Reviews by tggdan3

So Infocom (oops, Activision!) has returned to its roots with Zork: The Undiscovered Underground. But the game is more parody of Zork games than a Zork game itself, but therein lies some of its appeal.

For one, you start out with a plastic sword of no antiquity, and a battery powered plastic lantern which totally sucks. Finding a way to get it to stay alight long enough to complete the game is a puzzle in itself.

Basically, you're exploring a new cave on assignment from the Grand Inquisitor himself, because all the other (better) adventurers are busy for one reason or another.

Despite some obvious continuity errors (Spoiler - click to show) Such as a grue with glowing fur! The game is a fun mini-zork, complete with 2 different endings. Expect appearances from the implementors and the grues (which appear much smarter in this one than in any previous installment).

The puzzles aren't extremely difficult, and many of them are at least logical, which is a nice change of pace from the ECHO room of Zork I. (Yes, there was a more practical solution- added well AFTER the fact as the "real" solution did not appear in Dungeon).

Overall, it seemed like the game was made as a commercial for Zork: Grand Inquisitor, but it is nice to see another offical Zork after all these years, even if the years have not been friendly to the GUE.

Remember the days when you might worry if your computer was big enough to play Zork I?

Enter Mini-Zork, the smaller version of Zork I, which itself was the smaller version of Zork (Dungeon).

If you have never played Zork before, maybe you should play this game first. The mazes are simpler, the game is smaller, some of the puzzles have been removed.

If you have played Zork I before, forget it. The maze is smaller- but it's also been completely re-written, prepare to map it all over again. And some of the things you might expect are gone, though descriptions might imply otherwise (Spoiler - click to show)The egg still has a description that implies that it can be opened. If you try to open it by hand, the game tells you that this is removed and is only in full Zork, however, people who played before might go to all the trouble of giving it to the thief before realizing that this is useless.

I get it, Infocom was trying to get Zork to a bigger market by making it more accessable, but this realistically should be listed as a seperate version of the Zork I game, rather than it's own unique entry, and people thinking of playing it should treat it as such.

Another Lifeless Planet and Me with No Beer.

First of all, the planet is hardly lifeless, as one of the first things you'll see is an alien that kills you. But I digress.

The writing here is pretty funny, such as the description when you fall down the seemingly bottomless hole, thinking about how far it can possibly go before you hit the bo-!

The game has a two word parser, and being an old game that's understandable. The problem is that so many things in the game are poorly described or illogical.

For example, opening a small door (and having a creature come out of it) suggests a way you can go. However, trying to enter the door is met with failure, until you finally discover that the door is really a panel, not an entry way, which houses 2 buttons. Since there is a two word parser, "look in small-door" "reach in small-door" etc does not work. On top of that, many puzzles are illogical. (Apparantly, for some reason, an alien won't attack you if you're carrying a specific item, which makes no sense).

There are some combat scenes, and the style of combat changes as you enter different zones. Sometimes you actually have what appears to be a D&D style combat with damage based on HP damage, but in another zone, guns do a one hit kill with no combat mechanic at all.

The biggest complaint is that apparantly the game never came with an instruction book, as an avertisement in the beginning declares it as shareware, and suggests you mail $10 to the author for an instruction book, making it seem not only cheap, but rediculous, since the whole game is available. It becomes easy to SAVE your game, but figuring out how to restore your saved game has been impossible, leaving you to start over every time you die (which will be often).

The game does have a few nice bits, however- obvious exits are listed, as are obvious items to interact with, which is good, since many objects have two word names seperated by a hyphen to make them one word (such as small-stone) and the game would not recognise stone instead of small-stone. These do not auto-refresh, so you'll have to LOOK again if you want an update on the room. There are also some small graphics (ASCII of course) which add a bit to the gameplay.

The success comes from the conversational and joking writing style (such as the frog princess, who kisses you to return to being a princess, then looks at you, screams, and turns back into a frog). Lots of jokes, but outside of that, it's little surprise that the game doesn't have a huge following. The puzzles (such as they are) are not too inventive- there's literally a hangman game puzzle (timed of course), and a lot of (get the item to pass the barrier).

I like this game- though it's more nastolgic for me- I first played it back in middle school when it first came out. For someone used to the works of Emily Short, or even big Infocom fans- this game will probably get on your nerves pretty quickly.

First and foremost, if you don't have a copy of the instructions, you won't get far. The copy protection will see to that. That aside, this was a very funny game. Whether you're trying to rescue a pig from the bottom of an outhouse, or watching the evil knight laugh himself to death, or trying to use a magic ring- the semi-precious, which makes you semi-invisible, or trying to save the sex starved virgins from being sacrificed to the god of impacted wisdom teeth, or hearing Bones say "Dammit I'm a doctor, not a... well.. nevermind" when you tell him your arm hurts.

The game is full of puns on the scale of a Piers Anthony adventure, but it's all good hearted fun. Very forgiving and fun.

