~3 minute readGames & Books
Two New Games from Infocom
Few Infocom games have been as eagerly awaited as Douglas Adams's Bureaucracy (for most computers, including 128K Apple; $35- 40). Adams, you will recall, was the perpetrator of A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a wildly funny and hugely successful interactive fiction game which he based on his best-selling book. Now, with another of his books on the best-seller lists, his second Infocom collaboration (an original game that is not based on a book) makes a timely appearance. If you liked Hitchhiker, you’re gonna love Bureaucracy.
Adams's new game is a wacky adventure of a peculiarly modern kind. You have just taken a new job and moved to a new home. Your company wants you to go to Paris for a two-week seminar. All you have to do is open your mail, which contains the money you'll need, then pick up your ticket at the travel agency, and call a cab to take you to the airport.
Things go haywire right from the start. Although you notified the bank of your move, they sent your money to your former address, whose new occupant is not the least bit cooperative. You have no trouble picking up your ticket (it was prepaid), but when you try calling the cab company you get either no answer or a busy signal.
As you explore your new neighborhood in search of help, you encounter such hazards as an obscene one-winged macaw, a deaf matron toting an elephant gun, an irritating nerd who's always trying to sell you stuff, and a bleating llama. At the end of the street is a mysterious mansion protected by a locked gate, next to which is an intercom through which a voice keeps repeating, "Unfortunately, there’s a radio connected to my brain."
The game is full of unexpected shifts of locale (at one point you find yourself hanging from a tree in a distant jungle), a brand of silly but pointed humor that belongs uniquely to Douglas Adams, and, of course, lots of wonderfully devious puzzles. As you work on the puzzles, remember the game's description as "a paranoid fantasy" and the peculiarly cynical mind-set of its creator.
Bureaucracy is a fairly hard game, not suited for beginners.
Many interactive fiction fans count Steve Meretzky's Planetfall among their favorites. They will not be disappointed in his sequel, Stationfall (for most computers; $35-40).
You are a lieutenant in charge of paperwork. Your new assignment is to take a spacetruck to a nearby station and pick up a supply of Request for Stellar Patrol Issue Regulation Black Form Binders Request Form Forms. You will be accompanied by Floyd, the lovable robot from Planetfall. Though maddeningly helpless at times, Floyd has his endearing moments (each time you want to save your game position, he chortles, "Oh boy! Are we going to do something dangerous now?") and he can be a lifesaver at crucial moments (if he hasn't wandered off somewhere).
The space station where you go to pick up the forms, and where you will spend the rest of the game, is a nine-level module with three sub-modules, two of which you can’t enter without the proper authorization. The levels are connected by an elevator and by ladders. As you explore the module in search of the forms and a commanding officer to authorize your entry into the sub-modules, you discover with dismay that you are the only human in the station. The only other creature you can find is a robot named Plato, who becomes very good friends with Floyd (and forces him later to make a very difficult decision).
In a science lab you find cryptic references to a pyramid of mysterious power, and in one of the docking bays you discover an alien spacecraft. On one of the walls in the ship is a strange series of dots, the meaning of which was never discovered by the scientists, as you learn from their notes.
You begin to hear strange rumbling noises from the levels below. But the elevator refuses to descend to those levels, and the ladders that lead there have been blocked. Something very sinister appears to be going on, and you soon find yourself in mortal danger.
Meretzky (the author of Planetfall, Sorcerer, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and others) can always be counted on to provide a strong story line and unusually interesting puzzles. Stationfall has these in abundance, and thanks to his brilliant creation Floyd, it also has a heart. The game is of medium difficulty.
This article appeared in
Games
Jan-Feb 1988
These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.
