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.