The game allows you to click on a list of nouns in the area, and has a compass with directions to travel, and each area has some graphics, actual graphics, not an ASCII representation.

I love the Zork games. I really do. And this game had some delightful parts, but enough is enough.

For one, the world is HUGE! Epically huge. There are hundreds of useless items, and a tower with 400 floors. Getting to floor 400 berates you for wasting your time (and it is a waste of time considering you might be randomly teleported to the bottom). You need the feelies to even understand what you're supposed to be doing, much less solve the puzzles, as the feelies include maps of areas you can't see in-game (such as a chessboard puzzle where you need to insert passages in the walls- and need a feelie map to see where).

Some of the puzzles are rehashes of old games, like the tower of Hanai, the fox, chicken, grain, tricking someone with a mental paradox, or a card game with no real point except to perform a special series of moves described in (here it comes) the feelies.

The game did have some nice touches. There are plenty of AMUSING things to do, such as manipulating a stone pigeon that teleports you to the location of it's perch, leaving you to throw that perch EVERYWHERE, such as off the bottom of the world, into the sea, etc, so you can teleport to it. (A similar mechanism existed in Spellbreaker, though they didn't implement much experimentation with it.)

The game also explains where Grues come from and the origin of the White House from Zork I, and such, but the ending leaves you wondering "What the Hell?", especially after such a LONG game. That and a random Jester who shows up and messes with you (Much like the annoying wizard from Zork II), it just leaves me saying enough is enough.

If the game were more clever, with better thought out puzzles, it might be different, but after 3 Zork games, we're still left with a varaint of "Go collect all the treasures and put them in the trophy case" that we were using decades ago. For die-hard zorkers (like me), you'll play to the end, but I promise you, you'll use plenty of hints, since many puzzles have nonsensical solutions. If you're into that, have fun, but I found the game fairly aggrivating, and not in that really good way.

Sorcerer takes place a few years after Enchanter, and with the same PC. Now you live in the guild, a full enchanter, but your mentor has gone missing, which you find out after you sleep in one day.

As old IF classics go, you will definately feel some Abandonitus as you explore the ruins of an old fort and part of the GUE. However, you now get all kinds of nifty spells to mess around with, and potions too!

This game has a few of the best puzzles I've ever seen, and some very ANNOYING ones that require feelies to solve (such as a chest in the basement with a random code, the code requires the feelies to solve).

The hunger puzzle is there at first, and there is a unique variant on the inventory management puzzle (which reminds me of a part in Zork I). There are some scenes where you might randomly die just by entering the room (which is a pain, though you can avoid this- if you know about it- by casting the right spells ahead of time). The outer-world-knowledge "issue" is bypassed by providing you with a resurrection spell- if you cast it before hand, you can be brought back from death (so that out of world knowledge might still be player knowledge!). This also provides a useful solution to one of the harder puzzles. There is also a beautiful variant on the hunger puzzle- the breathing puzzle, very well implemented (and very big pain! The first time I played this game it was online, and I couldn't save! Imagine playing the whole game over!).

I would put this as the best of the Enchanter Trilogy, and better than the Zork trilogy also. (The game even has 2 possible "success" endings, though one is obviously better than the other.) A great play!

To start out, as much as infocom may have said this is not Zork IV, it is basically Zork IV. (You can visit this place in Zork III, and the game includes the Zork Adventurer as an NPC).

The game has a story, albeit a basic one- you are a weakling novice mage, one so minor the big bad mage Krill won't even notice you mucking about his castle. So go kill him.

The game includes a magic system which works nicely, and a very annoying hunger/thirst puzzle.

Some of the puzzles in this game seem to have multiple solutions. However, you will find that solving them the "wrong" way, will leave you without the tools to solve later puzzles, as I found out when I played it. You do run into some issues with the randomness aspect (that Zork Adventurer keeps running around before I can cast my spells on him!), and there are some times you need to use out of world knowledge to solve puzzles. (The last battle requires 3 specific spells, and you don't know you need to memorize them until you get there, and then it's too late).

The writing is wonderful, and you do get a sense of dread as time goes on, pushing you to complete the game faster. There are plenty of ways to screw with the spellcasting system, such as breaking everything, then repaing it with the repair spell, or summoning all kinds of people like the game designers or Krill himself. There is also a very clever (and nasty) puzzle involving a magic map and an imprisoned beast.

I played this game and loved it, and I am a big fan of the fantasy/Zorkian genre. If you are as well, you will love this game. If not, then this game will not be for you.

This game picks up where Zork 2 left off (minus your inventory- I really could have used that magic wand!). You're stumbling down an endless stair to a cavern where you find your old friend, the brass lantern.

This game departs a bit from the first 2 games, in that the object is not to find all the treasures and drop them in a case. You're still looking for all the treasures, but they aren't apparant as such, and the game is looking for certain behaviors from you.

