Aunt Nancy's House review Puzzleless, plotless IF? Not impossible, but very hard, and this isn't really trying to do anything besides teach the author Inform. As such, there's really not much use spending time on it, and rather than complain about the pointlessness, I'll just point out some things that the author should probably spend some time on.

Let's see. There's a videotape that you can take and carry away while it's still playing in a VCR, except that the TV comes on when you do that and you get simultaneous Star Wars and a baseball game. ("Use the force play, Luke." "Luke, I am your batter." Hey, maybe the author SHOULDN'T change this...) Moreover, you keep getting the Star Wars messages all over the house, meaning that either it's really loud or the author should have paid more attention to the location flags. The play-by-play of the baseball game was kinda fun--why not do the same for Star Wars? Directions in the attic are also a bit confusing--you go north to the stairs, but then up to get back to the attic. Also in the attic--starting up the computer is fine, but there should be something to do with it once it's started. Otherwise it's just a frustration device--insert your own Windows 95 joke here.

The bathroom simply doesn't work. The author tried to code hot and cold water handles for both sink and faucet, calling them HWH's and CWH's 1 and 2, but it's still impossible to interact with any of them, as far as I can tell. The faucets are similarly labeled, but one can at least tell them apart, not that either does much by itself. EXAMINE, even when the disambiguation works, yields "A sink faucet." Whee. There are some Band-Aids in the bathroom, so I promptly tried to cut my wrists and got "Cutting he up would achieve little." The bedrooms are largely non- interactive--many relevant items aren't acknowledged by the game--which had me thinking that this wasn't a particularly bold coding exercise.

It feels like the author started running out of steam as he went downstairs, since little of the scenery in the kitchen is recognized. You can drink some soda from the refrigerator--though you can't actually hold the bottle; taking it is interpreted as if you'd typed POUR BOTTLE or some such thing. Interacting with a box near a computer gets this response: "Which do you mean, the box or the box?" Well, that's a stumper. A TV can be turned on but doesn't actually show anything, at least, not as far as I could tell. There's a light switch at the top of the basement stairs, which had me thinking, well, at least he decided to try to code darkness--but no: when you go down the stairs, you're told that you triggered a motion sensor that turns on a light. Author: eliminate the sensor and try throwing in some darkness. Really. In the basement, there's another computer that you can't do anything with besides turn on and off, and another TV, making three of each--these are well-heeled folks, I gather.

There's more, I'm sure, but my patience is only so great. The author did some things right, I guess--an apple disappears when eaten as it's supposed to, for example, and you can't eat objects that shouldn't be eaten, not that I tried everything. But there's nothing here to change my opinion that coding exercises, unless perhaps unusually creative--see Balances--should not be released to the public, and it's only because this isn't actually offensively bad that I give it a 2.