Zork II: The Wizard of Frobozz

Zork II by Dave Lebling and Marc Blank
Published by Infocom
Release Year: 1981
Version Played: Apple IIe

It might seem weird that I'm doing a review of Zork II before I get around to doing Zork I but I can't really bring myself to play Zork I yet again. I've played it enough. I think I know it backwards and forwards. I know about getting the thief to open the egg and lowering the brass lamp into the well and shutting down the dam so that I can actually type commands in the Echo Room. I know not to get into the inflatable raft with anything sharp or to carry the torch into the mines. It's possible I don't remember some of the solutions but I'm fairly certain they'd come to me as soon as I encountered each puzzle. I'm far less familiar with Zork II even though I played it three to four decades ago. Maybe I'll remember how to do everything in this one too as I encounter each puzzle. But since the only thing I remember is that a wizard hassles you with spells that begin with "F", I figure it'll have a few surprises for me. And if it doesn't, and I grow bored, I'll just delete this post and move on!

Almost the entirety of Zork I takes place in a basement which is why so many of us nerds identified so strongly with it. Zork II continues the trend although it wants to be perceived as somewhat cooler so you begin in a "Barrow." But we all know we're just a little bit deeper in the basement of the white house. I wasn't allowed to keep any of the treasures I looted in the previous game but I did get to keep the brass lantern and the Elvish sword. Maybe a better ending to Zork I is not entering the dark passage after getting all the treasures and instead taking as many as you can carry and getting the fuck out of the Great Underground Empire.

I don't think this game has an official time limit. I think the battery on the lantern acts as an unofficial time/turn limit. So I'll keep it off as much as I can, Grues be damned. I say that but am I really going to take the time to turn the lantern off when I'm in a room with phosphorescent moss when I know I'll just have to turn it on again in a move or two? I know how lazy I am and that part about keeping it off was a huge fucking lie. Also:

The lantern lasts at least 600 moves, minus the few moves where I did remember to turn it off (which wasn't often).

I'm not entirely sure what I'm supposed to be doing in this sequel since the trophy case doesn't exist. I suppose I'll just have to explore until I figure it out. Being that the subtitle is "The Wizard of Frobozz," and seeing as how he's an irritating piece of shit who constantly casts spells at you that begin with "F" like "Fudgepack" and "Fingerbang," my guess is that I have to defeat him somehow. Hopefully that entails stealing his wand and using it against him to cast "Fondle" and "Fellatio" until he's seduced into submission.

One of the first things I encounter down in the sub-basement.

Finding a unicorn living off roses deep down in a dark basement lit only by barely glowing moss might seem unrealistic even for a fantasy game. But remember: I'm not actually in a basement! I'm in the Great Underground Empire, once ruled by Lord Dimwit Flathead himself! The place may have seen better days but it was once glorious and majestic, exactly the type of place a unicorn would live in a beautiful magic garden.

Coming from a unicorn, "uncouth sort of vagabond" is a compliment. It translates to "I can tell you've totally been laid, dude."

So getting the tiny gold key from the unicorn is the first puzzle I've encountered. And, surprising myself, I don't remember how to get it. That's a good sign! But it's a bad sign for the unicorn because I have a history of murdering unicorns thanks to Oblivion. The Non-Certified Spouse was appalled back when I played Oblivion and murdered the last unicorn in the land. Trying to guilt me, she then began to play the song from the movie, The Last Unicorn, which absolutely backfired because pretty soon she was weeping. It was funny and tragic.

A gazebo stands nearby full of a bunch of inventory items to get the adventure started. One of these items is a place mat and I know immediately how I'm going to use that. So my memory still retains a certain amount of spoilers for this game.

Past the garden is the Carousel Room because Marc and Dave and whoever else was responsible for this game back in the mainframe days are gigantic jerks who simply want to waste my time. Eight exits in various directions lead away from this room. But because the room spins, you never know which way you're going to go. So now whenever I think I have an item to deal with some puzzle elsewhere in the Great Underground Sub-basement, I have to waste my time constantly trying exits until I randomly end up in the proper place. I've got a Frobozznian spell for those asshats: "Fuck you."

Randomly wandering around until I can solve more puzzles, I run into the next NPC: a Frobozz Magic Robot! He comes with instructions that tell me to say, "Robot, Do Something!" and he'll do the something! Awesome!

Bogus.

The robot does help me push some electrified buttons and demolish a cage that traps me in the next room. But who's going to help me with this boner? The unicorn? It thinks I'm a disgusting slut! I heard there's a horny dragon around here somewhere so time to explore some more.

While wandering around, I discover the Bank of Zork and immediately feel like quitting. Isn't the bank one of the hardest puzzles to figure out in Infocom history? Am I remembering that wrong?! I suppose I'll ignore it for now. I think there's a baseball diamond maze around here somewhere. Much easier to solve for a moronic American. I hear you foreigners muttering, "That's redundant," and don't think I didn't think it also as soon as I typed it!

