~4 minute readgameplay
The Infocom people have long tried to earn the title interactive fiction for their text adventures. Now, in collaboration with Tom Snyder Productions, they've created Infocomics.
What a great idea! Comics have really come of age in the last ten years, daring to call themselves graphic novels and insisting on being judged against artistic standards as high as those applied to prose fiction. Imagine something as good as Batman: The Dark Knight Returns or The Watchmen on your PC, Mac, or Amiga. Computer comics could combine terrific art, exceptionally good storytelling, and the chance for you to experience events in a way you simply can't on paper. But if you expect all that, you'll be letting your expectations rise a little too high.
The art was the biggest disappointment. In the PC versions at least, Infocom decided to rely on a boot disk to stymie the software pirates — but what that means is that the game has to work on the lowest form of game computer: a vanilla PC with a CGA screen, with a maximum of four colors. That's right, folks, a maximum of four colors. Sort of like time traveling back to 1984.
Worse yet. the story is almost entirely carried by narration in a box under the picture. The art is mere illustration, and a static illustration at that. As a result, the best simulation of comics art on the computer continues to be the superbly animated Sierra games — visually. Infocomics aren't even in the running.
What about the use of the computer's possibilities? Here the Infocomics score pretty well. They don't even pretend to be playable games. You don't make a single choice for the characters; the stories end the same way no matter what you do.
Infocom's game designers use a hypertext approach in Infocomics. At many branch points in the story, you can switch from one character's point of view to another's. If you want, you can get inside a character and see a flashback of his or her past, or you can flip back through the story to an earlier branch point and choose to follow a different character's adventures through the same time period. You don't have control over what happens — but you have a great deal of control over the order and depth of the presentation. What about the stories? My first thought was that they were shallow and predictable — and I found no surprises.
Lane Mastodon vs. the Blubbermen is a Buck Rogers-type space adventure. It begins with rays from Jupiter that cause normal animals to grow into humongous monsters that destroy cities. When Lane Mastodon is sent to Jupiter to stop the ray, the Blubbermen confuse things by making clones of Lane and his two helpers — a genius boy and a nubile girl he rescued from a derelict spaceship.
Gamma Force: Pit of a Thousand Screams is a superhero comic about three people who come from a planet that was taken over by the Nast. They each die and then are brought back to life with special powers which they must use to defeat the Nast. One can fly, one can control water, and the girl, a good fighter, is their leader.
Zorkquest: Assault on Egreth Castle is a fantasy adventure about a small group of travelers who are unexpectedly involved in battling an evil magician. The characters are pretty ordinary; still, each has a surprise or two for us. Clichés? Yeah. Lots of them. About as many as in George Lucas's Willow. What finally dawned on me is that old guys like me aren't really the target audience for Infocomics. See, I performed a scientific test. I strategically left the games lying around where they'd be found by some of the shorter people in my household, and then I lurked.
My son Geoffrey played for hours. He didn't know about my ironclad law that a good game is one that lets the player change the outcome. He didn't know he was supposed to be annoyed by the CGA screen. He didn't know the stories were clichés — when you're ten years old, all stories are new. I interviewed him for this column. "I really got excited about finding out what happened next," he told me. Zorkquest was his favorite. "The best thing is you can follow your own way through the story, just finding out what you're most interested in. You only go back to find out the other parts of the story when you want to."
Problems? "I got confused at first — by following one character all the way through. Things kept happening that I didn't understand until I followed other characters and found out what they did." Will he play again? Sure. He wants to go back to explore even more.
Score: Infocomics 3, Reviewer 0.
But maybe — since Infocom really does try to get better even when their first attempt is a hit — maybe future Infocomics will come with better art and better stories.
Please? I'll never be ten again, but I'd still like an Infocomic I can enjoy.
This article appeared in
COMPUTE!
Sep 1988
These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.
