Ballyhoo (computer game)
| Ballyhoo | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Infocom |
| Publisher | Infocom |
| Senior Developer | Jeff O'Neill |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
1986 |
| platform | Atari 8-Bit , Atari ST , Commodore 64 , Commodore Amiga , MS-DOS , MSX , Schneider CPC , TRS-80 , TRS-80 CoCo , Mac OS , Apple II , TI-99 / 4A |
| Game engine | Z-machine |
| genre | Text adventure |
| Game mode | Single player |
| control | keyboard |
| medium | diskette |
| language | English |
| copy protection | Enclosure referencing |
Ballyhoo is a computer game by the US company Infocom from 1986. It belongs to the genre of text adventures .
action
The plot with elements of a crime story takes place in a circus environment. The circus director's daughter was kidnapped. The player, a circus goer, tries to free her. Disguised as a clown, he searches the entire circus grounds, collects clues and questions animal tamers, artists and other circus workers.
Game principle and technology
Ballyhoo is a text adventure, which means that the environment and events are displayed as screen text and the visualization is largely up to the player's imagination. The character is controlled via commands that the player enters using the keyboard and that are processed by a parser . The commands are in natural language and allow the game character to interact with his environment. The player can move through the game world, find objects, apply them to the environment or other objects and communicate with NPCs . As the story progresses, more locations in the game world will be unlocked.
Production notes
The text adventure without graphics and sound was developed on the technical basis of the Z-machine and for Atari-8-Bit , Atari ST , C 64 , DOS , Amiga , MSX , Amstrad , TRS-80 , TRS-80 CoCo , Mac OS and Apple II implemented. The game was developed by Jeff O'Neill, who a year later also wrote the Infocom adventure game Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It .
The outer packaging of the game contains some items that are useful for achieving the aim of the game, for example the circus program. These supplements are referenced in the game, which represents copy protection .
reception
In a test report, the computer magazine Happy Computer particularly emphasized the high artificial intelligence of the parser, which is typical for Infocom Adventures, the possibilities for interaction with other characters and the quality of the description texts.
In an investigation into computer game history and theory , the black humor of the texts and the mystery style of the plot were named as characteristics of Ballyhoo. Despite some similarities, however, as with Moonmist , the differences to earlier Infocom mystery adventures such as Suspect , Deadline and The Witness predominate .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Heinrich Lehnhardt: Infocom's Hattrick . In: Happy Computer . August 1986, p. 144.
- ↑ See Nick Montfort: Twisty Little Passages. An Approach to Interactive Fiction , MIT Press 2005, pp. 122, 140.