Starcross
| Starcross | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Infocom |
| Publisher | Infocom |
| Senior Developer | Dave Lebling |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
1982 |
| platform | Apple II , Atari-8-Bit , Atari ST , Commodore 64 , Commodore Amiga , Commodore Plus / 4 , MS-DOS , TRS-80 |
| Game engine | Z-machine |
| genre | Text adventure |
| Game mode | Single player |
| control | keyboard |
| language | English |
| copy protection | Enclosure referencing |
Starcross is a computer game from the US company Infocom from 1982. It belongs to the genre of text adventures ( interactive fiction ).
action
The science fiction story takes place in the solar system in 2186 . As a black hole miner with his spaceship MCS Starcross, the player searches for black holes in the solar asteroid belt , whose energy he taps and stores in order to later sell it for a profit. He meets an extraterrestrial spaceship. The player has to explore the interior of the ship, solve numerous puzzles and make contact with the alien creatures in the spaceship.
Game principle and technology
Starcross is controlled via the keyboard. English-language words and sentences are entered via a parser . The package insert for the adventure contains a letter from a fictional Bureau of Extra-Solar Intelligence with instructions on how to deal with extraterrestrial life forms, as well as a space navigation map and other items useful for the game solution.
Production notes
Starcross has no graphics and no sound. The adventure was developed on the basis of the Z-machine ; the implementation took place for the C 64 , Plus / 4 , DOS , Atari-8-Bit , Atari ST , Amiga , TRS-80 and Apple II . Dave Lebling was the author and programmer .
In 2019, the source code of the game was published on the software development repository GitHub .
reception
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The British magazine Zzap! 64 assigned the game to the genre of hard science fiction and saw content parallels to the novel Rendezvous mit 31/439 by Arthur C. Clarke . The magazine praised the narrative technique and the claim of the game, but criticized an unfair riddle that required “academic knowledge” (about the basics of chemistry), as well as some missing convenience functions of the parser. In the early 1980s, an American game reviewer praised Starcross as a captivating text adventure ("one of the most engrossing and engaging adventures I have experienced in a long time.").
Starcross has been treated in studies of computer game history and theory . Maher (2006) stated that Starcross is on the one hand a technically solid, well playable adventure game; on the other hand, however, it had no outstanding significance for the further development of interactive fiction .
Web links
- Starcross at MobyGames (English)
- Starcross in the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ GitHub.com: Starcross by Dave Lebling. Retrieved April 18, 2019 .
- ↑ a b Starcross . In: Zzap! 64 . November 1985, p. 83.
- ↑ Harvey Bernstein: Starcross . In: Antic Amiga Magazine, Vol. 2 No. 5, 8/1983, p. 86.
- ↑ 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 ) .