You cannot pet the dog in Zork II.


No wait. You can pet the dog in Zork II!

After exploring all that I can after solving every puzzle I know I can solve, I realize I probably need to do the Bank of Zork. It turns out, it's not that difficult. The problem is you only emerge from the bank with a stack of Zorkmid bills and a portrait of J. Pierpont Flathead which don't open the game up any further. They're just treasures which I don't know what to do with since I don't have a trophy case to stick them in. Some text adventures have this kind of bottleneck which really drags the game out for a bit. It's because you're presented with a handful of puzzles to solve but you can only actually solve one of them before you can start solving the others. The problem is figuring out which one. Here's what I had to work with: getting the key from the unicorn, unlocking a door with a lizard's head (which probably needed the key from the unicorn, so at least I knew the order of those two puzzle dominoes), getting past Cerberus, getting past the dragon, moving a large stone block, and possibly getting past a glacier.

I was stuck for the longest time at this point, maybe a few days (I think the game took about a week, playing a few hours here and there but thinking about it often). The problem was that as a kid, I had read the Infocom What-Do-I-Do-Now books (ugh. What a tortured Choose Your Own Adventure synonym!) and remembered the dragon puzzle from that book.

I don't remember which one of these it was in.

In the book, you lure the dragon to the ice wall, it sees another dragon reflected in the ice, blasts the ice with its fire breath, and drowns when the ice melts. For some reason, I remembered, incorrectly, that that solution wasn't the same as the solution in Zork II. So I didn't try it for the longest time. Instead giving the dragon gifts and hoping he'd eventually get enough treasure to let me by. He never did. So finally, I flashed the boner left over from the cocktease robot and was all, "Dragon, follow me."

"Curiosity and anger." The reaction from every woman I've ever dated.

Luring the dragon to the ice wall, he accidentally kills himself. I hardly even consider the waste of so many years of wisdom and knowledge simply because I wanted to get into the dragon's lair and steal his shit for a few points. Who's the real monster?

With the glacier melted and the dragon no longer blocking one of the directions I couldn't go, the entire game just opened up and it was practically no time at all that I had 400 points in 600 moves (as seen in the image somewhere previous). The dragon was keeping a princess locked in his lair so I just followed her to the gazebo where the unicorn was all, "OMG! A virgin! Ride me, baby!" That gave me the key which got me past the locked door with the lizard head on it which led into the Wizard of Frobozz's lair. It was there that I performed a sacred ritual using the red, blue, and clear spheres I had found (one of them in the aquarium in the wizard's lair) and summoned a demon.

Only one thing I can think to wish for!


So he's saying it's a possibility?!

So I load him up with treasure, get the Grue Repellent to use as lube, and ask him again.

Dammit!

I just realized I never asked the princess if she'd fuck me. I guess I knew the unicorn would call her an uncouth sort of vagabond and not give me the key if we did it so I didn't try. Also she might have killed me at the suggestion.

The first time I got this far into the game, I simply asked the demon to kill the wizard and he did. This gave me the wand which let me lift the stone to find the collar to get by the dog to find the end. But this time, I tried a different tack.

Ooh! I wonder if I can follow the wizard around and torment him now!

I never do find the wizard again. Killing the wizard or letting him live doesn't change the ending in any way. That's a shame. I wish you'd gain an extra point or two for sparing the wizard.

The adventure ends on the landing of a long staircase leading down in the sub-sub-basement of the white house. That will be explored in Zork III which I don't remember at all. But I look forward to easily beating the snot out of it!

SCORES

Game Title: Derivative! But I guess that makes sense because Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III were all just various parts of the original mainframe game. I think. If you want the actual history about these games, go read the Digital Antiquarian! The subtitle was spot on though because there was a Wizard and I guess he was from Frobozz which, I suppose, means he's a sorcerer whose power is limited to spells that begin with "F". Pretty lame when you get right down to it. Luckily he never tried to Fist me.

Puzzles: Infocom was known for its logical puzzles which always made sense and were often, although not always, hinted at in some way or another. I'm an American so I won't complain about the maze that was meant to be a simulation of running the bases of a baseball field. So easy to figure out! The simplest maze ever! I have a feeling getting the dragon to kill himself and the bank puzzle were the hardest puzzles in the game. Most of the other puzzles basically solved themselves when you finally found the combination of the correct item and where to use it. Perhaps realizing the moldable clay was plastique may have been a bit of an intuitive leap as well although if you play as an arsonist and try to burn everything you come across, you'll learn pretty quickly that it's an explosive. It's hard to say how many of the puzzles in this game my subconscious helped me to solve because I certainly didn't remember a lot of them. Like getting the clear sphere out of the aquarium or getting the red sphere out of the trapped room or getting rid of the pool of tears. Most of those were pretty simple though because they basically relied on items local to the area of the puzzle (or the sword which you should always have on you because this is Zork!).

Gameplay: It could have used more kissing.

