Border zone
| Border zone | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Infocom |
| Publisher | Infocom |
| Senior Developer | Marc Blank |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
1987 |
| platform | Apple II , Atari ST , Commodore 64 , Mac OS , MS-DOS |
| Game engine | Z-machine |
| genre | Text adventure |
| Game mode | Single player |
| control | keyboard |
| medium | diskette |
| language | English |
| copy protection | Feelies |
Border Zone is a computer game by the US company Infocom from 1987. It belongs to the genre of text adventures .
action
The action in the style of a spy novel takes place at the time of the Cold War in the fictional city of Ostnitz , which lies on the border between the (also fictional) states of Frobnia and Litzenburg . In the three parts of the adventure that can be played in any order, the player takes on the role of an American businessman, a wounded American agent and an American-Soviet double agent. The three parts of the game are linked; For example, in the first part, the player as an American businessman meets the wounded agent, a non-player character , whom he then embodies himself in the second part. The aim of the game is to prevent an attack on the American ambassador in Ostnitz.
Game principle and technology
The text adventure is controlled via the keyboard, with English words, short sentences and more complex sentences being entered using a text parser . In contrast to all other Infocom adventures and the vast majority of other text adventures, Border Zone is played in real time , i. That is, the game continues even if the player does not make any entries. Since players and the trade press rejected this creative novelty despite a built-in pause function, it was a one-off experiment. Border Zone has no graphics and no sound. The technical development basis is the Z-machine ; the implementation took place for the then common home computers Apple II , Atari ST and Commodore 64 as well as for PCs with the operating systems Mac OS and MS-DOS .
Production notes
Marc Blank, one of the founders of Infocom and who last worked there as head of development, had been laid off a year earlier because the company was restructuring due to its high debt burden. Owner Activision urged Infocom to produce more adventure games, but Infocom ran out of money to hire new authors. Blank, who had worked as head of software development at Simon & Schuster after his dismissal and has meanwhile worked on the development of the Philips CD-i for American Interactive Media , hired his old colleagues as a freelancer to develop his vision of a text adventure to be realized in real time.
Although all other Infocom text adventures were published for the Amiga, Border Zone was not offered for this popular home computer, although no development work would have been necessary because of the cross-system functionality of the Z-machine. The game packaging contained so-called "Feelies", objects made for the game that are supposed to make the game world more tangible. In the case of Border Zone , these were a Frobnia travel guide, a map of the border region between Frobnia and Litzenburg, a business card from a bookseller in Litzenburg, a matchbook and a train schedule for the "Frobnia National Railway", which was referenced in the game and thus represented copy protection .
In 2019, the source code of the game was published on the software development repository GitHub .
reception
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In a review of New York Magazine in 1987, Border Zone was characterized as an exciting text adventure with stylistic elements by Alfred Hitchcock , Ian Fleming and John le Carré . An investigation into computer game history and theory from 2006 praised both the technically convincing game and the well-written plot. On the other hand, the "real-time" style of play was criticized by Border Zone, which was an interesting experiment , but ultimately unsuitable for text adventures ( interactive fiction ). For the German magazine Power Play , Anatol Locker praised the atmosphere of the game, which "John le Carré or John Forsyth (sic) (...) couldn't (could) have described better". But he criticized the low level of difficulty and the small size of the game. Co-reviewer Boris Schneider-Johne emphasized the superiority of Infocom over competing companies in the adventure genre, but negatively noted that the puzzles were not very densely packed. For the influential Computer Gaming World , the reviewer rated Scorpia Border Zone as "disappointing" and "one of Infocom's weakest games". Although she diagnosed a relationship with the espionage novels by Edward Phillips Oppenheim , she criticized gross logic gaps when comparing the three subgames; Success or failure in one of the parts of the game would have no effect on the other parts, which makes no sense, since the three stories run parallel and interwoven. Scorpia also criticized the linearity of the game. The US magazine PC Magazine drew comparisons with the spy novels by John le Carré. Reviewer Gus Venditto praised the help function integrated into the game, the lack of which is a shortcoming in other games of the genre and which is "long overdue".
Web links
- Border Zone at MobyGames (English)
- Play Border Zone online at Archive.org
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Jimmy Maher: Let's Tell a Story Together. A History of Interactive Fiction . Senior Honor's Thesis, University of Texas, Dallas 2006 (Chapter 5 The Infocom Canon - Late Experiments in Form: Border Zone and Beyond Zork ) .
- ↑ Filfre.net: Down from the Top. Accessed May 1, 2019 .
- ↑ Filfre.net: Border tone. Accessed May 1, 2019 .
- ↑ GitHub.com: Border Zone, by Marc Blank (Infocom). Accessed May 1, 2019 .
- ↑ a b Power Play 2/1987, p. 74: Border Zone. Retrieved February 1, 2017 .
- ↑ Phoebe Hoban: From Frobnia with Love . In: New York Magazine, December 7, 1987, issue, p. 44.
- ↑ Computer Gaming World # 43, January 1988, p. 20: Border Zone. Retrieved February 25, 2017 . (PDF, 22.3 mb)
- ↑ Gus Venditto: The Leading Role in a Spy Thriller: Border Zone Presents Three Possible Missions . In: PC Magazine . March 1988, p. 374.