Starcross (PC, 1982) - Part 2

When I left off last time, I was entering the giant alien cylinder.  After closing the airlock that I came through, I take a bold chance and take off my suit, and find that the ship has air.  I find myself in a boring red hallway.  No one's here to greet me.  Since I was brought here intentionally, I immediately surmise that I'm being tested somehow - the puzzle outside the cylinder would seem to confirm this.  I proceed to wander around the cylinder.

Since the cylinder is rotating, up is towards the center of the cylinder, and down towards the edge.  There are two "levels" to the cylinder.  The "outside" level is a grid of hallways that extends from one end of the cylinder to the other, and all the way around the outside.  A ladder in one of the intersections leads up to the "inside" level, which is a giant terrarium, with a small forest and grasslands.  The terrarium extends all the way around, which means if you look up, you can see the other side of it.  Imagining this cylindrical world is one of the best features of the game - it makes a nice change from the caves which were the standard fare of text adventures up to this point, such as Colossal Cave and Zork.

From the terrarium, I look up to see giant bubbles on the fore and aft ends of the cylinder, which I had noticed from the outside of the cylinder as weel..  The bubble on the fore end is probably the bridge, but it seems completely inaccessible.  If I climb an especially large tree in the forest, I come very near the center of the cylinder, where there is no gravity.  From there, I can jump and float to the outside of the aft bubble, where I find a locked hatch next to a small silver hole.  I should mention that the ship is full of these small colored holes, which accept small colored rods as keys, like the black rod I was given outside.  In fact, almost the entire game is spent searching for these nine or so colored rods, which are scattered all over the place.  There's no special order in which you find these things, and the silver one ended up being the last one I found, which was more than a little frustrating.

It turns out I have more pressing problems than getting to the aft bubble, since after 100 or so turns the air starts to get thin.  This confuses me.  If the ship has a leak, or the other alien races (I'll get to those in a second) breathe oxygen, than certainly it would have run out long ago.  If I'm the only air-breather, then why would it run out so soon, since the cylinder is massive.  Whatever.  It turns out I find a room full of machines, one of which produces gases somehow.  I can surmise this through a pictorial display that shows a solid block, next to a fluid level, next to a series of wavy lines in red.  Solid, liquid,...gas.  Part of the game is interpreting these sorts of displays, which I never had too much difficulty with.  Unfortunately, the machine requires a red rod.  Fortunately, the red rod is not hard to find.  It's in the ship's small zoo, in the outside level..  Most of the alien animals in this zoo are long dead.  A pack of grues has broken free, and settled in the dark areas of the ship.  (These are a Zork reference - I'll let the reader look them up.)

The only inhabitants of the zoo are a pack of rat-ants.  At least that's how the game describes them - to spare us lengthy descriptions (Infocom games are notoriously spare with descriptions - thus the classic response "You see nothing special about the treasure chest"), all of the aliens are described in reference to an Earth animal.  The rat-ants have built their giant nest out of odds and ends, including a red rod.  If I try to take the red rod, an ant comes out and pinch me.  I quickly resort to violence, and attempt to hit, kick, and punch the nest.  None of these responses work - amusingly, if I try to kick the nest, I am stopped by a bunch of ants.  I must be kind of a weakling.  It turns out I'm on the right track, though, only I'm supposed to throw something heavy at the nest, such as my space suit.  I remember this being an issue in the Zork games as well - for some reason, the designers like the verb "throw" for violent acts, probably because it necessitates that extra object.  Aaargh.

Anyways, I get the red rod, at the expense of the little creatures' homes.  This doesn't bode well for my first alien contact.  At least I manage to turn on the air.  Actually, there's another symbol interpretation puzzle with pictures of what turns out to be molecules.  If I get it wrong, then the air starts filling up with ammonia or methane.  In the learn-something-every-day department, apparently methane smells like charcoal in large quantities.  I always thought it was what you were smelling from a fart, but I guess that's sulfur or something else.

So then I proceed with the arduous task of finding all the colored rods, except for the one I want.  This brings me into contact with the other aliens on the artifact.  The cylinder has four airlocks.  One of them I came in.  Two of them have alien ships parked outside.  The first of these is occupied by a giant talking spider.  He's friendly, and tells me he's been stuck here for centuries, incredibly bored.  I give him the tape library from my own ship, and he's happy as a peach.  He gives me the yellow rod.

The second ship is hard to get to.  It was brought here long ago by members of a weasel race, who have since increased and become primitive.  One large section of the outside level is covered with a series of dirt tunnels they've built, forming an impenetrable maze (another notorious feature of Infocom games).  The only way through the maze is to follow the weasel chieftain, after giving him your space suit.  That seems like a bad idea, but you're stuck on the cylinder anyway - the tentacle's not letting go of your ship anytime soon.  One of the colored rods is in the weasel's ship, which has been turned into a shrine.  However, the weasels quickly kill you if they find you've disturbed anything.  The solution - use a transporter disc you find in another room to evade the weasels after committing sacrilege.  Another act of deception - you're off to a great start.

What about the fourth airlock?  Well, the ship outside it was destroyed, cutting off power in that section of the cylinder.  After restoring power with the yellow rod, I ventured outside the airlock (before I gave away my space suit, naturally) to find a ton of debris, and the body of a man-sized reptile.  The narrator surmises that the explosion might have been caused by the pilot attempting to leave the tentacle's grip.  Well, who can blame him for wanting to commit suicide, forever stuck in a place like this?  He's holding onto the pink rod - fortunately, he didn't drop it, or I'd be screwed.

