~2 minute readST Product News: ST Reviews
A Mind Forever Voyaging
Infocom, Inc.
125 Cambridge Park Drive
Cambridge, MA 02140
(617) 492-6000
$44.95
As any longtime reader of Antic probably knows by now, I have been an avid Infocom text-adventure freak ever since I bought my Atari 810 disk drive and Zork I on the same day. Thus it was with great anticipation that I greeted A Mind Forever Voyaging -- Infocom's first 128K-minimum game and its first original release for the ST. Written by the venerated Steve Meretzky, whose previous credits include Planetfall, AMFV is the most original game to come out of the Infocom stables in ages.
The game begins in the year 2031, when you make the shocking discovery that your life and memories until now are just electronically implanted delusions -- that you are actually a sophisticated computer known as PRISM! The reason for revealing your true origin is somewhat sinister. Society is on the verge of collapse, so the ruling powers have instituted the Plan -- a complex series of socio-political steps designed to put civilization back onto the right course. your job is to enter a series of simulations -- 10, 20, 30 years into the future -- in order to test the long-term effects of the Plan. But what is the Plan, and who is really behind it? Is the Plan truly a boon to mankind, or does it need to be stopped? And if so, how can it be stopped? Answering these questions becomes the ultimate goal of A Mind Forever Voyaging.
As expected, AMFV makes no use of the GEM interface and contains the usual Infocom parser, only larger. Command structure is actually two-fold. In the early parts of the game, you cannot move or pick up objects -- don't forget, you are a computer. Instead you can enter different "modes," allowing you to tie into a worldwide news service, communicate with human beings, review your own message banks, or even interface with other terminals. In this manner, AMFV is very much like Suspended. Once inside the simulations, however, it becomes a standard adventure.
AMFV is considerably more open-ended than your average text adventure. You can wander almost anywhere, and you don't get killed (at least not that I've discovered). The bad news is that this game continues the trend started with Cutthroats and Hitchhiker's Guide -- if you don't do the right thing at the right time, everything comes to a standstill. Oh you can walk around, all right, but nothing happens to advance the story and the other characters can't be found. At least with a locked door you have some idea of what to try next.
The expanded memory of the ST allows for one of the nicest upgrades of the Infocom parser -- the "oops" command. If, like me, your mind works faster than your fingers, you might type something like "Unlock the doob." Rather than retype the whole command, simply typing "oops door" will correct it. Nifty!
A Mind Forever Voyaging is an essential addition to the library of any ST owner who loves Infocom games as much as I do. Whatever else they may have in the works for 128K-minimum computers will have to go a long way to beat this.
This article appeared in
Antic
Apr 1986
These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.