Graphics: Not a single graphic. Even the cover art was basically just the cover art for the first Zork. Infocom won't have graphics until Zork Zero comes along. And it won't have terrible movie files Return to Zork!

Concept: Same old Zork concept: find all the treasures and put them somewhere. In the first one, you found them and shoved them in a trophy cabinet. In this one, you find them and shove them up a demon's ass. But at least in this one, you're using the treasures so it doesn't feel like you abandoned them at the end of the adventure. It's too bad the only real choice in this game that matters is to have the demon kill the wizard or let the wizard live as you simply take his wand. I wish it made some kind of difference to the end game. It was nice to have an actual antagonist throughout the game although I don't know why he was my antagonist. Was this just some kind of turf war? What was he protecting? Was he like one of the old white men in a Scooby Doo cartoon simply trying to scare me off?

Fun Time: Guess who didn't keep track of his time playing again? This guy with two thumbs! I think I put in a little time every day for about a week. Some sessions could go for an hour or more as I set to work mapping the entire place. Sometimes I'd pop in for just a few minutes as I tried a few things which didn't work and quit to let the puzzles percolate in my stupid head. I'd say every minute playing the game was actually pretty fun. I really enjoyed exploring this one. The map seemed to open up just enough every time I felt maybe I was stuck, allowing me to slowly make progress. I only felt really stuck the one time with the dragon which was stupid because I knew the answer all along and just had convinced myself that it wasn't the actual answer. It's probably a good thing that I'd read those Zork books though because I'm not sure I would have gotten the dragon to follow me, especially because the dragon responds to you in a weird way, making it seem like maybe he won't follow you. And if you do anything else after asking him to follow you that isn't moving in a compass direction, he won't follow you.

The Map!

Starcross

Starcross by Dave Lebling
Published by Infocom
Release Year: 1982
Version Played: Apple IIe

How do people manage to do everything they want to do each day, especially when they've got a job that takes up at least forty hours of that time? I barely work fifteen hours per week (because I own my own business and I'm really bad at it but I make enough to be comfortable (at least I did until corporations began running this whole "It's actually inflation and not price gouging!" scam they've been perfecting since the Reagan era)) and I never seem to move forward on any of my projects. Granted, I also own a cat that expects almost more attention than your average dog. She's sitting by the computer right now just side-eyeing me with ears on the verge of airplaning, just to make sure I know she's annoyed that I'm not paying her any attention. Also, I tend to have too many projects and they bottle neck which causes choice paralysis and then I wind up watching fifteen hours of Twitch. Although too many projects vying for my time wasn't really the problem with my Text Adventures Daily blog. The real problem was beginning Starcross and immediately realizing I didn't fancy it. And the only reasonable reaction to something like that is to never play another text adventure game for two solid years. I can't think of any other choices!

My main issue with Starcross is that it begins with you, the main character, being awoken from a nice restful hibernation by a "strident" alarm which won't shut up until you can figure out how to manipulate the ship's computer. Some of you might already be shooting holes in that barely acceptable reason for quitting a text adventure by pointing out that the game is, you know, a text adventure. How annoying can an alarm be in a text adventure? Oh, I don't know. Shall we test it out?

Oh hey! There's an alarm ringing. Let's wake up and shut that off so we can get on with our day digging up black holes!

Having been awoken while in a nice comfortable bunk, I decide to get out of the bunk so I can turn off the alarm.

Yeah, yeah! I'm coming!

Once out of my bunk, I take a quick look around my living quarters for the computer but find only an empty bureau.

Fuck. Where the hell is the computer?!

How do I get out of this room? Where are the exits?

Oh, ha ha. Still going. I didn't know teeth could grit this grittily.

Oh, of course. I'm on a ship. I go STARBOARD to wind up on the bridge.

I swear to God I will crash this ship directly into the nearest black hole if that fucking alarm doesn't stop ringing stridently!

The mass detector happens to be on the bridge and it has two large buttons, one red and one blue. So without any clue as to how to operate anything on the ship but annoyed as all fuck at the alarm, I hit the red button hoping that it begins the self-destruct sequence. Unluckily, it doesn't. Luckily, it turns off the alarm. Great! Now I can hear myself think as I try to figure out how to steer my ship to the large mass that set off the alarm on the Large Mass Detectortron!

The Feelie that comes with Starcross is the Large Mass Detectortron output which spits out of the Large Mass Detectortron when you hit the blue button. This shows the location of all the single large masses in your local area. The screen on the Large Mass Detectortron tells you which Large Mass has set off the alarm. In my case, it was Large Mass UM91. So now all I have to do, I suppose, is insert the coordinates into the computer. Luckily, the way to do this is explicitly stated on Infocom's Starcross Large Mass Detectortron Output Map that comes with the game. Unluckily, the computer tells me there's nothing at those coordinates and maybe I should input a new course. But I, being the captain and a human and not an unthinking electronic device no better than a handheld football game, tell the computer to shut up. When me and the ship arrive at an empty spot in space, the computer decides to never speak with me again and the game ends. I guess I just die out in the cold of space begging my computer to take me to an inhabited planet? How awful!

