This is a game which I got as part of the Interplay's 10th Anniversary Anthology. I found it strange in that I liked the two oldest games the most, this being one of them. This game included a fictitious newspaper, which is something I admired even more. The early commercial releases of Infocom games included printed material (which you often had to refer to throughout the game, as a means of copy protection) and odd trinkets, which added to the delight of the gameplay experience. That is something lacking in newer games these days.
Tass Times In Tonetown is set in what the '80s MTV generation thought the future would be like. One thing you discover pretty quickly is that Tonetown citizens do not take kindly to strangers. You'll probably die several times without knowing why, until you read the newspaper articles a couple of times over.
Some of the puzzles were strange, and there was a fair amount of inventory management that you had to do. It had icons for common commands and your inventory slots, but I don't think I ever got the mouse to work with this game. It obviously relied on some kind of proprietary early mouse driver.
The strange people and locations kept the game interesting, and I enjoyed playing it through multiple times. It's worth a try.