[net.micro.cbm] Review: Deadline

doug@terak.UUCP (Doug Pardee) (02/13/85)

Game review:
Deadline (Infocom)  C-64 disk  list:$40   discount:$25?
	(Commodore) C-64 disk  list:$20?  discount:$13
    One player

Overall grade: B (Commodore),    probably A- (Infocom)

A wealthy industrialist has been found dead, an apparent suicide,
locked in his study.  The law firm handling his will has persuaded
the police to assign you to take one day to investigate further.
Your job -- prove that it was murder, and prove means, motive, and
opportunity for your suspect, before the day is out.

This is an all-text adventure, one of the earliest in the Infocom
series of such adventures.  Infocom has gained quite a reputation
from this adventure series, and rightly so.  Still, I would take
issue with those who claim that the command parser is well advanced
beyond the old 2-word verb&object adventure parsers.  Perhaps Infocom
has an improved parser in later adventures, but the parser used in
Deadline is fairly ordinary.  I don't consider ignoring noise words like
"the" and recognizing word pairs as verbs ("pick up") to be any great
advance.

Nor do I consider the fairly lengthy descriptions to be any great
advance.  It is a natural consequence of using disk storage for the
descriptions rather than RAM.  You have to get used to the delay
while the program reads a description or response to a question
off of the >slow< 1541.

What I do consider an advance, though, is the intricacy of the time
element.  You have to be in the right place at the right time.
In addition, the other characters react (to some extent) to your
questioning, possibly doing things that they wouldn't have done had
you not questioned them.  This intricacy brings home the inherent
difficulties in detective work -- trying to find the person you want
to question, and people destroying evidence while you're busy
questioning someone else.

There are no graphics nor sound effects -- this is an all-text
adventure.  In fact, you might well want to set the border, background,
and cursor color to colors of your liking before you load "Deadline".

Infocom has also gained quite a reputation on its documentation and
packaging.  This is where the version distributed by Commodore is
obviously inferior.  Commodore's documentation is poorly produced.
It's usable once you figure out what's what, but still not too good.
For example, some of the pages are out of order.  Since they aren't
page-numbered, you can get lost pretty easily.  Another example:
one page is a black-and-white photo of the crime scene (you know,
where they've got chalk on the floor showing where the body was
lying).  In the Commodore version, it's printed so badly as to
be virtually useless.  I presume that the Infocom version is better.

The documentation leaves out some information that you expect to
have up front -- like the first names of the characters involved.
It's quite disconcerting when the documentation refers to people
only by last name, but while playing the game the characters are
just as likely to use first names as last and you don't know whom
they are talking about.  I don't know if the Infocom version
addresses this or not.

Another little detail:  When I thought I was done, a coworker
who was playing Deadline on his IBM-PC suggested that I wasn't.
Sure enough.  Word to the wise:  do not accept any conclusion to
the case unless you have been able to prove means, motive, and
opportunity and have the suspect *arrested*.  There are bogus
endings where you have a confession from the suspect.  That *won't*
do.  The documentation should've said something about this.

My disk drive was starting to go out of alignment when I played
Deadline.  With a program that reads as much data from the disk
as this one, that was a problem.  Occasional garbage text was one
thing, but when I solved the mystery I didn't know if I did or not;
the response was a totally trashed screen followed by a lock-up.
-- 
Doug Pardee -- Terak Corp. -- !{hao,ihnp4,decvax}!noao!terak!doug