The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

"The wildest and best text adventure ever"

On the heels of Douglas Adams's wildly successful Hitchhiker's Guide trilogy came what I feel to be the best text adventure game ever. It's funny. Even the cluebook, which you will probably need, is funny, but do use the magic marker and not the apple cider/shampoo combination mentioned in the ''Have you tried?'' section to reveal clues. The object is to land the spaceship Heart of Gold on Magrathea and set foot there. You start out as Arthur Dent but due to improbability physics you will change time streams and identities as you find contorted ways to get Marvin the Paranoid Android and the ship's paranoid computer to do your bidding. The text parser is also quite good. Infocom's was one of the best, being able to understand six-word sentences, and humorous footnotes and other book-specific jokes were thrown in, including references you can access in the Hitch-Hiker's Guide, a nifty item.

It's neat to see and play the other personalities: Ford Prefect, the alien who saves Arthur as the Earth blows up, Zaphod Beeblebrox, president of the Galaxy turned criminal, and Tricia McMillan(Trillian) who took off on Zaphod's spaceship after Arthur failed to impress her at a party. They provide diversions and important items in your quest for real tea, the meaning of fluff, and other miscellaneous items, and the alternate identities are almost a break from the usual intense difficulty. For instance, in Ford's case(before the earth blows up) you should really know what to do. The only major part of the book that's downplayed is the presence of the number 42.

The game is reasonably faithful to the story but expounds on characters the book only mentioned, like the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, whom you get to meet. You even get a double dose of horrible Vogon Poetry, and in one of the most tangled text adventure puzzles of all time, you try to stick a Babel Fish(which allows you to understand the Vogons) in your ear. There's even the greatest ambiguous item ever in interactive fiction, the Thing Your Aunt Gave You Which You Don't Know What it Is, which even beats the asteroid chipper and the anti-Bugblatter Beast gun; the items are the biggest spot of divergence from the books, and they are entertaining. Of course the old standbys like L. Prosser with his construction crew knocking down your house and Zaphod make appearances, and you even get to change the procession of a galactic war in the process. There are also Magrathean missiles, but the process of stopping them is much more difficult in the game.

In a text adventure this difficult you are going to make fatal mistakes or just get sidetracked, and the humor does not let up then. For instance, you will get hit by a brick from your house getting knocked down if you leave directly for the pub, where you had better not drink too much, or you'll have a great time as the Vogons blow up Earth. There's also the grossest hamburger in the world there that costs you points if you eat it, and drinking Advanced Tea Substitute is so depressing it loses you points and then kills you on the Heart of Gold. If you are not careful you can even rip apart the space-time continuum in the universe, but my favorite one is the unsubtle ''Something stinks in here, and it's not just your puzzle-solving ability!'' after a few lesser hints.

Of course, with a text adventure, you are not going to get a lot of graphics, but the text provides some of the best images. From the bilious Vogon Jeltz whose troops capture you to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal and his wall of names of people he's killed, there are humorous landmarks all over the game. Frequently solving a puzzle will leave you with a wild story that is obviously an excuse to throw you back into a convenient location but is still easy to picture.

Because of the puzzles' originality and difficulty, they are not easy to remember, and so you can play this game more than once. This game in fact inspired me to read the HHGG trilogy, which inspired me to play through the game again to appreciate fully the jokes I didn't quite get the first time. There are also ignominious ways to die which should not be overlooked as well(it'll happen a lot, so you deserve something out of it) and with the cluebook HTML-ized online you may want to try every suggestion there. This game is a great repository for spare ideas Adams seemed to have that wouldn't quite fit in a book, and many of the puzzles' solutions are classic slams on some aspect of society. To include every wonderful joke that was in the book that inspired this game would have been impossible, but you're left with the feeling that it wasn't really necessary. This game is one of the densest adventures, and none of the puzzles ''miss'' or even abuse the leeway that science-fiction absurdism affords.

HHGG even had cool stuff enclosed with the package. You got some free pocket fluff, a plastic packet containing a microscopic space fleet, and Peril-Sensitive Sunglasses cut out of 100% black paper. It's these details that propel a game to greatness and I have only one quibble. At the end the game promised a sequel that never materialized(Bureaucracy doesn't really count.) There are also a couple of bugs where you cannot win the game despite your best efforts as you're not given an item. For these I deduct .42 points from a perfect ten--oh, but Don't Panic, that should be rounded up. I lift my Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster to the memory of Douglas Adams for making such a great game. It is almost as wonderful as the books he wrote.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 09/16/00, Updated 12/02/01