The
Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Zork Grand Inquisitor, Starship Titanic, and Mirage

By
Darcy Danielson

The
Good …

I am the Boss of You!

Zork Grand Inquisitor is
the last (a subject bemoaned by Zork devotees) of titles in the venerable
series and, for me, by far the most enjoyable. There was literally not one aspect
of this game that I did not find aligned completely with my personal tastes as
far as graphic first-person adventure games go.

The story itself and the
quality of writing recaptures the whimsical nature of the early Zork text
adventures, something that had in small increments fallen away from the series
upon the inclusion of graphics, a change whose pinnacle was reflected in Zork
Nemesis (a beautiful but dark, brooding game). In Zork Grand Inquisitor,
magic has been banned from the underground empire by edict of a Grand Inquisitor,
played by Eric Avari (Stargate). If caught practicing magic, the guilty party
is totemized, a punishment whereby the offender is sealed is a small container
that looks suspiciously like a paperweight. Your job is to save the kingdom and
avoid getting totemized in the process.

The writing is crisp and clever
and had me laughing out loud throughout. The jokes are cleverly built in, some
delivered by characters, some included in the design.

Another sterling decision,
to the designer’s credit, is the inclusion of real actors that do real acting
jobs throughout the story. In other words, the names in this, including Avari,
Dirk Benedict (in an Indiana Jones parody), and Rip Taylor (think Gong Show),
do not give you the idea when they are speaking in your general direction that
you’re holding their cue cards for them. There’s also some great voice acting,
including turns by Michael McKean and Marty Ingles.

The graphics are extremely
well-designed and capture perfectly the lighthearted nature of the subject. Transitions
are smooth and waste no time; the prerendered landscape is some of the best artwork
in a first-person game. The game boasts something called Z-Vision, really just
a fancy title for 360-degree panning, which makes the environments open up, giving
the player a freedom of movement that’s quite enjoyable. The cursor is well designed,
giving away just enough info to be helpful, but not in too complex a fashion.

There
are several design omissions that require, just because it’s so miraculous to
have all omitted in one game, that I bring them up. There’s virtually no pixel
hunting. There are no mazes. No conversations with mind-numbing conversation trees.
No text parser (remember, I played this right after Starship Titanic.)

A
particularly nice touch is the inclusion of a mapping system that allows the player
to instantly travel to places in the game that she has been through before, virtually
eliminating the drudgery some games resort to of making the gamer trot back and
forth in an odious and redundant manner to get to and from various areas in the
game.

The music is well-done and aligns perfectly with the gameplay. There
are some simply clever ambient sounds, such as a snapdragon flower that’s really
the head of a creature that’s snapping, and the sound increases and decreases
as the player moves closer or farther away from the area.

The gameplay
is entirely nonlinear, and huge sections of the game are open once the player
gets underground. Despite this, there are additional locations that open up as
rewards for completing tasks. The puzzles are put together well, but they are
not so difficult that the player is stopped dead in his tracks, and there are
enough open locations that one can go back and forth to try different things rather
than being stonewalled and stuck in front of one thing trying to figure it out.

The
game has some straight built-in puzzles, but most are inventory-based, and the
inventory is also designed well, with items no longer needed (with the exception
of only one or two) dropping away once used so that they do not become tedious
red herrings later. The game also uses the casting of collected spells as puzzles,
something I thought I’d dislike very much but came away charmed by, and I had
a lot of fun with these.

This game talks and walks like something designed
by people that play these darned things themselves. A thoroughly refreshing idea.
And it goes in my all-time top 10.

Final Grade: A

System
Requirements:

PC:
Pentium
90 MHz
Win 95
16 MB RAM
4X CD ROM drive
50 MB hard drive space
High-color
(16 bit) 640×480 VLB or PCI video card
Sound Blaster 16-compatible sound card

Mac:
I
played this with Virtual PC 4, on a 466 MHz iBook with no glitches.

