I was not overly impressed with "Victory Garden." It shot no
ducks out of the water for me. It was fun for a while, but
grating when I began hitting the same passages more than once.
I guess what bothered me is that I felt very confined, and I
guess that wouldn't be such a bad thing if I hadn't been
reading all about how flowing and liberating hypertext can be.
I felt like this piece had a front cover and a back cover, just
like any real book would have. Sure, the pages were not sewn
into the spine--they could be shifted and reorganiced to a
certain extent--but they were definitively confined nonetheless.
As for the FEED Magazine Dialogue, the
interruptions/disruptions of the text was very interesting but
I had a bit of trouble keeping the different people who were
have the conversation straight. Perhaps if there was a little
identification icon for each speaker, a tiny photograph of
themselves or something. This is, after all, hypermedia.
As for "Sea Island," I'm still trying to figure out how to play
it on a lab computer <since I don't have a computer of my own
that I could feasibly download it into>. I think my beef
with Eastgate is that you've got to have some dough in order to
have a computer with a large enough hard-drive to download
their stuff. And the disks themselves cost twenty-bucks. I
bought Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities" for ten bucks and all
I need is my glasses and a comfy couch to read it.