My Big Fat Review
Who Is The Real Lurking Horror...
Turns out it is Legends of Zork's Action Points scheme. I was pretty amped about LOZ, but with a limit of 30 APs a day (in order to force you to buy more of them) my enthusiasm has been quelled. The whole game seems to be arranged as an attempt to get you to spend money on coconuts in order to get more APs. They even pushed back the update time for the game to 5am so you couldn't play back to back at midnight. Trust me nobody is getting up at 5am to play this game. Even worse they allied up with the most evil denizen of the Internet Offerpal so you can get "free" coconuts. The only thing you'll get is tons of spam email. Offerpal is horrendous on following through with the coconuts.
The game play is simplistic at best. It reminds of a dumbed down version of Munchkins, but with less funny and less variety. It would be nice if you could acquire APs through some other means, something similar to Kingdom of Loathing where you can eat food and drink cocktails to play longer. Ultimately I'm disappointed in Jolt. They pretty much stripped Zork down to a few phrases and words from the original and slapped that on a crappy game. The only inventive and interesting part of the game is the Double Funucci cards. I guess in retrospect the fact that Jolt released LOZ on April Fools day goes to show that the joke was on all of us die hard Zork fans for expecting something worthy of the name. Don't waste your time, go play Kingdom of Loathing here, it is more Zork then LOZ will ever be.
Update 4/18/09 - Shamefully I admit I've continued playing LOZ in my down time. It's still boring, but you can only check the weather so often in a day (which is sadly still more involving than LOZ's gameplay). What I wanted to add was a big fat complaint about Jolt's tech support. I tried the Offerpal scam in order to get free coconuts and not so surprisingly they did NOT come through after I completed the process. I contacted Jolt's tech support five times and nothing. I did receive 120 emails in one day from Offerpal, but amazingly nothing to date from Jolt about getting my "free" coconuts. So be smart and go play Kingdom of Loathing instead, unless you like getting 120 junk emails a day. Finally even Jolt had this to say in their last LOZ newsletter, "There has been the occasional dissenting voice (and by dissenting we mean calling for our offices to be burned to the ground and the ground to be salted so that no other browser game can ever again grow here again), which we can understand, given the nature of Zork. For such a radical change to a much-loved franchise there will always be those who disagree with the route you take." "Radical change" is a nice way of saying Jolt neutered, lobotomized and defiled the holy name of Zork in every way imaginable. Cover your children's eyes.