Pardon me. I just have to get this out of my system: "I like large masses and I cannot lie." Thank you for your time.

I start over, get a new location for the Large Mass (UM12) and get the coordinates right this time. I really couldn't read the Phi on the Computer Game Museum website's scan of the Starcross map the first time. But this time I successfully navigate to the Large Mass and now I'm further in the story than I've been in two years! Not that I played it more than the one time where I spent zero time examining the Feelie and refused to wear my space seat belt. It was a horrible death.

The game takes over for a bit as you just sit there in the cockpit waiting for the safest moment to unfasten your seat belt. If you do it too early, thinking maybe you can explore the rest of your ship as you're traveling, you'll eventually be splattered all over the inside walls of your ship as the Large Mass you're investigating turns out to be a phallic space station. I wasn't as disappointed as you might think. The Large Rod grapples your ship, and hauls you into it at astounding speeds. "Buy a fella dinner first," I quip to the computer. The computer responds, "I don't know the word 'buy'." Why have I put my life in this thing's hands?

If you're keeping track, staying safely belted into the ship for the appropriate amount of time is the third puzzle you must solve. It's not much of a puzzle but then neither was the first puzzle, turning off the alarm. Or the second puzzle either, reading the Feelies to figure out how to guide the ship to the main plot. But the fourth puzzle? Ah, the fourth puzzle! I, um, don't know what to think of it. I solved it but I'm not sure how?

Once on the "Unidentified Rotating Phallus," I can explore exactly one location: just outside the airlock door. The door has some kind of puzzle on it where I need to push one of ten bumps of various sizes. Being that this was before Pluto was declared "Not a Planet," and also because I'm so fucking smart, my guess is it's an abstract of the solar system. By pressing the fourth bump, the airlock opens and a black rod pops out which you can take but should probably discard it as soon as possible because it's a cursed rod whose only purpose is to end your game some 300 moves later (if you're dumb enough to use it (I know this because I'm dumb)). The black rod does not have a black star on the end and doesn't respond to a special magic word. I think, though I'm not sure, that you press the fourth lump because you've found the object around Mars. But now that I say that, Mars would be the fifth bump since the first bump is obviously the sun, being the largest bump. Fuck if I know. Whatever. I stumbled on pressing the correct bump on the third try. Infocom should not be proud of this puzzle. One thing about Infocom is that their puzzles are consistently understandable, if not while trying to solve it, at least afterward!

That last statement probably doesn't say what I wanted it to say. If Infocom's puzzles are always understandable, and I don't understand this puzzle, I must be a fucking idiot. Dammit.

I don't know how I've solved as many Infocom games as I have.

I decided to sit down and completely map the game before I began blogging about it and, in so doing, I'm one problem away from either winning or some kind of endgame. Hopefully I'll realize what I need to do as I recap the story. I sure hope it doesn't have anything to do with the weasels hunting unicorns because I don't want any part of killing unicorns.

What the fuck is going on in this ship?

Apparently this ship has a long history of catching space travelers and making them do chores aboard the ship. So far, none of the aliens have agreed to do them. They've just begun their own civilizations or refused to make webs onboard or died in a fiery crash upon landing. I'm the only one dumb enough to fall for this whole "solve the fun puzzles!" schtick. By the end of the game, it's hinted that by solving the puzzles, the aliens will reward Earth with loads of advanced knowledge. But I think they're just trying to find a species that will do free labor for useless points and an even more useless title.

Once on board the mystery ship, I soon discover another reason why I quit playing this game two years ago even if I didn't know about it then: a time limit. You have only about 250 moves before the oxygen runs out on the ship and you suffocate. As I mapped the ship and discovered more and more puzzles that I'd have to do within that limit, and realized how many times I'd have to go back and forth, and how many turns I'd lose to following other characters around, my mind began to break down. I'm pretty sure some of my brain dribbled out of my nose. This "game" was winding up more stressful than Border Zone! Of course it didn't take long to realize the turn limit goes away once you solve one particular problem. Although is it possible to beat the game without fixing the oxygen system?! Do I dare plan a speed run route?!

I spent the time mapping identifying and planning the problems that needed to be solved first. Little did I know, once you insert your red rod into the red slot and spray oxygen all over the ship, you have plenty of time to do the puzzles in practically any order. I said practically!

Getting the lights on was Priority #1. Unless mapping was Priority #1. Unless turning off the alarm was Priority #1.

Some games overwhelm you with locations and items as a way to complicate the puzzles. Other games limit the places you can go until you solve a puzzle or two while offering more puzzles than you can solve with the items you can initially find. Starcross appears to be the latter. The obstacles in my way of mapping were the dark rooms and the obligatory dreaded maze. I didn't want to deal with the maze yet, so it was off to find a light switch.

That yellow slot with a diagram emitting rays looks like an alien light switch! The red slots with diagrams looks like math. Or chemistry. Blech!

