Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle

By: Guest Reviewer

On: February 23rd, 2010

Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle

[This is a guest article by Valter. If you’d like to contribute a guest article to TIGSource, go here.]

Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle is a parody of text-based adventure games. (Specifically, it’s a parody of Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die. -ed.) The premise is simple: You are standing in the center of a non-descript New England town. A phone booth is near you. What do you do? > _

The catch to this game is that the game ends after one command – every single command possible in the game will give you an “ending” (with a very small number of exceptions, which merely restart you automatically). A lot of time was given into writing endings for every bizarre thing you can think of! (You could think of it as taking the Scribblenauts approach to adventure gaming).

Finding endings can be a bit difficult, as certain “obvious” results like “use phone booth” do not work, whereas obscure entries such as “fry phone booth” have endings. Apart from that, though, it’s an excellent way to spend 10-20 if you’re bored. There are “over 200 endings”, as boasted by the authors, and they’re all comedic. The majority of the endings I found were capable of eliciting at least a dry chuckle, some were given a hearty chortle, and I must admit that a few led to some honest-to-goodness guffawing. Give it a shot!

  • mewse

    Actually, it’s a parody mash-up of “Pick Up the Phone Booth and Die” (a game which only understood one command), and “Aisle” (which understood lots of commands, but you only could use one of them before the game ended).

    Aisle is where the “one command game” mechanic was first used within the IF scene, and it deals with more serious subject matter and has a substantially more compelling narrative than “Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle”.

    As you’d probably expect, what with “Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle” being a parody, and all.

    If you’re interested, you can play Aisle online here

    Or you can download the z5 file here if you have your own Z5-player.

  • Blipflip

    To win, type win.

    Do you have a browser link for the original?

  • PHeMoX

    I’m sorry, but I didn’t think much of the endings were very smile-worthy so to speak…

    ..but in a sense this is good, being obviously a parody.

  • http://twofoldsecret.com/ Chris

    It’s also a parody of “Aisle.” http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/Aisle

  • SirNiko

    Here’s what you do: When the user tries a command that’s not already in the game, you’re given the opportunity to write a result for that command. Eventually you’ll have so many commands that nearly anything you do results in a result.

    After a few commands that result in a generic “you lose” it loses the appeal. Scribblenauts tries to point you in the direction of a valid command. Why not put that in here?

    -SirNiko

  • robolee

    hmm I typed push and it gave me “full points for good memory” as it apparently won the original game, lots of single letter stuff gives weird answers that seem to be followed on from other things though that may be the point, the thing I hate about interactive fiction/games that use written input for action is something along the lines of “action not understood”, I think I got about 20 or so answers before I gave in due to that.

  • James

    The single letter endings are shortcuts for commands like North, South, East, West, Inventory, Die, Look, etc.

  • Rowboat

    It’s worth mentioning that the game’s title also references Aisle, which does a similar one-move thing a little more seriously and is very worth playing.

  • Matzerath

    This is also a parody, of course, of Aisle, which is one of my favorite text ‘adventures’. In fact, the two games parodied are parodies themselves, so, uh … hm.

  • valzi

    It’s not really parodying Pick Up The Phone Booth and Die at all. It’s more of a sequel to PUTPBAD (which is itself a parody of text adventures) parodying Aisle specifically.

    Put simply, this is a parody of Aisle, which is much more of a Scribblenauts-as-text-adventure sort of thing. It’s quite rewarding too, unlike this parody which is only fun for a minute.

    Information on Pick Up the Phone Booth and Aisle: http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=6vej1yd9quwfm9qn

    Information on Aisle:
    http://ifdb.tads.org/viewgame?id=j49crlvd62mhwuzu

  • googoogjoob

    posted just nine years after the game came out

    timely

  • nullerator

    I would also like to point out that … nevermind. But Aisle is totally worth playing – it is actually a proper game, with a difficult puzzle/situation that you only have one turn to deal with.

  • Derek

    Haha, thanks guys. I understand now.

    “THE MORE YOU KNOW”

  • Valter

    googoogjoob: True quality is timeless.

  • http://sites.google.com/site/freewaregames/free Feliz

    By the way, this game is also a parody of Aisle. I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned that yet. Probably not. ;)

  • notext

    Has anyone mentioned that this is a parody of Aisle yet? Because it is, so there.

  • Valter

    Guys, I was doing some background research, and I found out that this is actually a parody of another game called Aisle! Crazy huh

  • Guest

    just so you know, this is actually a parody of a one-turn game called Aisle