Multiple Choice

The first and only of what would have been three games in Infocom's "Golden Age" trilogy. This one has full graphics and uses a point-and-click interface to make choices from various menus. Can be pretty tough in some spots, but the interface takes a lot of frustration out of it.

Tack the name Zork onto a children's choose-your-own-adventure title and it's guaranteed to sell, right? I'll admit I don't know the background story behind this piece, but it doesn't make a very good first impression. You'll be finished with this game in about 15 minutes, and there's hardly any replay value. It's narrated in the third-person with two main characters, a young boy and girl named Juranda and Bivotar, with no shortage of dialog between them at each junction point. It's as boring as it sounds.

This is not unlike some of my early attempts at PC game development in QBASIC. I tweaked the source code to this and modified the text, as a way to teach myself IF programming. Maybe it was the 200+ page programming manual that had intimidated me all those years ago. At any rate, the commentary by the person who ported this game to IF says everything that needs to be said. This game is in need of a good MiSTing.

For a port of a title to IF without the traditional parser interface, this is actually pretty fun. You play as a hacker-for-hire who was assassinated. Your body is pretty much gone, but your consciousness remains very much alive in cyberspace. Now you have been contacted by somebody who offers you a new cybernetic body in exchange for your services.

The interface is menu-driven within the "status window," with only room descriptions and the like appearing in the other window. There is a setting to change the number of lines available to the status window, based on what interpreter you are using. It doesn't work on all interpreters, but it's definitely worth a try.