I headed off to search for something to stick in the yellow slot other than my penis (which turned something on but it wasn't the lights). Some rat-ants had built a home in the ship's zoo (why does the ship have a zoo? Probably to explain how an alien ship could have Grues, having escaped from the zoo, now living in its dark places). They had a red rod incorporated into their nest which seemed like a good candidate for sticking in one of the three red slots in the Repair Room. This was one of the puzzles that took me the longest to solve but I eventually used an old tried and true Infocom trick: when stuck, look in the manual at the verb list they offer. I hit upon "throw" and threw my space suit at their nest, destroying it. They weren't pissed off enough to kill me but they were angry enough to move to another corner of the room, leaving the red rod for me to snap up.

The yellow rod was being held by an overly friendly alien yet mammalian spider. He wanted to talk to me about everything and anything he could think of. But I didn't want to talk to him because he was gross. So I gave him the set of informational tapes from my ship I just happened to be carrying around with me like nobody would ever do unless they were playing a text adventure game. He loved them and he stopped bothering me after receiving them!

Little did he know, if I hadn't come along, he was only going to need to be sane for another 200 moves.

Before the lights were on, I could only visit the ship's Red Hall, Blue Hall, and Green Hall, with various rooms branching off from these halls and an alien civilization living in the Green Hall. Once the lights were on, I could also explore the Yellow Hall. Based on the layout of the halls, I knew each hall had an airlock to the docked ships I saw on my approach. My ship, the Starcross, was docked off the Red Hall. The spider's ship was docked off the Blue Hall. Based on my map, I could tell the Green Dock was going to be past the warrens where the weasel-like aliens lived. In other words, the maze. So I decided to explore the Yellow Dock which had been covered in debris on my approach.

Tangled in the debris on the Yellow Dock was a dead reptilian alien with a pink rod in his hand. No, I did not immediately think it was his penis.

Um, this was an attempt to solve a different puzzle!

Also in the Yellow Hall was the Laboratory. Inside the lab were a pair of manhole-sized disks (one red, one blue) and a blue rod embedded in a strange silver globe. This blue rod, in conjunction with a later part of the game, was the problem I couldn't solve. I could get the blue rod but it would make the last part of the game impossible. But while at work earlier, I believe I've figured out how to get around that problem. I haven't tested it yet but remember how I mentioned Infocom's puzzles always made sense and were satisfying once you saw how they were solved? Well, my solution I came up with makes so much sense that I'm not even bothered with trying it out. I'll just win the game when I get there! I know I will!

Infocom (and most older text adventures created before Graham Nelson descended from Nerd Heaven and proclaimed, "Death shall not be a requirement to solve a text adventure!") loved making puzzles that really couldn't be solved the first time through. You often had to experience failure to understand the puzzle you were facing. That's the case in Starcross with the ray gun you find lying around somewhere in the already lit area. When you fire it, it seems to misfire with a weird explosion a few feet in front of you. The second shot works just fine. But then that's it for shots and you seemingly need at least four shots to beat the game (one of those in the lab which is why I'm bringing it up now!). So I wondered, "Can the gun be recharged? Maybe if I stuck the black rod I found earlier into it?" So after the gun was out of charges, I tried loading it with the black rod.

Wait, what? Seriously?!

This didn't actually charge the ray gun so I thought, "What if I shove the black rod into the gun before I fire it?" And so, I reloaded and tried that.

Well I do declare! (My space farer was Southern.)

Shaking the gun, I could hear something rattling inside. Looking in the barrel, I could tell something was there. Simply looking in the ray gun revealed a silver rod! That was why the gun was misfiring! Oh, Infocom! You're so much more clever than I am! I had to stupidly try to jam another rod down the barrel of the gun to realize something was in the gun rather than realize the misfire probably meant something was jammed into the barrel. But then, I'm not a Looney Tunes character so what do I know about sticking things in the barrels of guns?

Once the silver rod was removed from the ray gun, I actually got three shots with the charge. Still one shot short of being able to complete the game and the problem I was having before I went to work last night. Before I thought of the solution to the problem I haven't mentioned yet, I could either get the blue rod or get to the end game. But, obviously, you needed to do both. I'll get to that soon enough! For now, I need to get the blue rod!

Expanding the silver globe by setting the dial on the machine allows you to shoot the globe without harming the blue rod embedded in it. The globe disappears for a moment before the machine reforms it. But during that moment, the blue rod drops safely to the ground. Just a few more rods to go: gold, green, brown, clear, and violet.

First the gold rod because it's basically free. Just off the Green Hall, there's a computer room with an access panel loaded with cards. One slot is empty. Just stick a card in the slot and the ship's computer is back up and running. Back in the Repair Room, I found a metallic and ceramic square. This is the card that needs to go in the slot. I'm not sure I would have made that connection except that I accidentally stuck it in the slot one game because I'm terrible at these games. And even though I didn't think I had a card, I typed, "Put card in slot," and the game was all, "Sure thing! Boom! Right in! Good job! Here's a gold rod!" So then I had to wrack my brain trying to figure out where I had found a card! Really, that wasn't easy. It took awhile before I remembered the metallic and ceramic square. Seriously. I don't know how I've beaten so many Infocom games!

