
Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Amiga, Infocom
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3/10
Summary
While The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy can’t be faulted when it comes to being faithful to the source material, that’s also its biggest downfall. If you’re not a fan of the original works, you’ll struggle with the humour and have almost no chance with the puzzles in the game. Add to that the repetitive nature of most of them, and this is sadly one for die-hard Hitch Hiker’s fans only.
User Review
( votes)My first introduction to the Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy was when I was at school. Like a lot my age, I first saw the 1981 BBC TV series without realising that it was based on the original radio series produced a few years earlier. Having loved the show, I quickly dived into the first couple of books (which eventually became a six-part trilogy) and finally tracked down the radio series on cassette which I’ve still got to this day.
It wasn’t for everyone, but Douglas Adams created – for me and many of its fans – a timeless classic that still holds up today almost 50 years after it was first broadcast. It was inevitable that a game of some sort was going to be released and legendary interactive fiction (that’s text adventures to mere mortals like you and me!) publishers Infocom stepped in…
What Is Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy?
If you’ve never seen, read or heard of HHGTTG before, it’s a strange hybrid of sci-fi, comedy (although not laugh-out-loud style humour that you find in shows like Red Dwarf) and subtle social commentary. Taking control of Arthur Dent, a typically average human, he awakens to find his home is about to be demolished to make way for a bypass. With all attempts to save his house failing, he’s met by his rather strange friend Ford Prefect and from that moment his life is going to change forever.
Ford reveals that he is in fact an alien and that the Earth itself is about to be destroyed and they only have a few minutes to prepare for an escape. Managing to just in time, they hitch a lift on a Vogon spaceship (who are the ones responsible for destroying the Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass, no less) and from there it’s one adventure through space after another. Still in his PJs, it’s just Arthur, Ford and a trusty intergalactic encyclopedia to help him along the way…
Getting Started
As with most text adventures, Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is narrative driven and you play from Arthur Dent’s perspective. Everything is described as seen from his point of view and you interact by typing in short commands, typically 2-4 words long. Most of the common commands used in text adventures are there or are easy to figure out during play, although there are a few strangely enough that the interpreter doesn’t seem to understand.
Solving puzzles will earn you points towards and overall score (displayed at the top of the screen) and the number of moves you have taken is also tracked. The latter is important as some actions in the story progress independently of whatever you do so you need to think and act quickly.
Race Against The Clock?
While there’s no timer as such, your moves are counted as I just mentioned. This plays a critical part throughout the game as key events progress each time you make a move. This can be anything from moving from one location to another, picking an object up, or even looking in your inventory so you need to be aware of these time-sensitive elements of the plot. For a game that is dependent on its interpreter being able to understand what the player wants and is trying to do, this seems to be a strange gameplay mechanic to include, especially when common words and phrases aren’t in the game’s vocabulary.
For me, text adventures are all about solving puzzles and being able to play at a casual pace taking as much time as possible rather than having to worry if I’m going to run out of moves before it’s game over. While I appreciate that there are elements of the original story do have an aspect of threat and tension, that doesn’t translate well to a non-action title where a large part of the challenge for the player is trying to figure out the words to use to solve a problem and not just the problem itself.
Groundhog Day
One thing that I found incredibly frustrating was the number of “puzzles” that were solved through repetition. Right at the start of the game, there’s one fundamental problem that can only be solved by typing WAIT no fewer than six times in a row – three to trigger one story event, and three more to solve the puzzle. There are other puzzles that are encountered during the game that also require continued repetition, but again there’s no indication as to how many times you need to do something. Too few times and you won’t complete the task, too many and you could even end up being killed and it’s game over!
Changing The Goalposts
It’s not just the repetition in some of the puzzles that I found annoying, but others that seemed to be never ending. When you’re trying to get the all-important Babel Fish that you need throughout the game (for the uninitiated, a small fish you place in your ear that will automatically translate any language that you hear!) at first it seems like a fairly straightforward puzzle to solve.
However, that soon proves not to be the case and needs a chain of puzzles to be solved before you can finally get it, but with the narrative text giving no clues to what you need to do. Certainly the use of one object with the second puzzle doesn’t even mention one thing you need to interact with in the environment! Puzzles like this, and others that seem to defy logic stop the game from being challenging and fun and make it more a case of guesswork and luck.
Presentation
As a text adventure, there’s nothing to speak of when it comes to graphics or sound with Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. Unlike other publishers, Infocom made the conscious decision to keep their games text only so they could have complex parsers and more descriptive text instead. This isn’t a problem as I’d been used to playing games like this right since I first played Adventureland on the Vic 20. However, what lets this down is how basic everything looks.
The game opens up and runs in a standard Amiga window, using the default font and colour scheme and frankly there’s nothing to distinguish it from an Amiga system information window, let alone anything else. Even if it ran in full screen – at least something simple like changing the colour to a high contrast scheme would have been something of an improvement. If Adventure International could do it for the Commodore 16 conversion of The Incredible Hulk, there’s no reason why this shouldn’t look better.
For The Fans
I can’t deny that this hasn’t been crafted with care and passion for the books and radio dramas. The adaptation of the story and humour throughout has clearly been written by Adams himself and Infocom’s Steve Meretzky who wrote the actual game certainly knows how to deliver the goods when it comes to writing a rock solid adventure. But the combination here simply doesn’t work.
Getting the balance right for any licensed game isn’t easy, but with arcade games it’s probably easier when a lot are designed as generic platform or action titles. But when the plot of a movie, book or TV show is central to the game itself as it is here with Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy that sadly makes it inaccessible to all but the most devoted of its loyal fanbase.
And that’s probably the game’s biggest drawback. Even as a huge fan, there were some scenes I couldn’t quite remember verbatim and it meant I was left scratching my head when it came to solving puzzles. So if I struggled, I dread to think how a non-fan would cope with the game. To be honest, I don’t think they would have had a chance and it’s such a shame that this was made to be so alienating rather that trying to draw new fans in.
Overall
I really wanted to enjoy playing this, I honestly did. But no matter how strong my love of the Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is, I just couldn’t get past the inherent flaws in this interactive adaptation. I can’t fault the writing, but it’s the execution that lets it down. Add to that the frustration of repeated player deaths thanks to the unforgiving timer and it’s one I found a struggle to stick with.
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