One complaint on this game is that one of the puzzles (the most important one, you might argue) is timed, so in order to gain the permanent light source, and one of the treasures, you need to do the puzzle RIGHT AWAY, otherwise you render the game unwinnable. And in Zork 3, it is easy to make the game unwinnable and not realize it.

It was possible in Zork 1 and 2 also, though it was much more apprarant- if you died at the volcano and you left some treasures in the balloon- they were unreachable. In Zork 3, you need to decide at one point whether to go for a staff or treasure, how to respond to a mysterious viking ship, choose between to solutions to a shifting wall puzzle, decide what items to try to steal during a time travel puzzle, decide whether to kill someone attacking you or not (and the choice is not obvious),decide WHEN to do a puzzle involving teleportation- and the wrong selection on any of them makes the game unwinnable, and you never realize it as such unless you go back and do things the RIGHT way.

Now, I don't know that this is UNFAIR, because I like difficulty, I would only wish I knew what I was supposed to do before I screwed myself up. If you do what many people might and explore the entire world right away, you've already lost too much time.

That being said, some of the puzzles are freaking BRILLIANT! A puzzle where you need to slide a mirror is difficult to visualize, but very smart. The shifting room puzzle gave me that real "AHA" moment as well. The time travel puzzle makes sense when you think about it, it's just not exactly clear how time travel relates to the time machine itself. If you're a fan of Zork I and II then you shouldn't be really surprised by the solution of the mysterious ship puzzle, and you should relish the chance of being able to walk past some grues in the dark. (A feat you will repeat in Spellbreaker, and possibly in Sorcerer).

The game does tie up the trilogy nicely, provides a good ending point, and gives you the challenge you deserve, without bogging you down in inventory management (very much) or much of a light puzzle (if you run out of light you either missed the first puzzle or did something stupid, like entering a lake with a torch).

If you like Zork I and II you will like this as well, just be ready for a bit more serious a tone and more difficult puzzles.

I played Zork I back in the 80's when it was the new thing. I missed out on the original dungeon and cave adventure until much later when the internet made every game available, but I still go back to Zork time and again for a refreshing review.

The game has no real story to speak of. You are an AFGNCAAP wandering around the cave complex in the basement of someone's house collecting valuable items and putting them in his treasure box.

The game had some well thought out puzzles, and plenty of amusing things to do when you were bored. It also had cute little extras, like mirrors you could teleport with or walls you could teleport through, or various solutions to puzzles (proving you used the hints- because why would you think about that otherwise?).

The game created the inventory management and light puzzle (Damn you!), though you do find a permanent light source eventually. It included ramdomized battles as well, which I don't see much in IF anymore (and it was well implemented). It also includes the dreaded maze puzzle, difficult to map because some guy is stealing and moving your stuff. And then there's that infamous egg puzzle, which had me endlessly confused!

It's a great testament to the game that even some 20 years later I'm still marvelling at the ideas and puzzles they used. The Dam puzzle, the coal basket puzzle, performing the ritual to enter hades, they still amaze me at how well thought out they were. It's easy to think of them and see them in games now, but these guys came up with it from scratch, no one had done this before, and that's why this game may be the most influential game in IF ever.

Please, play it through. Give it a chance. Ignore it's annoyances (they're due to it's age) and learn where it all started.

The "Next Level" is something you'll either love or hate in IF. I loved it.

Beyond Zork happens at the same time as Spellbreaker, in the same universe, but with a differenct character. While the PC in Spellbreaker is trying to destroy all magic, you're trying to preserve it by collecting the Coconut of Quendor, in which magic knowledge is held, and hiding it to reinstate magic one day. (Which will be done in Zork: Grand Inquisitor).

What makes this game different is the mini-map, the ability to name objects, a money system to purchase things, some items have random descriptions and locations to change the gameplay, multiple enemies with randomize combat, D&D style stats and make-your-own character. The puzzles are what you would expect from Zork, ranging from obvious to "why does this bridge never seem to end?", where you would need some kind of extra world knowledge to get the joke.

This may be one of the first Zork/Enchanter games to involve a variety of NPCs (even though 3 of them are the same person) who you can speak to and have a REASON to speak to (unlike that Thief from Zork I), and even some NPCs that follow you around.

The downside to this is that, like many games of its era, you would need the instruction book to pass some puzzles. Luckily, it's not as blatant as in Spellbreaker or Sorcerer, where you actually need to look up info, but some hints on how to defeat some creatures (like the christmas tree monsters) are nonsensical, and only by reading the feelies would you know what to do.

All the classic Zork/Enchanter puzzles are here, and most of the trash was left out: no hunger puzzles, very little light issues, a magic system, a time travel puzzle, a place to say "Hello, Sailor", all the goodies.

However, if the Zork games weren't your think, or you prefer non-randomness in your games, this one probably isn't for you.