There's a game called The Last Guardian, and while I don't know jack crap about programming I've been told it's very impressive from a programming perspective. However, in Previously Recorded's review of the game, they not exasperatedly:
"...they spent six years making this fucking dog, and nobody made an interesting game to go with the dog."And that's more or less how I feel about this comic. (If you're confused, click the comic to go to xkcd.com, then right click the comic there.) I am genuinely impressed that Randall managed to organize a weird drop-down menu thing within what seems like a normal comic at first. It does also seem like he put a lot of work into making a large number of branching paths. (Although, at time of writing, many of them do lead to dead-ends of one kind or another)
I think that most people, the first time they right-clicked, went to the top-most option first. So, "File" -> "Close", and then that very first button (at time of writing) doesn't do anything. Which, fair enough, it's just "Close", I'm sure the next one will be better. So then most people will probably go "File" -> "Open" -> "A:/" -> "Insert a disc into drive A" -> "Floppy disc" ...which also doesn't do anything. The "Chip card" option under "A:/" does lead to something, but it feels like a 90's-era 'computers are hard to use' joke. After "A:/" comes "C:/", and since "Documents" also doesn't lead anywhere, the first actual joke is in "Music", which turns out to just be a slightly expanded version of #851. I think this setup will give a lot of people a really weak first impression of this comic, which does have actual good parts in it.
It's also worth noting that in this expanded version of #851, two of the 'endings' link back to previous XKCDs, and one links to not the official music video of "Absolutely (Story Of A Girl)" or a funny joke song using the intro to that song, but just someone's random upload of the song.
Really the only section that I think is enhanced by the comic's format is the "Games" section, which includes "Rock Paper Scissors" (where you always lose), "Twenty Questions" (which has jokes instead of an individual answer for each path but I'm not going to hold that against it since that'd be 1,048,576 unique paths), "D&D" (which seems to have mostly broken paths but its still a funny idea), and "ADVENT.EXE" (which did actually give me a genuine sense of accomplishment when I won, even if it was half by luck).
A few other things worthy of note:
"Sequences" is literally just a transcription of an Adult Swim promo.
The "Bookmarks" folder appears to be almost entirely links to previous XKCD comics, for some reason. I do really like how "Secret" leads to "Enable Dark Web", which adds a "Do Crimes" option to the main directory (the first crime is "Say Swears"! Hee!). But then that just leads to more XKCD links for some reason. Randall! You already have a comic archive!!
The "Check Space Usage" sub-directory includes "Dark Matter", "Hydrogen", and "Helium", which comes off as less unoriginal than it actually is due to the comic's format working naturally as a setup.
"Music" -> "Hey now" -> "Hey now na now" -> "Sing 'This Corrosion' to me" inverts the comic's colors, which means that there was the potential for more interactivity between the comic and the different filepaths. This means that there is NO EXCUSE having the "); DROP TABLE Menus;--" just link back to #327 instead of having some hilarious system error thing happen.
I do understand that this was intended specifically as an April Fool's Day comic, and that a few problems I have with it (the number of dead-ends, the jokes that are just links back to previous XKCDs) are likely a result of a lack of time. I also understand that the joke is more the presentation than the actual content. However, I'm someone who likes his dancing bears to dance well, thank you very much, and I have enough faith in Randall to believe that he could have made something that was both novel and entertaining, rather than just novel.