The next rod was the green rod. To get that one, I needed help from the ship's Roomba.

The garbage collector probably looks like a mouse so a player might think the way to get the red rod is to lure the mouse to the rat-ant nest where the guard will be distracted while fucking the mouse. But that, um, probably didn't work.

Did I mention the blue and red disks were teleport pads? That was easy to figure out because what else would they be?! Once I sussed out their purpose, I figured there would be two possible puzzles using the disks: to get to a location that I couldn't normally get to or to get an item to a location you couldn't normally get it. Turns out both of those puzzles are used plus one more: to get out of a place that you can't get out of in the regular way without dying. So three uses for the things! Of course, you lose one of the disks after the puzzle where you use them to escape the situation where you'll die otherwise. So that becomes a puzzle in itself if you forget about the disks, or think you don't need them anymore. But that's part of the puzzle I couldn't figure out earlier! First, the green rod!

If you follow the mouse around for a bit, you'll discover it takes any items it's carrying through a small hole in the wall which you can't fit inside. Aha, I thought, I have to shrink myself! But I couldn't find a way to do that so I remembered the thing I thought when I found the teleport pads. I just needed to get one of the pads through the mousehole and I could teleport inside. So I just dropped a disk and let the mouse take it. The first time I did this, I let the mouse take it and then just left it so that when I teleported out of that life and death situation I keep being vague about, I would just go right into the mouse's lair. But now I realized maybe I need the escape disk in a completely different location later. So I'll deal with the mouse in one fell swoop.

Inside the mouse's lair is a trash bin. Inside the trash bin is the green rod. Also inside the mouse's lair is a secret door which lets you back into the main part of the ship with both teleport pads. But it's one way so don't think you're going to cheekily find it when you have to restart and try again. Also don't think about how large the teleport pads are (manhole-sized) and how the mouse can get them through the door and how you can't fit through the door. Mostly don't think about that because the size of the door wasn't actually the problem; I just couldn't open it. Maybe if I'd ripped off the mouse's head, I could have operated the door! Seems like the kind of solution my space farer would have come up with, seeing as how I didn't mind destroying nests and desecrating holy places (we'll get to that!).

After this, it was time to attempt the maze. But first, I needed to set up the solution to the puzzle I couldn't solve earlier! The Repair Room is on a different level than the colored halls. It is in the center of the spinning tubular satellite I was on. The interior of the tube looked like a national park, maybe to go along with the zoo theme. At either end of the tube-like room are two glass domes. Because they are at the exact center of the spinning satellite in space, there is no gravity between them. At one end, I could climb up a large tree to reach the dome and the area of no gravity. To get to the other dome, I had to propel myself while floating weightless between the domes. To do that, I could shoot the ray gun three times. But after getting the blue rod, I only have two shots left. To move the final distance, I thought maybe I needed to throw something heavy. The only thing I thought was heavy enough was my space suit. But I can't climb the tree with the space suit. "A-ha! I bet this was the second puzzle which can be solved using the teleport pads!" I thought presumptuously. The problem with that is that I needed the pads to escape from the area past the maze. And that's where I hit on the solution! If I set up one of the pads inside the dome at the top of the tree, I'll teleport out of the maze with my space suit and have it ready to propel me across the gap! Well, not my space suit. The tattered space suit. But, um, we'll get to that! First let's see if I can set the pad up in the dome. I haven't tried this yet! If it doesn't work, I'll probably quit and never play another Infocom game in my life!

Fuck it. I didn't want to play anymore Infocom games anyway.

See how the disk is floating? Yeah, I forgot about the whole no gravity thing in the dome. And the disk only works when it's securely placed on a flat surface. So that's not going to work. Oh well, how about I just get as far as I can and then see what happens?

I've got just two more locations to explore before nearing the end game: the maze and the observatory. I'll leave one of my teleport disks in the observatory and then head on over to deal with the maze and the weasel aliens.

He obviously wants my space suit.

I don't really need the space suit anymore (I don't think?) but I do need the brown rod. So I point at it to make clear that we're trading. He seems to understand and then I give him the suit. He takes off his tattered suit, leaving it for me to scrounge, puts on my suit, and then tries to pretend he doesn't have a brown rod. Fucking piece of shit. I have a ray gun but I don't kill him. I just point at the brown rod again and he honorably gives it up. But I'll remember this betrayal! I'll get even for this slight by destroying his most sacred thing! After reluctantly giving me the brown rod, the chief pouts away into the maze.

