I hurt Strawberry Clock and I felt bad, now I got him to the point of him saying to me "I think I love you." Been playing this game since it came out, love this game 9 years later.
Reviews for "Interactive Buddy v.1.01"
Fun and cruel, you'll get your times worth. Unfortunately, it gets stale after a while. Still good in small doses.
been playing this game for like, three years
never gets old
All things considered, this is effectively a better pet sim than, say, Club a Seal. The different skins make it very easy both to want to care for and obliterate the 'buddy' you get on-screen, and the dialogue is also quite funny. I also like that this is a neat cross between physics games like The Torture Game as well as those pet sim games, which is why I originally thought of Club a Seal.
The items you get are quite fun to play with as well. The system of throwing objects is very easy to do, and the rate at which items spawn make it easy to simply delete and respawn an item rather than pick it back up. The items could stand to be a little more varied, however. There were a lot more weapons than there were things to entertain your buddy with, which is a strike against you. Variety is good. A dozen weapons that knock your buddy unconscious (and force you to wait for several boring seconds until he gets up) are not.
The modes are also a little gimmicky, though I'd rather have them than not have them. Certain things like the earthquake are completely unnecessary, while low gravity could be genuinely fun to play around with. The scripting engine access is the icing on the cake, although I don't know the names of any of the variables so I wouldn't know how to go about messing with the source code. Oh well.
Overall this is probably one of the best sim games out there, especially for when this was made. I think adding something like food would have been kind of neat, and also some different terrain rather than that one blank room (which Tom aptly notes is Matrix-like).
It might have also been nice if your buddy could interact with you more spontaneously, such as throwing the baseball back at the user after catching it, and the player having to catch it too. There could definitely be a lot more added to this game rather than just objects and a physics engine. I like that you can try and get a higher amount of money in one, three, or ten seconds, and I also like getting money too. Couldn't there be a better way to use money rather than one-time purchases? Maybe temporary consumable items that cost a certain amount, or special items that cost money for each spawn? There could also be some kind of challenge mode where you have to inflict a certain amount of damage within a certain time using certain modes, or some kind of more advanced baseball game. What I'm saying is that this game has high potential for some more involved gameplay but doesn't deliver.
Still, this is a really fun gadget and I'm glad I went back to reconnect with it even nine years later.
Hurting the little guy made me feel like a bad person, and made me feel bad. Otherwise, good game.