🧭 THE ARCHIVES

Quote of the day

"Materialism! That's another thing I was trying to get away from!" The hermit looks glum.

-- Spellbreaker

Factoid of the day

In 1992, former implementers Marc Blank and Michael Berlyn teamed up to found video game company Blank, Berlyn & Co., eventually renamed to Eidetic and then to Bend Studio after being acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment. The company initially produced games for the Apple Newton, but later pivoted to computer and console games such as Busby 3D and Syphon Filter.

*The hostess of a lavish masquerade ball has just been brutally strangled. Fortunately, there's a suspect. Unfortunately, it's you.*
Oct 1985

Family Computing, v5(12)

~1 minute read

Dec 1987

SOFTWARE REVIEWS

Stationfall

David Langendoen

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS: 64K Apple, IBM PC.
PUBLISHER: Infocom
PRICE: $35-$40

Here we go again. Not only has Infocom come up with a sequel to Planetfall, but it has delivered another winner.

It's been five years since you and your faithful and rambunctious robotic companion, Floyd, saved the planet Resida from destruction. No longer do you have to scrub and rescrub decks, or clean out grotch cages while domineering, demonic lieutenants glare at you. Now you're a lieutenant first-class, and it's your duty to perform one of the most vital and important functions in the Stellar Patrol... paperwork. There is so much paperwork in fact that you sometimes catch yourself daydreaming about grotch cages. Look at today's TOP PRIORITY assignment, for example. You've got to fly a space truck to a nearby space station and pick up 24 pallets of "Request for Stellar Patrol Issue Regulation Black Form Binders Request Form Forms." What you would do for a dirty deck to scrub!

Things start looking up when you discover that Floyd (and his paddleball) will be going with you. When you arrive at the space station, you discover that something is wrong. For one thing, why is it deserted and the machinery acting strangely? And for another, why is that hull welder glaring at you malevolently? More important, why does the Stellar Patrol insist on stocking its survival kits with "nutritious" multicolored goo?

Humor and challenge abound in Stationfall. Half of the fun is performing bizarre or stupid actions and seeing how the computer responds. As usual, Infocom's full-sentence parser and vast vocabulary facilitate communications with the program. The main difficulty with the game is that one of the problems is fairly obscure and you could easily become stuck.

If you do have any trouble solving Stationfall, look on the bright side. When you finally complete it, you'll surely be promoted and assigned new duties. What could possibly be worse than paperwork?

This article appeared in
Family Computing
Dec 1987

These historical, out-of-print articles and literary works have been GNUSTOed onto InvisiClues.org for academic and research purposes.