…
The Bad …

Make It Stop Mommy, It Burns!

Why, why, why? I can’t even
imagine what these people were thinking. It looks like an adventure game, it certainly
has puzzles, places to explore, a plot, prerendered graphics, etc., but something
was done with these elements here to make the completion of this game an equitable
experience to having to get multiple doses of oral surgery.

The thing that
is so misleading about Starship Titanic is that it actually looks as
though it is going to be a fun game. And I went into it with my nose up in the
air, having heard the stories of mind-numbingly hard puzzles but thinking smugly
to myself, “Ha! I’ve played so many of these, I’m sure I’ll know the lay
of the land and have it figured out in no time at all. What a bunch of babies
those other players were.” And promptly came out the other side of it holding
my nose, with my eyes watering.

Now don’t get me wrong. I adore Douglas
Adams. I’ve got all the Hitchhiker books and even a boxed set of the filmed
adaptation. But even my admiration for this beloved writer could not ease my temperament
in dealing with this title.

The story is quite straighforward. At the center
of a galaxy, a beautiful, most elaborate starship, the Starship Titanic, has been
built. It crashes into your house (Adams lifts his own material here), and you
end up on board. During the course of gameplay, you discover what has happened
to the ship and what must be done to repair it so you may return home.

The
graphics are actually quite impressive. The design was carefully done, overseen
and orchestrated by Douglas Adams himself, and it has the feel of a very elegant
old Art Deco hotel, dipped in some sci-fi. A perfectly acceptable mix, and very
lovely. Of course, this feature gives a glossy finish to the horrific underpinnings
of the game as the player struggles through sloggish game controls, a highly complex
inventory system, as well as an unwieldy text parser stuck in the middle, one
suspects as a poorly thought out homage to Adam’s earlier Hitchhiker text
adventure.

One feature that I really admired, and wish there would be more
of in all games, is that the game offers the option of a full install to the hard
drive. This was just dandy and serves the same function of getting a multiple-CD
game (this is three) onto a DVD.

I have to mention something about the transitional
graphics. Someone had the idea that when the game moves from location to location,
the screen and all of the graphics should turn blurry while moving. This trick
gives the player the feeling that she is at a college frat house in the middle
of a hazing ritual that includes attempted alcohol poisoning. The first night
I played, I actually got a headache and had to leave the game alone for several
days before attempting it again.

There is a highly complex inventory system,
with four different sections–the player must keep chevrons that are for each
room in the game in one, another is to have conversations with the mechanized
characters met along the way throughout the story, one shows you which room can
be accessed in whichever elevator you are in (and there are four elevators, all
exactly alike–have fun keeping that straight), and the final one is for inventory
items proper. Confused? Join the club.

The music is actually quite well
done, and along with the graphics, it tricks the player into thinking he is in
for a real treat of a good time.

The puzzles in Starship Titanic are
one of the major failings of this game. Did you ever see the movie Heaven’s
Gate? Do you remember it? The four-hour debacle that virtually finished off
director Michael Cimino in Hollywood? Well, let me tell you, brother, the puzzles
in Starship Titanic are like watching into the fourth hour of that movie.
That’s the best I can explain it. And I really think the tipoff here is that someone
has started to package and sell the game with the strategy guide thrown in for
free, and I earnestly believe that we should all, adventuring babies, take that
sort of thing as a big fat clue when it comes to game shopping. You could even
think of it as a real-world shopping puzzle. “Gee … now what’s the reason
these guys are giving me a free twenty-dollar book?” My favorite part of
this is the PC Gamer magazine blurb on the back: “Forget Riven. This
may be the game that reignites the adventure genre!” Some public relations
person earned his or her paycheck the week that was published, that’s for sure!

Unlike
Mae West, when this is bad, it is not better. Is there someone that you really
want to get even with for some slight? Give him this game. And make sure you keep
the strategy guide. That way it’ll work better than a computer virus.

