RPS Feature That bloody parrot
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Starship Titanic didn’t work. It was Douglas Adams’ second foray into the world of gaming, following Infocom’s infamous Hitchhiker’s Guide in 1984, and it was a far wider miss. Released in 1998, it managed to contain dead ends, abysmal puzzles, horrid pre-rendered graphics, and a text parser that was spectacularly dreadful. But still, Douglas Adams!
GOG are still capable of serving up a dangerous dose of nostalgia from time to time. Three releases yesterday all gave me reason to reflect on sometimes misspent and sometimes well-spent youth. The game I remember as Stronghold has been released as D&D Stronghold: Kingdom Simulator, presumably to avoid Firefly-related confusion. Then there’s Al-Qadim: The Genie’s Curse, a D&D-inflected Arabian Nights puzzle-adventure. And, last but not least, Starship Titanic, the game wot Douglas Adams did.
As it happens, I’ve recently been playing some Infocom text adventures. Guess what: Infocom were really rather good. Guess what else: there was one rather significant game they never released. And you can play some of it.
In a remarkable find by waxy.org (linked via the magics of QT3), amongst a complete archive of Infocom’s work is the game Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to one of the most famous and adored IF games of all time, Adams’ own Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. This was discovered on the somehow aquired “complete backup of Infocom’s shared network drive from 1989.”
