"Attention Infocom Bigwigs: Do you have a permit to produce a game that is so far below your potential?"

The first game Douglas Adams designed, Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was enough of a success(to put it mildly) that Infocom called him back for more and hyped the game considerably. He threw in plenty of puns and annoying characters, along with some features never seen before in an Infocom text adventures. Yet it didn't work. Between the game's indecision(is it American or English?) and the overplayed puns, the high from buying a long-hyped product and the entertaining package materials(a triplicate form and a copy of Popular Paranoia with conspiracy theories for copy protection) wore off quickly.

Perhaps no other game starts out with you filling in a form. You'll need it for the game's records, in order to fill out more forms later, which gets a bit less funny in practice despite the random snide comments as you fill in fields in random order. Once this task is complete, you're dumped in your home with $1 in your pocket, an empty stomach, a flight that leaves in the afternoon, and a ringing doorbell for a package that's not yours but is the least of your worries. There's a lot wrong, but most crushing to Infocom fans is how the score in the top right is replaced by blood pressure, which increases during annoying events or when you type in a bad command, resulting in a ruptured blood vessel. The statuses are amusing, but the rank and points(Victim until you total a paltry 21, half of 42) are bad things. The puzzles themselves alternate between infuriatingly random or appallingly arbitrary rules you must decode. Are you facing random stuff or quasi-random? It's tough to tell, and although this reflects annoyance with bureaucracy('Who can I blame for this?') I didn't find it amusing tacked on to the waiting around from the Apple loading all the time.

The first part of the game, your street(which has convenient addresses close to your own. If you mention you're at 1060 West Addison, other locations are 1059, 1061, etc.,) contains a conglomeration of oddballs and bureaucracies. In each one you'll need to find some mail or work through a tedious form, eventually getting a positive bank balance. Then it's off to the airport, with the predictable long lines and an airplane that seems as though it will leave without you. After the airplane trip over the Zalagasan jungle the game gets a bit too weird, and despite the ending explaining what has happened throughout the game, the staple of jokes about airlines and their food(you almost expect the game to take place at Christmas, with you receiving a fruitcake) are, for Douglas Adams, slumming.

Bureaucracy tries to appeal to you through the usual five senses, but mostly everything can be presented as a rehash of HHGG, which makes efforts such as allowing you to play with a personal computer and even log into a network and even use basic programming commands seem part of the effort and not part of the joke. The bad restaurant and airline food(one of which echoes a non-story Adams told far too often to reviewers) will never match the pub cheeseburger or Advanced Tea Substitute. Other reduxes of HHGG work out better but still leave the game feeling derivative(airport intercom mentions someone's dropped No Tea.) The computer and form interfaces are impressive but ultimately awkward(just as Adams's foray into discussing computers was cramped in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency,) and throughout the game there are sprinklings of bad music(100 string orchestra playing 'Surfin' USA') and modern cultural references, which are what I suspect drags Bureaucracy down. It is too here-and-now, but its now will always be the eighties, referencing famous people or phrases or things(Boysenberry personal computer, for instance) rather than erroneous tendencies of the time, and its here is not clear either; constant English and American cultural references mix each other up(cheque, dollar bills, Sir Laurence Olivier, US Excess card) and ruin the attempt at an Everyplace feel. Then of course there are more beeps than usual, going a bit heavy on the annoyance thing. Like Bureaucracy, there's no way around them, so don't go making a typo, but you shouldn't have a problem if you don't cause any. Geddit?

The game uses NPC's pretty well, such as the nerd, who spews one-liners you just have to sit through, and the interactions between you, the paranoid, and the weirdo also work out well. But if you are looking for consistent gags as in HHGG, the rule of thumb is that while HHGG's gags may feel universal and make sense once you see them, Bureaucracy's have already been done and you leave feeling you could've thought of them. With HHGG, you get the feeling that anybody could describe the story line and be hilarious, but with Bureaucracy, only Dynamic Speakers(the sort who can work their way up in a Bureaucracy and are excellent at avoiding details and analysis) could make the game seem exciting. Given the too-snappy ending that is already discussed in the manual, this whole shaggy dog story doesn't seem worthwhile unless you bring it up in one window and have a walkthrough open in another. The greatest twinge of genuine irony I remember relating to this game is how hard it was to track down a working copy of it over the 'Net and the false leads I followed, until I gave up and discovered it in an unrelated search a half-hour later. Bureaucracy stretched the boundaries of what a text adventure is and thus widened Infocom's horizons, but remember what happened when they went further and tried to develop spreadsheets.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 09/22/00, Updated 03/13/02