Frenetic Five review Occasionally cute but more often irritating, The Frenetic Five vs. Sturm und Drang ended up in my Clever Ideas That Didn't Quite Work file. Having the player as head of a motley crew of quasi- superheroes sounds like fun, and it's good for a few chuckles, but the game itself doesn't live up to the premise, and implementation problems make this one tedious to play.

You play a fellow named Improv, a MacGyver-esque character who can make something useful out of anything (in fact, you have a picture of Richard Dean Anderson in your bedroom, an amusing touch). Your four friends, all with similarly humdrum abilities (one of them can give an instant news update), follow you as you confront Sturm und Drang and their "melodramaturge," a device which, uh, well, that's not clear. But it does something along the lines of making everyone speak like Sturm ("We would never allow you to interfere with this, the greatest of all our evil inventions!" he rages, flailing his arms at dust motes. "This is the big one! The evil scheme to end all evil schemes! The mother of all nefarious plots!"), clearly a dire fate--and obviously such ho-hum superheroes as yourselves wouldn't want that.

As a parody, Frenetic Five is usually amusing and sometimes hilarious. The comical villains are dead-on; best of all is one moment when you first encounter them:

Sturm begins chuckling maniacally.  This is nothing new to you -- you're
convinced that at the School of Evil Villainry, they give first-year students
lessons in Maniacal Chuckling.  Someday you're going to get hold of a syllabus
and check.
There are other priceless moments, notably the response when you try to open your old refrigerator, the instance when you mistake a garbage truck for the "sound of evil afoot," and your comrades' encouragement, after one of your stunts is successful, that "that was a trick worthy of Scooby-Doo." Even the initial setting--a messy, ill-cared-for house--is well-done; your sidekick who gives you news updates turns to you at one point and informs you that your roof needs fixing. And rather than flying faster than a speeding bullet to the scene of the crime, you and the rest of the gang take a bus. Your compatriots are essentially buffoons who can't be trusted to wash dishes properly and who would rather sleep in than go fight crime--and one of them is more interested in reading the magazine he finds than in the mission.

Unfortunately, Frenetic Five works better as a series of jokes than as a game. For a short game, large amounts of playtime are given over to waiting, as there are several moments with nothing to do but sit there; the enjoyability of the game could be increased considerably if those were eliminated or shortened. (It's not just that you have to wait--it's that not much goes on, often enough, while you're waiting.) Your companions are so incompetent that you have to tell each of them to pay the bus fare--funny, perhaps, but tedious to actually do. (I now realize that you can avoid having to do that, but the way you avoid it seems like a bug, since your companions never pay at all and you can evade a puzzle this way.) Moreover, your sidekicks are good for almost nothing; one was never useful at all (I realized later that she had a use, but it was minimal), the powers of another don't actually help you in your quest (merely in allowing her to follow along), and another allows you to solve a puzzle that you could solve perfectly well yourself with a little thought. When the chips are down, you do everything and the rest of the band watches, making this feel like an ordinary hero game with comical superheroes tacked on. For a game determined to make fun of comic-book cliches, moreover, your means of escaping when tied up by the villains feels rather tired. Worst of all is the inventory limit; you need absolutely every item that you can carry, and you are limited to carrying one fewer item than you need, meaning that you have to figure out a way to put one object in or on another--a feature that more than likely closes off the game without warning, since several objects have unforeseeable uses. Inventory management should NOT be a puzzle, and penalizing the player for failing to take everything that isn't nailed down is no longer cool.

There are other problems. You can reach two bus stops, but there is no way--short of going to each one--of knowing where you can catch the desired bus. (As in, you can ask one of your buddies which bus to take, but you need to go to each stop to figure out which buses stop there. The information is on a sign that's not mentioned in the room description.) One puzzle involving a pile of crates where you put your inventive powers to use seems largely nonsensical; it seems, anyway, like there should be simpler ways to do it. And at another point, one of your friends picks up an unidentified object, and the walkthrough informs you that you need to ask her for it--but if there's a way to figure out what the object is so that you can ask for it, I certainly never found it, and Lord knows I tried. (Using it properly, furthermore, requires considerable intuition.) The game seems oddly short--I felt like I'd hardly started when the end came along. There is much to be said for respecting the two-hour limit, of course, but it makes this particular game feel a bit abbreviated, partly because you spend a long time just getting out of your house. On the whole, Frenetic Five works better as a silly story than as interactive fiction.

The writing is quite good; the writer certainly has the feel of hack-villain-speech, and virtually every room description is funny in one way or another. The goons who stand there punching each other to keep in shape are an especially funny addition, and parenthetical asides; at one point, the bus ride "seems like forever (though ever since your battle with Captain Eternity you're all too aware of how long "forever" really is)". The author clearly writes very well; if only he'd pay some attention to commonly accepted conventions of IF.

There is plenty of potential here for a better game--the author did write "Lost New York," after all--and the ending points to a sequel. With an expanded plot and some consideration for the player in the areas of puzzles and inventory limits, the Frenetic Five idea could produce some of the better games out there. As it is, the writing was good enough for only a 6 on the competition scale.