Suspended

Brian Moriarty

SUSPENDED by Michael Berlyn
INFOCOM, Incorporated
55 Wheeler Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
32K Disk $49.95

The home computer market is obsessed with graphics. Flip through any computer magazine and you'll find pages and pages of game advertisements, each promising high-res action graphics in at least four more colors than the hardware is capable of displaying. Game programmers spend countless hours squeezing the last pixel out of their playfields and any dealer will tell you that a flashy title screen is worth more than a good game concept.

In this world where even the best computer games come and go in the space of a single month, the prose adventures of Infocom stand apart. Their unadorned text boasts only two colors (foreground and background); there are no illustrations, no sound effects to jazz up the action. Yet the Interlogic series is comfortably lodged in the top-25 list of every major software distributor.

What is Infocom's secret? Why does a 4-year-old text game like Zork continue to flourish when even the venerable Scott Adams Adventure Series (now "enhanced" with flickering graphics) fails to hold the interest of computer enthusiasts?

The answer, I think, has less to do with Infocom's famous packaging than with the fundamental quality of their products. When I play an Interlogic adventure, I don't get the feeling that the thing was coded according to a formula, shrink-wrapped and shoved out the door in a couple of weeks. There's a sense of completeness and pride in engineering, as if the programmer had a genuine emotional investment in the game. Suspended, the latest offering in the Interlogic Science Fiction Series, conveys this sense of personal authorship more than any other computer adventure I have played.

An intriguing scenario

Suspended was created by Michael Berlyn, a programmer best known as the author of the best-selling Apple adventures Oo-Topos and Cyborg. Just as this issue went to press, I received the new ATARI conversion of Cyborg from Berlyn's former company, Sentient Software. Look for a report on ATARI Cyborg in a later issue, and let's hope we'll see Oo-Topos in the near future.

Suspended is similar to Cyborg in that it puts the player in control of an imaginary cybernetic system. Your frozen brain is hooked into a network of "filtering computers" which are directly responsible for the care and feeding of an entire planet. This delicately-balanced network is maintained by a team of six robots which respond to your commands. The filtering computers allow you to address the robots individually, or in any combination.

Each robot is endowed with special hardware capabilities and a unique personality. Your job is to coordinate the action of the robots so that the planet you are babysitting remains comfortable and happy. The penalty for failure? Chaos, massive casualties and disconnection!

Like the other adventures in Infocom's Interlogic series, Suspended incorporates a sophisticated parser that understands complex English sentences, with a vocabulary of over 600 words. Phrases like "Put the rough object into the access panel then close the access panel" are perfectly legal; multiple commands may be entered on a single line by ending each phrase with a period. The program also accepts a number of useful abbreviations, and will support the saving and loading of up to five separate game positions. You can choose between five levels of play difficulty (including an inconceivably tough "IMPOSSIBLE" game), or custom-design your own game configurations. These features should keep your copy of Suspended far away from the shelf where your "solved" adventures are gathering dust.

Suspended comes with an attractive full-color game board and a vinyl token for each robot. These allow you to keep track of where the robots are located in the planet's underground maintenance complex. The superb owner's manual provides an amusing historical background and detailed information about the robots' abilities and limitations. And let's not overlook that incredible packaging -- an eerie molded mask with eyes that follow you around the room, saying "I really am worth fifty dollars!"

Clever characterizations

Berlyn's most impressive achievement in Suspended is his characterization of the six robots. Each responds to your commands with a rhetorical style that is fancifully suited to its function.

"Iris," the only robot equipped with visual receptors, is a wise-mouthed old woman who replies to your commands with "Okay, good looking," and interrupts the game with complaints when she needs a repair job. "Waldo" (an all-purpose worker with multiple grasping extensions) is an affable fellow with a distinctly blue-collar outlook. "Whiz" is the bookworm of the team; he communicates in a clipped, matter-of-fact manner and is only happy when plugged into an information pedestal. "Poet" reminds me of an ex-60s burnout. His replies are embellished with hip slang, horrible rhymes and obscure literary quotes.

A few hours with these electronic personalities will make them your friends. This is the kind of compliment you would normally extend to a good book or movie, not to a computer game. But the scenario and implementation of Suspended are so professionally crafted, that the product actually manages to transcend the typical text adventure (often nothing more than a puzzle that understands English), offering a level of involvement which can only be compared to the experience of a fine novel. That this feat is accomplished without elaborate graphics proves Infocom's contention that the mind is more imaginative than the eye.

Suspended is not without its petty annoyances. Since the room and object descriptions are stored on a disk as text files, you have to be patient while the slow 810 disk drive beeps and clacks, searching for just the right sentences. Typing commands can get pretty tiresome after several hours of play, especially if you make your living by typing all day like I do. But these inconveniences are caused by the hardware, not the software; future home computers with megabytes of RAM and voice recognition will make such limitations a thing of the past. Until then, let's enjoy the pioneering efforts of authors like Michael Berlyn and companies like Infocom, whose products are among the finest examples ofa new and entertaining means of self-expression which can now be regarded as "literature" without apology.

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