[Retro Review] Babel

By: Bill Stiteler

Genre: Text Adventure

Format: Shareware

Developer: Ian Finley, Illuminated Designs

Minimum Requirements: System 7

Network Feature: No

3Dfx Support: What do you think?

Retail Price: $5.00

Availability: Out Now

My friend Dale got me a Sony Playstation, basically so I could play Lunar: Silver Star Story. It's a funky Japanese RPG adventure that I was having fun with, but as often happens, I got stuck. So I hopped on the internet to look up a hint. I came across a Lunar FAQ, and the first question on it was "How can you play a game that is only 2D?"

I like to believe this really is a frequently asked question, but then, I like feeling superior to people. I like to think that there are people out there who think that a game's quality is determined by its hardware requirements and who also wonder why Julia Roberts hasn't been nominated for best actress. I'd like to sit these clowns down with a copy of Vanya on 42nd Street and watch their heads explode as I tell them that people used to play games that were nothing but text.

Set the Waybac for the early 1980s, Sherman, before we knew what a Megahertz was, and a little company named Infocom ruled home computer entertainment with "interactive fiction." A buzzword today, but we had it twenty years ago, Skippy. The flagship, Zork, still haunts me; how is it I can frag Necris from across the room, but I could never defeat the man with the "lean and hungry look?" The fiendishness of the puzzles in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy makes Myst look like, well, Riven, and before Leisure Suit Larry strutted his stuff across our screens, there were the Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

The limitations of the technology only added to the challenge. We're talking about entire games that came on a 5 1/4" floppy, and you'd spend six months playing them, drawing maps that would cover an entire wall. The language recognition was almost ridiculous--whether you were in deep space or the seven seas, everyone seemed to know the phrases "I'm not interested in that" and "I don't know anything about that." But the parser got more sophisticated, as did the stories.

Then, as Charlie Chaplin said, just as they got it right, they stopped making them.

Video killed the text-adventure star, and after trying to add primitive graphics to its rich stories, Infocom got gobbled up, and that's all she wrote. But much like Mac evangelists, there are still those who keep the torch of interactive fiction alive. One such person is Ian Finley of Illuminated Designs, who has just released the latest version of Babel, an interactive fiction adventure available at the Interactive Fiction Archive.

The game is classic interactive fiction--you wake up in a location you don't recognize and have to piece everything together. And while it runs quite a bit shorter than the epics of Infocom (I got through it in one day), all the elements are solid. I was playing in a well-lit office in the middle of the day, but as I made my way through the chilly, deserted hallways of Babel, I found myself getting the creeps. The puzzles weren't especially difficult, but they made sense, and more importantly, served to tell the story. And the story had a nifty gimmick--you have the ability to touch certain objects and see events from the past--which ties everything together.

I can't tell you too much about the game without spoiling a lot of the surprises, but allow me to hammer home that it's solidly written with a lot of atmosphere and characters you'll want to find out more about. As a shareware release, Babel is more of a short story than a novel. But if you register, you get a discount on the upcoming deluxe version, and some "neat freebies." But that's not really what matters, because for 600k of great story, I'll break out my C-64 and tape drive in a sec. But:

> Offer Bill seven CDs of Phantasmagoria?

"I'm not interested in that."

.

October 06, 2008