Micro Adventurer, #12

~5 minute read

Oct 1984

Rendezvous between the stars

An insufferable computer with a neat line in sarcasm helps Noel Williams pilot the Starcross to a meeting with destiny

Noel Williams

Infocom has a reputation second to none in the world of text adventures, but in Starcross I think they have forgotten something. Why doesn't the package (disc, booklet and starmap) contain a screwdriver? If I had a screwdriver I could get into that infernal computer and turn the (expletives deleted) thing off. Some people might think its supercilious remarks are clever, even humourous (the computer itself obviously thinks so), but when you have just struggled for half an hour to land your ship on the temptingly mysterious planetary body ("not your ordinary asteroid" says the computer, helpfully) where, I ask you, is the humour in being told "The ship is at rest, but unfortunately, so are you." My ship was grabbed by an alien artifice and the resulting bump proved fatal.

If you want a computer that runs the whole range of useful comments from surly self-satisfaction ("Maybe next time you'll listen to me") to downright sarcasm ("Other than that things have been pretty dull around here"), you want to get on board the starship M.C.S. Starcross, Even if you don't you will find that Infocom's latest offering is another winner.

From the same stable as the ever-popular Zork, this game is very similar in presentation, structure and feel. The instructions booklet is virtually the same as for Zork, being Infocom's standard guide to text adventuring, which is fair enough as the text processing, command structure and version of English is identical to that of Zork. This means several sentences can be in one line of input, objects can be coupled together by the use of AND, indirect objects, such as 'in the cage' are allowed (but only one per sentence) and you can ask questions beginning 'What' or 'Where'. Sometimes this leads to odd output, like the response "What do you want to what?" but there has been a great effort to ensure reasonable response to the majority of likely commands. All this will be familiar to previous Infocom addicts but the delights of sophisticated input commands just are not appreciated by enough adventurers. In particular there is much less of the 'guess what two word combination works in this room' syndrome than in most adventures, as in several cases different words are allowed for the same action. Infocom deserve even wider recognition than they presently receive.

There is one major difference between Starcross and Zork. As you may have guessed, you can talk directly to the computer which (or rather, who) controls most of the happenings on your starship. Because you never invested in complete interfacing of computer to other ship's equipment (as it will readily remind you) you have to communicate with it through a natural language interface. (In more primitive times we used to call this 'talking' -- you might have heard of it.) Well, this is what makes Starcross something special. Any command can be prefaced by "Computer" in which case it is taken as a direct converstional gambit directed at the computer. The conversation is not intelligent (in other words it is purely conditioned by whether you feed it key commands) but the vocabulary is so large (I have no reason to doubt the claimed 600 words) and the allowed sentence structures so flexible (compared with the painful and familiar two word format) that many of the exchanges seem perfectly natural. I must admit I have spent most of my time enjoying the comments of the computer rather than actually exploring the game. Probably this will become boring after a while, but not before you are well into the game and caught by its special set of problems.

The other thing that makes Starcross a little different from Zork is the map supplied with it. It shows the position of various 'masses' around your ship at the start of the game. These objects include asteroids, planets, ships and mystery objects. The player can steer the ship to any object once he or she has discovered how to pilot the thing (don't bother asking the computer). In this way you 'move' to different sets of locations and different problems. The only trouble is that the objects themselves are moving and the map becomes invalid after move 64, so you have an additional task, navigating around the heavens based on partial information. The map includes the headings of the objects at the start of the game, so you should be able to figure out where they are later on. Well, you may be able to, but I'm having a little difficulty. In effect this is a game with moving rooms -- a good idea and one sufficient to renovate the tried and trusted text adventure formula. I would not say that it feels like piloting a ship around the stars, but certainly some of the difficulties you encounter make the imaginary world that bit more enjoyable.

The initial scenario is perhaps a little hackneyed now for science fiction adventures. I have lost count of the number of times I have awoken as the only crewmember of an empty spaceship apparently knowing nothing about how to operate the ship or where things are. And some of the 'problems' are rather trivial, like remembering to stand up or to get out of your bunk. Taken to extremes this kind of necessary command could lead to adventures which require you to 'PLACE FOOT' each time you want to walk or to 'MOVE EYES' before attempting to read something. These are legitimate actions and could be adventure commands but they only bore the player and add nothing to the feel of the game. But such unoriginality and triviality is the exception in Starcross, especially once you get into the meat of the problem, solving a riddle set aeons ago.

As is usual with Infocom the room descriptions are excellent. Who needs graphics? Some descriptions are so long that they will not fit on the screen, and all are intriguing, humorous and give plenty to think about. Not only this but they are correctly spelt (making due allowance for colonialisms). There is one slight drawback, of course, with such a large game -- it is only available on disc. It is, however, almost worth investing in a disc drive to be able to play such games. I had a little difficulty loading my copy and once, when loaded, it crashed mid-program.

Other than this I could find no serious bugs in the game, though I must admit I have not solved it yet and am not likely to without many more hours play. The need to access the disc slows things down a little on occasions and disc access does happen rather frequently. If your drive is prone to errors, you might want to leave this game alone as nothing could be more frustrating than a head crash midway through such a game, but the delays during normal operation are no greater than many games which involve decoding text.

All in all another winner from Infocom.

This article appeared in
Micro Adventurer
Oct 1984

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