Final
Grade: D

System Requirements:

Mac:
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

PC:
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

…
And the Ugly

I love bad movies. Sometimes, films in this genre are made badly on
purpose (Russ Meyer’s Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!), but sometimes the
creators are really, really sincere, and the resultant effort, considered serious
art by its maker, is the stuff by which bad-art legends are made (Ed Wood’s Glen
or Glenda?).

I’ve been discovering some old adventure games that seem
to qualify as a new subgenre of their own, all along this line of thinking. I
think these came about around the time a few technical advancements were being
made, CD-ROMs were first on the horizon. You know what I’m talking about. The
odious, bargain-bin-anointed “Multimedia” titles. And like bad films,
some of these are so busy reveling in their own clever and artistic achievements,
they can’t see the forest for the trees.

The game Mirage handily
fits into this newly coined genre, which for the sake of clarity I’ll call Trash
Adventure. Ephemeral blips on the adventure gamer radar.

Mirage is
actually a western that takes place in the town of BrotHell. Here’s a sampling
of explanation from the game docs: “The doors and windows of your imagination
will open or close if you find the key to survival. Awaiting you is your just
reward as you uncover the dead and bury the living in the hallucinogenic terrains
of the ‘Mirage’ desert. … Lost in the hallucinogenic terrains of the Mirage
desert. Your thirst and your hunger for pleasure could lead you to a phantasmagoric
land trapped forever inside your own imagination. In limbo with the ultimate deadly
psychosis called ‘Mirage’.”

Well. Thanks for clearing that up.

Throughout
the game you are given pieces of video that spell out the real story: your job
is to rescue a girl named Jenny (no, I did not make this up to tease our
own Jenny G) from a group of desperate, ugly thespian wannabes.

The graphics
are that flimsy multimedia-type. You know the kind, a static screen that’s an
altered photographic image, and there are maybe two, or even three, areas that
pulse a little bit, slyly winking at you to get you to try clicking on them and
see if something wondrous may happen?

The cast is bad-film superb. The women
are leftover “actresses” from the legendary Vivid Video’s house o’porn,
in their first real acting jobs with their clothing on. The male actors look like
they were ripped off from one of Vivid’s set crews. The first giveaway to this,
of course, is the notice on the back of the CD case–“All actors are on file
and over the age of 18.” What a hoot! For an adventure game?

Puzzles
consist mainly of clicking on the right thing and finding the correct hot spots
in each room that will lead you to the next correct room. There are three inventory
items that are collected at the beginning of the game and three more in the middle.
All but one aren’t actually ever used. I kind of got the idea that these were
needed in order to get through more of the rooms, but this isn’t really spelled
out anywhere. There are multiple wrong rooms that can be chosen that will lead
to a game over “death” screen. These are enigmatic and inexplicable,
although I’m sure the guy that thought them up was having some sort of idea about
them; however, the player just can’t decipher it.

One of the great things
about this package is that it comes with a separate CD entitled “The Magic
of Mirage: The Behind the Scenes Look at the Critically Acclaimed Game.”
The guy in charge of the music, cryptically named “Saint,” looks suspiciously
like an escapee from a Thompson Twins video. The entire package is pure high camp,
all the much better because it has no idea it is at all. A truly Ed Wood kinda
gaming experience.

Final Grade: You and I both know this isn’t going
to qualify for a good score. But one has to ask by what standard should it be
judged? Are we going to apply a John Waters criterion to it and give it an A?
Or with a straight face call a spade a spade and give it the F it deserves? I
can’t decide. I think the player will have to figure that out for him or herself.

System Requirements:

Mac:
Macintosh
LC or greater
68030 or greater
2X ROM drive
System 7 or better
16-bit
color
6 MB RAM minimum

PC:
IBM 386
or better
2X ROM drive
Sound card
16-bit color
Win 3.1 and above
6
MB RAM minimum
DOS 5.0