I was extremely eager
to get my hands on Starship
Titanic.
I’d read terrific reviews; I’m a Douglas Adams fan – I
thought, how could I lose?

I practically skipped home from Virgin Megastore, ripping the plastic
shrinkwrap off, reading the back of the box, and seeing that the
look of the game had been designed by Eugenio Zanetti, the Oscar-winning
designer of the 1995 film Restoration. Yum!

I was also impressed with
the several installation options I was offered. This is a feature
that should be available on more games.
I don’t mean to brag, but I have a pretty large cd drive, and
I appreciate the option to load all three cds onto it so that I can
completely eliminate disk swapping!

So far, so good. I start
the game. The game begins in the living room of Your Lovely Home,
and after a minute or two the bottom of
Starship Titanic literally crashes into your living room. A door
opens, an a befuddled robot glides down the gangway, looking around,
and muttering bleakly “Oh dear,” over and over.

I’m on the floor laughing with glee. I enter the ship, meet
the other hilarious robots and proceed to tour the ship. The graphics
are absolutely beautiful, and I’m almost giddy with pleasure
at the idea of having (sort of) free reign to roam around the ship,
check out my stateroom, and begin to try to figure out the game.

The game! Ah, there’s the rub. As long as Starship
Titanic is dazzling you with its beautiful graphics and very funny robots,
you’re tempted to consider it a good game. But as soon as you
get down to cases and try to figure out what the #*$& you’re
supposed to be DOING on the ship, well, that’s another matter
entirely.

As for the story: well,
I hate to report this, but Doug Adams forgot to write one. There’s no story. At all. Instead of a story,
there’s one Big Fat Task: put the ships central brain back
together by going on an inane and incredibly repetitive scavenger
hunt around the ship.

The first few times through
the various lovely rooms in the ship are fun, but by the 125th,
I’d seen enough. I haven’t
been this sick of the claustrophobic interiors of a game since slogging
endlessly through the museum in Shivers!

Much ado was made about
the “revolutionary” text parser
which allows you to “converse” with the robots. I hate
to break it to Mr. Adams, because he and his team worked so very
hard on it (just read the documentation if you don’t believe
me!) but it just isn’t very impressive. Most of the responses
you get from the robots are nonsequiturs or simply “What are
you talking about?” answers.

And the puzzles. I know,
I know, I’m in a Douglas Adams world,
and I should expect everything to be a bit twisted. But the things
I had to do to hunt down the various articles of the treasure hunt
were too often obtuse in the extreme. I mean, they were funny when
I finally resorted to a walkthrough and tried them, but by then I’d
given up any hope of solving the puzzles myself.

There is one puzzle dealing with navigational triangulation, at
the very end, that I think is simply unfair.

By the time I was finished with Starship
Titanic, I was worn out,
fed up and decidedly unamused.

Final Grade: D

System Requirements:

CD-ROM version:
Windows 95
100 MHz Pentium (133 recommended)
16 MB RAM
160 MB available hard drive space
16-bit (high-color) capable video card and monitor
Video and sound cards 10% compatible with DirectX 5.0
4X CD-ROM drive

DVD-ROM version:
Windows 95
100MHz Pentium
16MB RAM
10MB free hard drive space
16 Bit color at 640×480
Soundblaster of 100% compatible
DVD-ROM drive

Macintosh version:
120 MHz Power PC or faster
Mac OS 7.5 or later
4X CD ROM
32 MB RAM
160 MB hard drive space
Thousands of colors

This
review is copyright Ray Ivey and Just Adventure and
may not be republished elsewhere without the express written consent
of the author. Republication of said review must also contain a link
back to Just Adventure.