~2 minute readComputing at Chaos Manor
Comic Books?
I like Infocom games -- I really do -- so when I got the latest release from Infocom I was ready to try it despite the title: "Lane Mastodon vs. the Blubber Men of Jupiter."
What I had, I soon discovered, isn't a game at all. It's a kind of comic book with primitive animation. It is not an interactive story; there's only one action line, one ending, and nothing you can do will change the story at all. The gimmick is that you can read the comic book from the viewpoint of the hero, the villain, and subsidiary characters. The idea is to read along until you come to one of the (obvious) choice points, where you can jump off the track and follow some other character. You can also run the "projector" backward to a choice point and shift again.
From time to time, the action is interrupted to let you witness a comic book dialogue between two critics who have supposedly been watching this mess on a movie screen. For reasons best known to the designers, these rather unattractive male cartoon figures aren't wearing any clothes. They say a few meaningless things about the action so far, and the story continues. The breaks are clearly intended to make you go to the main character's story line from time to time, and they're needed, since hero Lane Mastodon is so dumb that only a twit would want to watch things from his point of view.
The artwork is pretty grim; it's certainly so compared to what real comic artists are doing now in Marvel Comics and the Watchman series. The story line might amuse cretin dwarves, though I doubt it; not only is the story implausible, but it knows that you know that. The notion is to invite you to share the joke. If you can do that, feel free; you might even enjoy this mess.
I watched this thing through to the end because I was interested in the technique, but you'd have to pay me money to get me to do it again. In my judgment, Infocom has come up with the answer to software piracy: a story so dumb that no one in their right mind would want to steal it.
This article appeared in
BYTE
Jun 1988
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