🚀 go-pugleaf

Over the last few months, I shelled out for several games for the Macintosh,
and while the majority have been at least somewhat entertaining, none have
yet taken full advantage of the Mac's unique user interface.  I'll elaborate
on the three games I've purchased so far: SUSPENDED, by Infocom, and CYBORG
and LODE RUNNER by Broderbund (sp?).

     SUSPENDED 

     	I'd heard from a number of people that if one liked text
     adventure games (i.e. no graphics, period), that Infocom was the
     company reknowned for producing them.  Infocom makes no secret of
     this; in fact, they boast that their software depends entirely on
     the language parser.  So I bought this knowing it is a "text"
     game, and will be comparing on it's non-graphical features.
     
     	Obviously, this is a program that was built for other PC's and
     was converted to the Mac as quickly and easily as possible.  The
     few menu commands are all duplicates of commands that can be
     typed at a point when the game is prompting for input; the mouse
     can copy lines from previous prompts and paste them in the
     current prompt line, so you don't have to retype a single command
     several times in a row.  This is somewhat handy, but since you
     can only have one line in the clipboard at a time, pretty
     limited.  It rates pretty poorly as software trying to fit into
     the Macintosh method of user interface, but, again, it doesn't
     claim to be anything other than a text game.
     
     	As entertainment, I enjoyed this more than any other text
     adventure game I've played, but this may be due to the fact that
     it is not a "maze" adventure game, which I find particularly
     annoying with only a text interface.  The basis of the game is
     that the player is in suspended animation and responsible for the
     maintenance of a planetary service center (weather control,
     traffic control, etc.).  The player must keep everything going
     using six different robots, as various crisis situations arise.
     It is engrossing, and has kept my interest for several weeks now.
     The one feature of the game I believe Infocom over-hyped is their
     command parser.  They make it sound as if it is more advanced and
     easy-to-use than any parser currently used.  It is slightly
     better than others I've dealt with, but still has many occasions
     where it cannot understand a command unless you give it in a very
     specific grammar.
     
     	In summary, if you like text adventure games, you'll probably
     like this.
     
     
     CYBORG
     
     	CYBORG, in it's advertising, claims to have been built with
     the Mac in mind, and describes itself as a text & graphics
     adventure game; a t&g game is the same as a text game, except
     that for every location, a different (non-animated) picture
     appears on the screen.  Also, it boasts of a semi-animated
     control screen from which to control the Cyborg.  It makes a great
     out of the Macintosh interface with the game, and advertises
     itself as a full-fledged Mac game.

     Unfortunately, what we have here is a text (very little graphics at
     all) adventure game with an animated front panel that beeps and blinks
     and does very little else.  The action of the game seems to have very
     little to do with science fiction (as the title would suggest).  It is
     the standard maze type adventure game, except the same text picture is
     used as you proceed through the adventure.  The functions and commands
     which can be used through the control panel (and accessed with the
     mouse) are generally redundant methods of giving a text command to the
     game.

     As a text adventure game, I might give this standard marks; but due to
     the very misleading advertisements surrounding it, I'm pretty
     disappointed, and thus would have you steer away from it.

LODERUNNER

     First, a confession; during my youth, as an undergraduate at the
     University of Washington, I discovered a game running on a Vax 780
     (VMesS) which I became addicted to, and spent many hours playing during
     the wee hours of the evening.  Suffice it to say that I eventually grew
     out of this phase... until I happened to pick up a game called
     LODERUNNER for my Mac at the local computer shoppe.  LODERUNNER and the
     game at the UW were obviously related; I have no idea who came first (I
     can guess) and could care less, but  this Mac version of the game has
     lost none of the addictive power of the VMS version, and added quite a
     few features which exploit the powers of the Macs graphic capabilities.

     I would have to say that Lode Runner is the best game designed for the
     Mac  currently on the market (from what I've seen).  This is an
     arcade-type game, with the player running through multi-level mazes,
     grabbing money and eluding guards.  The graphics are excellent, the
     mazes created by the writers intriguing, and the animation some of the
     best I've seen.  My only major complaint is that the mouse is not
     really brought in for movement of the player on the screen.  There is
     an option allowing the user to move the mouse in the direction you want
     the player's character to go; but this invariably brought me to the
     edge of the screen, and I had to somehow move the mouse back to the
     center, which moved my character in a direction I didn't want him to go
     in.  This game takes fast reflexes, and I soon discovered that the best
     way to play it was by using keys for indicating directions (even with
     the Mouse version of playing, one still has to use some keys
     interactively).  I am not sure how one *could* bring the mouse into use
     here, but it would be nice.

     The best feature of this game is that after you've gotten through all
     100 mazes that come with the game (don't hold your breath), you can
     build ones of your own.  The game has standard Mac edit feature,  and
     with the Mouse, it is extremely easy to build a maze and test it out.
     I suspect that people playing this game could come up with some very
     challenging mazes to run, and I'll be interested to see if any appear
     over net.sources.mac.  At any rate, it is a thoughtful and innovative
     feature to the game, and it shows the people who wrote LODERUNNER for
     the Mac were thinking of the abilities of the host machine.  Also, the
     price is the lowest of the three games review, which is the capper.

SUMMARY

        It looks as if, in general, games built strictly for the Mac
have not come about, though LODERUNNER should point the way to several
interesting methods of game-building for the Mac.  The main problem
seems to be how to incorporate the Mouse into the play of the game; the
Mouse just does not substitute well as a joystick or a track ball
(unless the position of the marker on the screen is not a limitation,
as it is in LODERUNNER).  A game with good graphics and animation, with
an imaginitive and engaging concept, could make it in the market; but
the feature which would truly make it worth playing is a way to use the
Mouse to control play, in a logical and smooth manner.


					Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
					John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc.
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