Steve Meretzky returned to science fiction for his third Infocom game, this time collaborating with English author Douglas Adams with 1984's cutting edge "electronic mail" technology to adapt his novelized BBC radio comedy hit into a suitably absurd interactive fiction title. Hitchhiker's, as it's listed on Infocom's sales sheets, quickly became their second biggest hit after Zork I, even as text adventures as a whole were commercially on the decline.
Infocom retired the folio packaging format by 1984, and this "grey box" offers more feelies than most, but they're mainly cheap gag items - a pair of black cardboard shades, a "Don't Panic!" pin, some fluff, a plastic bag allegedly containing a microscopic space fleet, and no tea. Most relevant are two demolition orders, and the manual, taking the form of a humorous brochure for the eponymous Hitchhiker's Guide, essentially a tablet that runs Space Wikipedia.
I have to confess that, although I have listened to a few episode broadcasts on NPR, watched the BBC TV series, and seen the ghastly 2005 feature film, I never finished reading the book. Something about Adam's narration-heavy prose, no doubt a positive to his many fans, doesn't quite click with me, with the nonstop digressions, tangents, and syntactically weird sentences that lead you around a garden path and make you forget how they began by the time they finish. This style works better for me as a radio program than a novel, like listening to a stand-up comedy routine that happens to also tell a story, one without too much concern for pacing or consistency. In any format, though, Adam's bleak, ultra-nihilistic outlook leaves me cold, even despondent.
In any event, the manual does advise that familiarity with the book is useful for solving the game's initial portions, but that things diverge pretty quickly. I do not expect my failure to complete the book to be much of an impediment to playing the game. I am also not playing completely blind, having learned of some of its most notorious puzzles previously by cultural osmosis (e.g. the Babel Fish puzzle).
>i
You have:
a splitting headache
no tea
The game starts in Arthur Dent's bedroom, spinning around his hungover head. Little does he know that his house is scheduled to be demolished in a few minutes, and Earth not long after.
First actions - get up, turn on the light, put on a dressing gown, and take some aspirin. Afterward, you can get your screwdriver and toothbrush, and pick up a big pile of mail on the porch, but not dawdle, as the bulldozer is already here (as you pick up the toothbrush a tree outside the window collapses. There is no causal relationship between these two events, lies the parser). As is canon, you delay it by lying down in defiance of councilman Prosser's stern warnings.
After waiting in the mud a few turns, the bulldozer stops in its tracks, and Ford Prefect comes by to offer a towel. Here comes the game's first mean trick - take it, and you've softlocked yourself. Ford walks away, leaving you alone in a stalemate with the bulldozer until you yield or the Vogon space fleet comes by and annihilates the planet. You must instead continue waiting for a few more turns, until Ford notices your predicament, and then the plot converges back to its track as he talks Prosser into taking your place so you can go to the pub.
Through trial and error, I found the next sequence of events. Drink beer until there isn't any left, while Ford casually brings up the imminent destruction of the world and Arthur is too drunk to care. Leave the pub before Arthur enjoys himself too much. When the Vogon fleet showed up, a mysterious "thing" escaped from my inventory. Ford produced a thumb-shaped device, which when activated correctly, warped me up into the dark hold of a Vogon destructor ship, blind and disoriented.
The prose onboard (finite permutations of you can see nothing, feel nothing, hear nothing, taste nothing, and are not entirely certain who you are) suggests a variant on the MOTLP, but the trick is to realize it says nothing about smelling, which will bring you to your senses quickly.
Ford gave me some peanuts, advised me to consult the Guide, and took a nap. A few subjects produced semi-meaningful, if not immediately useful answers:
- Vogon
- Vogon poetry
- Bugblatter
- Earth
Most subjects were simply described as among the Great Unanswered Questions, and the Guide suggested a list was available, but I found no way to successfully summon one, though one spectacularly unsuccessful attempt did wind up destroying an entire galaxy.
For now, the Guide was not immediately useful in escaping the hold, which I soon realized was the location of the infamous Babel Fish puzzle. I'm happy to say that the puzzle, which I had known of previously though not its solution, isn't nearly as unsolvable as its reputation suggests. The solution is ridiculous if described in isolation of the gameplay experience, but in my effort to find it, each failure was a hint toward the intended next step of the correct sequence of actions.
For instance:
>press dispenser button
A single babel fish shoots out of the slot. It sails across the room and through a small hole in the wall, just under a metal hook.
...cues you to block the hole with something. My first instinct was to hang up the towel, but after a few frustrating attempts to get the parser to understand this idea, I realized I was meant to use the gown (and the towel's purpose became clear soon after). The main problem here is you have limited time and limited Babel Fishes, but that's what save files are for.
With the Babel Fish acquired, I soon learned two things through its universal translation powers:
- The password to a display case containing a valuable vector plotter is found in Vogon poetry.
- The captain is on his way right now to torture us with his poetry.
He arrived, and dragged me and Ford to his cabin for a session. From prior reading long ago, I knew a counterintuitive action was needed here:
>enjoy poetry
You realise that, although the Vogon poetry is indeed astoundingly bad, worse things happen at sea, and in fact, at school. With an effort for which Hercules himself would have patted you on the back, you grit your teeth and enjoy the stuff.
"You looked like you enjoyed my poem. I think...yes, I think I'll read the NEXT verse, also!"
"Gashee morphousite, thou expungiest quoopisk!"
After his grand finish, I had just enough time to snag the vector plotter before the guards threw me out the airlock.
To be continued...
(owing to the very linear nature of the game so far, I don't see any need to post a Trizbort map).
I recall, instead of waiting around for Ford to notice your house demolition problem, you can also get his attention more quickly with conversation commands. "FORD, WHAT ABOUT MY HOME" will work, for example.
ReplyDeleteI remember having fun with "character, WHAT IS THE OBJECT OF THE GAME". And I thought it was cute that the parser responded to things like "DON'T TAKE GOWN", probably as an extension of handling "DON'T PANIC".
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