About that maze! I tried to map it earlier but Infocom, realizing early on how people learned to map mazes, began coming up with new tricks every game to keep the mazes difficult. In this one, I found I couldn't drop any objects to mark each location because the young weasels steal the stuff I left lying about. Or their parents take it from them and give it back to me. At first, I thought maybe I'd let them steal one of the teleport disks. But once I did that, I couldn't put down the other disk to stand on it because the little buggers steal that one too. So I tried to brute force it by moving in every combination. First every direction in the first room. Then every direction in the room to the north. Then every direction in the room to the north of the north room. At one point, I wound up outside the maze. But I wasn't paying attention. So I tried again and noticed I wound up outside the maze simply by moving from the first room. But that had never happened before. So I experimented a little more and realized the maze was almost certainly one room with a small chance of exiting the maze every time you chose a direction. This is proven if you deal with the chief just inside the maze because he'll drop the tattered suit and no children will take it. Then every direction you go, you'll be In the Warrens with a tattered suit.

Realizing the maze was just a big illusion, I figured the only way through was to follow an alien. You can't follow the children because they just stand there staring at you. But you can follow the chief after he pouts and flounces off with your suit. So that's what I did. For a whole bunch of moves. But it finally pays off when you wind up in the center of the warren!

Is he trying to seduce me?

The chief lives just above the Green Airlock. He seems to want me to visit so I head down to the Green Dock where there's another ship. The cargo hold of this ship is full of worthless offerings, dead flowers, and decaying fruit. Just past the cargo hold, on the bridge, is a shrine to the dead pilot of the ship, still seated on his control couch. By touching the skeleton of the pilot, his arm falls from the arm rest and he drops a violet rod. I take the violet rod but cannot fix the position the corpse was in when I found it because if I touch it again, it will crumble and I'll be immediately killed as a blasphemous heretic. And if I leave the ship and head back to the Chief's room, he'll know I messed with his shrine and kill me. The only way out is to teleport. So I drop my disk and disappear. But I'll never get that disk back. I hope I don't need to teleport anymore!

I wind up in the observatory where I'd left the other disk. I hadn't mentioned this place because I couldn't do anything here until I got a broken black visor from the cargo hold of the shrine I just looted. I feel like Indiana Jones, the super cool imperialist thief of other people's relics! Inside the observatory is a blinding light coming out of a projector. If I look into the projector, I go blind and wind up getting eaten by Grues. Not because me being blind equates everything becoming darkness where Grues live but because me being blind means stumbling into a dark corner of the ship where the Grues are hiding. I don't know where that dark corner is now that I turned on the lights. Probably under a table somewhere. Anyway, with the visor, I can look into the projector to get the last rod.

The clue there was something in the projector was that the color of the planets it was projecting were all off. But the real clue was the projector was something in the game that I could fiddle with.

I now had 325 points out of 400 and all the rods. I think. The only puzzle left is figuring out how to float from the drive bubble to the control bubble. Hopefully I have everything I need and just haven't quite figured it out yet. Otherwise, I guess I'll shamefully be looking up the Invisiclues for this one.

I eventually manage to get the suit up the tree by putting it on the teleport pad which is a total cheat of the system and something the playtesters should have noticed. My thinking is that it's bulky enough to propel me 1/3 of the way to the control bubble by throwing it. But it is not. I am at a loss. I am stuck. The game has beaten me!

Knowing that you can get across with three blasts of the ray gun, my guess is that there's another way to get the blue rod. But I tried getting help from the Garbage Mouse. I tried getting help from the spider. I tried using the teleport pads under the silver globe but only managed to kill myself in a terrible teleportation accident. I tried putting things on the globe. The only other thing I haven't dealt with in the game are the unicorns in a grassy field and the weasel hunters hunting them. Is that something? I don't know. But I've exhausted the limits of my mind. I'm disappointed but it looks like Starcross has beaten me. Time to check out the Invisiclues.

After reading the clues and discovering exactly how to get the blue rod without using a shot from the gun, I don't feel too bad. I almost had it but didn't put it all together. You have to put the disk under the globe and put something on the globe before setting the dial to 4. I had done both of those things but never together. I may have even done that once but while holding the other pad instead of putting on the ground where it needs to be to work. As I've pointed out several times, I don't know how I ever solved an Infocom game!

Luckily I had a save state where I'd done everything except get the blue rod. Because I figured there was a way to do it without using all three shots. It might seem a problem that I only have one teleport disk but that's easy enough to get around. I just slide the disk under the globe, put the gun on the globe, set the dial to 4 so that the gun falls on the teleport pad and teleports itself and the blue rod to the blue disk in the weasel shrine. Then I grab the red disk, stand on it, and get all my loot while on the weasel ship. Then I teleport back and I'm ready for the end game, a little bit sad because I had to get a fucking hint.

Does the amount you hate yourself ever fill up like an overflowing bucket? The older you get, shouldn't you despise yourself more and more for every time you've disappointed yourself? Or will I eventually forget that I failed miserably at solving Starcross completely? I guess that's what will happen because I barely remember that I also needed exactly one hint to solve Sherlock: The Riddle of the Crown Jewels.