I find the other rods in rooms around the ship - I'll skip them, just because they're not very relevant to the plot.  The silver rod I find in the barrel of a ray gun, of all things.  The clue is that the gun misfires with the rod in the barrel, but I wasn't picking up on that.  With that I enter the bubble on the aft end.  Inside I use the white rod to make a bunch of controls appear, which I seem to be uninterested in.  A black circle appears, which the game describes as ominous.  If I insert the black rod, the ship immediately loses all of its power and the game ends - the black circle seems to be a self-destruct mechanism.  I find it strange that the creators of the cylinder would include this option and then not label it in any way.  This is just one of many strange decisions on their part.

Besides the self-destruct mechanism, there's nothing in the aft bubble to interact with, so it would seem I'm at a dead end.  The only unexplored area of the ship is the fore bubble, but there's no way to climb up there.  The solution is sort of ingenuous.  I must climb to the center of the cylinder, outside the aft bubble, where there is zero gravity.  From there I must fire the aforementioned ray gun to propel myself over to the fore bubble.  Although I had figured this out, I kept dying because I hadn't climbed to the exact center - the game didn't do a good job informing me that there was a ladder on the outside of the bubble.

Upon reaching the fore bubble, I find slots for the rest of my colored rods.  Fortunately, I managed to find them all beforehand, since I don't have any way of getting back (I used up all of the ray gun's energy getting here.)  With these controls, I can select a destination for the cylinder, the speed of my journey, and what type of orbit I want.  I send the ship to a circular orbit around Earth.  After the cylinder starts on its way, a holographic movie of one of the ship's creators starts up - he hopes that one day, we might use his technology to make the journey back to meet his race.  Then the game ends.

All that work, and I don't even to get to meet the alien in the end.  Well, that's pretty anticlimactic.

So, how does Starcross fair among Infocom's ouevre?  Not that well, really.  It's quite short, and the puzzles are unimaginative and poorly designed.  The story is bare, and ultimately doesn't make much sense.  If the ship's purpose is to find other spacefaring aliens and give them a path back to their own planet, then why all the nonsense with the colored rods?  Why is the main bridge so difficult to get to?  Why does the cylinder trap approaching ships without any possibility of escape?  I suppose it might be testing these races, but that seems pointlessly cruel, and even the game itself acknowledges that it came close to being completely unsuccessful - if I were to fail, there aren't any more airlocks.

However, this game was an early step for Infocom, who were trying to break free from the text adventure staple, the cave spelunker, and into something new.  The setting is cool, and even if the plot has gaping holes, it's clear that the designer had tried to make something that's somewhat realistic, if not especially innovative, in the sci-fi genre.  A stepping stone toward better things, if not much else.   

Starcross (PC, 1982) - Part 1

Starcross is a text adventure by Dave Lebling, the fifth released by Infocom and the second outside of the Zork trilogy, which the developer is most known for today.  I'm in the midst of playing this game, and instead of waiting until I finished and writing a more conventional criticism, I thought I would take a cue from some other IF blogs I've read, and narrate, with much simplification, the game as it happens.  With most types of games, this task would be either too complex or too dull, but text games, especially the early ones with their rather rote descriptions, lend themselves well to this sort of thing.

Starcross is set a century or so in the future.  I play an entrepeneur who buys a small mining spaceship, in order to search the solar system for small black holes.  Why the solar system contains black holes, or indeed, what anyone would do with one is not to my knowledge explained.  In any case, after months of lonely searching, my mass detector goes off somewhere in the vicinity of Mars.  At this point, I come up against a bit of copyright protection - in order to fly to the unidentified object, I must look up the coordinates on a map provided in the game box.  In a nice touch, the coordinates I must give to the computer are spherical.

The computer (the in-game one, that is), with some sarcasm, warns me that I'll want my seatbelt on before we activate the engines - if I ignore it, it gladly starts them anyway and fatally flattens me against a bulkhead.  Homicidal machine, I guess.  The object, on approach, turns out to be cylindrical and clearly made by intelligent beings.  I should mention that humanity has not made contact with any aliens before this point.  So this would be a pretty surprising discovery - and yet, in typical Infocom fashion, the game leaves me, the player, to do the emoting, and I ride in silence to the alien ship, occasionally interrupted by another snarky comment from the computer.

As I circle around the giant cylinder, which is approximately five kilometers long and one kilometer in diameter, I notice a couple ships about my size strapped around the middle.  Also part of the ship appears to have sustained some damage.  There's a large bubble, possibly the bridge, on one of the ends.  Eventually, a giant metal arm comes out, grabs my ship, and pulls it up against the cylinder.  I take a space suit and head outside.  Fortunately, I have magnetic boots - otherwise centrifugal force caused by the spinning cylinder would cause me to fly off the edge.  I also have a safety line which I attach to a nearby hook, since I know the game has no qualms about killing me for stupid mistakes.

I notice a closed airlock, and some set of 9 metal "bumps" in the shape of my solar system.  Apparently, the aliens want to know which planet I'm from.  At first, I mistakenly press the "third bump", but that's Venus, since the first bump is the sun.  I guess the aliens must already know where I'm from, since the door does not open and I am not given a second chance.  After reloading and giving the correct planet, a small bump appears on the solar system at the same distance as Jupiter.  My best guess is that it refers to Ceres, the asteroid where my ship was built - by the way, in the future, asteroids are colonizable.  In any case, after pressing it a small black rod appears, which is apparently the key to the airlock - it opens as soon as I pick up.  I untie my safety line and head inside.