CRITICALLY SPEAKING..COMMODORE 64

Planetfall

PLANETFALL (NA / ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐) from INFOCOM, is a humorous text adventure which begins aboard the Stellar Patrol Starship Feinstein. You joined the Patrol to find adventure, and you've found it -- your duties consist of scrubbing floors and getting demoted. Things get better though as your ship is destroyed and you escape just in time to crash land on a deserted planet. Actually, the planet does have one inhabitant of a sort -- Floyd, an enthusiastic but not-too-bright robot that you find in an empty laboratory building. With Floyd's help, you must set about unravelling the mysteries concerning the planet. Specifically, where are the people and what happened to them? Floyd doesn't prove to be much help since he prefers playing hide-and-seek over helping you explore, but he is occasionally useful. Almost everything requires an access card to be used, and each access card is different. As a result, a lot of your time is spent tracking down access cards to various devices.

A Fine Adventure

Unlike most adventure games, you must have food, water, and sleep in order to survive, so these become your first priorities. Like all other Infocom games, Planetfall accepts complete sentences as input, making gameplay more realistic. While the game is billed as being humorous (and rightly so), the events which transpire have a serious side as well. This game is not as hard as other Infocom adventures, but it is every bit as intriguing as far as the puzzles and situations are concerned. If you've never tried a text adventure before, this is a good one to start with. (also available for Apple, Atari; disk)

Recommended (MSR $49.95)

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