Carrying all my rods, I climb to the drive bubble, use the silver rod to open it, and enter. There's a white rod and white slot here so that basically takes care of itself. After that, I leap from atop the drive bubble so that I'm floating over the forest. I fire my gun at the drive bubble three times to wind up on top of the control bubble. Climbing down, there's a gold slot for my gold rod. Now all that's left is entering the control bubble and shoving all of my various rods into a bunch of holes.

Wait a second. Did these ancient aliens just trick me into having sex with their ship?

Inserting the rods bring up the controls for the ship. Once I figure them out, I set course for Earth and promptly use it as a slingshot to fire myself into deep space. So I restored the game and set the course correctly, ending in an orbit around Earth rather than slingshotting around it (one option has you set course for the center of Earth. I should try that one next!) and I succeed! Now instead of Indiana Jones, I'm like Han Solo! It only took me two tries to correctly pilot this hunk of junk!

Oh no! I'm never leaving Earth again! You can personally meet some other human chump.

The game ends as if I just brought tons of knowledge to the human race. But what I actually brought them was a ship loaded with weasel-men, rat-ants, and a super curious spider man. Oh, and the weasels and ants are fucking pissed at me. Hopefully all the Grues were killed when I turned on the emergency lighting system, leaving them no dark rooms to hide in. Or maybe this is how Grues got to Earth! Is that the big twist? This is a prequel to Zork and I was the jerk that brought Grues to our world?! What a catastrophe!

SCORES

Game Title: The title confused me. I thought this was going to be a space romance about star-crossed lovers. Instead it was about a lonely miner with so little going on that he doesn't mind picking up after some ancient aliens who were so careless about their colored rods. The ship's name was Starcross so the title makes sense in that regard. But why was that the name of the ship? It's not like mankind currently has the capability to cross to other stars. That's the information the ancient aliens are going to give them. Also, why am I mining for black holes in the Sol System? Maybe my ship can travel between stars in the Milky Way. I don't really remember all the background stuff.

Puzzles: The puzzles were all really fair (maybe not by today's text adventure standards. But back in the '80s, we understood that death was often crucial to solving certain puzzles. And everybody except Graham Nelson didn't actually mind). This was labeled as an Expert Infocom game but I don't think any of the puzzles were spectacularly hard or unfair. The way to get the blue rod correctly so that you can win the game may be the only really "Expert" puzzle I can think of. Pretty much all the other solutions to puzzles are hinted at in the text or via your actions. They aren't always the best hints, like the colors of the projected planets being off or the gun's misfire. But they absolutely make sense after the fact, and I could see truly expert Infocom players grasping their meanings. I'm not sure that I cared for the way the adventurer, me, needed to solve some of the problems but then I never actually hurt anybody. Hell, I saved them all by fixing the oxygen system and the computer! And I murdered all the Grues. Oh yeah. So I did hurt some creatures. And if you don't feel bad about killing Grues, you probably haven't played Wishbringer.

Gameplay: Have you played an Infocom game before? It's like that. But with less explanation of where the exits are. Which is fine because you're in a huge tube with four long hallways. If you didn't try to go in every direction once you realized directions weren't consistently noted, that's on you. You're supposed to map these things, you know. It could have used more kissing.

Graphics: None. Not a single one. Which is not to say it couldn't have used some. I know Infocom text adventures don't have graphics but they've managed before to include helpful ASCII drawings. Take Infidel as an example. It showed you the runes inside the pyramid so you had the best chance of translating them instead of trying to describe them to you. This game had at least two locations that would have really benefitted with some kind of visual aid. Like the symbols that were supposed to represent the chemical make-up of gasses. Or the entire computer set-up once you get it running. Although the computer doesn't really do anything. Do you even need to fix it to beat the game? Does it turn on the Control and Drive systems?

Concept: Being tested by aliens was already a trope by the time this game was published. Finding alien artifacts left by aliens to help the other aliens who found them was what 2001: A Space Odyssey was about. Wasn't it? Was that what it was about? Seriously, I have no idea. Did the monkeys at the beginning solve the Monolith's riddle or were they like the weasel aliens and the spider guy? So confused by it that they just quit trying to understand it? Oh! Was I like the monkeys at the beginning of 2001 in that I was so confused by it that I quit trying to understand it and just threw a bunch of shit around my room?

Fun Time: You won't believe this but, once again, I forgot to keep track of how long I spent playing this game. It couldn't have been more than five or six hours of actual time typing in commands. But my mind definitely thought about the game constantly in the background while doing other things. Even when I didn't know I was working on one of the game's puzzles, my mind was whirling away until suddenly I'd think, "Oh! Maybe I should try that!" Too bad my brain was too stupid to come up with the solution to the one puzzle I never solved, even though I was about 80% of the way there! I was never really bored while playing this and never so stuck that I wanted to abandon it. If I had been playing this in the pre-Internet days on my Apple IIe, I probably would have solved it in another week or so. The simple fact that you could slide the teleport pad under the globe was indication enough that that was going to be part of the blue rod solution.

The Map!