Starship Titanic
This is a visually stunning example of what is (unfortunately) a dying game genre. A game where you have to use your brain, instead of your trigger finger. Some of the earliest big sellers in the PC-software industry were adventure games -- Adventure (which I have seen in nearly identical incarnations for Apple, Commodore, and TRS-80 -- it was originally written in BASIC and was ported to anything with a translator), Zork, Leather Goddess of Phobos, Planetfall, and the first Douglas Adams game, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They were vast, sprawling, and required a pencil and lots of paper to keep track of where you were. Then, with the advent of faster processors and better video, the games went graphical, which replaced paragraphs of text with a scene to be explored. Unfortunately, more people would rather blow away demon hoardes than explore a detailed world, where thinking is more important than reaction time. And that is one of the problems with this game -- it requires a great deal of thought and attention to detail. I started out on my own -- and actually stumbled on quite a few of the correct leads, and was on the right path for another, when I stumbled across a walkthrough for the game and found out how much I had walked right past without even blinking. So much for my great intelligence! The Digital Village was also so excited about the improved text interface, which was supposed to let you hold on conversations with the robots manning the ship -- but in truth, the old psychiatrist programs from the early days of the PC were more interesting to talk to than the game characters. You end up using one word sentences to get what you want -- it confuses the AI less. Those little problems aside -- it is still a very immersive experience. Your movements through the ship can be either in frame by frame jerks (Myst) or smooth movements (7th Guest). The scenery is high resolution, high color images -- beautifully rendered, and in styles ranging from normal, to highly tacky, to highly ostentatious -- and are exactly what you would expect to find on a starship with name Titanic. Your task in this ship of dreams? To find the missing pieces of the ships master computer Titania, and find your way back home (or at least back to what's left of your home, since the ship landed in your living room). Some are just lying around, some are being misused for something else, and some are held hostage by deranged robots and tropical birds. Once Titania is reassembled, you get to try your hand at astrogation, and once you get home, Leovinus himself offers you the ship to do with as you will. As you explore the ship, the music follows you along, even changing as you go from the classy parts of the ship to the crass, and one of the puzzles requires you to get the music room robots to play a song (or varying degrees of cocaphony, depending on what you enter on the control panel). If you need help, you can use Alta Vista to search for help, or you can just use what I found when I did the same thing. There's also a Theme Pack, which has a few new icons, some neat wallpapers, and lots of annoying new sounds. It's a fun game, and if you get a chance, give it a spin.