Station case

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Station case
Logo Stationfall (Infocom) .jpg
Studio Infocom
Publisher Infocom
Senior Developer Steve Meretzky
Erstveröffent-
lichung		 April 30, 1987
platform Apple II , Atari 8-Bit , Atari ST , Commodore 64 , Commodore Amiga , Mac OS , MS-DOS , Schneider CPC
Game engine ZIL
genre Text adventure
Game mode Single player
control keyboard
medium diskette
language English
copy protection Enclosure referencing

Stationfall is a text adventure of the US development studio Infocom from the year 1987. The sci-fi adventure is the successor of the also of Steve Meretzky written Planetfall from the year 1983rd

action

The player is a member of the "Stellar Patrol", a military organization of the "Third Galactic Union", an association of the interstellar empires Tremain and Gallium. After the events in Planetfall , he was promoted from Ensign 7th Class to Lieutenant 1st Class. This doesn't make his life exciting: At the start of the game he is on his way to a space station on a fully automatically controlled space freighter to pick up a load of "application forms for application forms for black loose-leaf binders for forms for space patrol service regulations". Together with his Sidekick Floyd known from Planetfall , a reasonably intelligent and very headstrong robot, the player reaches the space station, which is free of any life except for an ostrich and a strange, balloon-like creature from the star system of the Arktur . There is no trace of the station's crew, but the player is attacked by standard peaceful welding robots. In the course of the game it turns out that all the machines on the space station are trying to kill the player, including the initially friendly, additional robot Plato, who gradually becomes more hostile to the player over the course of the game and finally when attempting the Killing player, being turned off by Floyd. The cause of all evil turns out to be a pyramid-shaped artifact that makes all machines in its vicinity act hostile to humans, killing the crew of the space station and finally taking control of Floyd. In order to win the game, the player must first take out Floyd and then destroy the artifact.

Game principle and technology

Game scene

Stationfall 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 end of the previous game Planetfall allows for a continuation in terms of content. It is not known whether the author Meretzky planned one in 1983; However, his employer Infocom initially put him on other projects, such as a follow-up game to Enchanter and as support for Douglas Adams for the creation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy . After the takeover of Infocom by Activision , the studio came under increasing pressure in 1986 to exploit its licenses. Two lucrative brands were Zork and Planetfall . Brian Moriarty started designing Beyond Zork while Meretzky started work on Stationfall . Like its predecessor, Planetfall, the name Stationfall is a suitcase word . "Fall" comes from "Landfall" (German: landing), "Station" stands for the space station in which most of the game takes place. For author Meretzky it was the sixth title written for Infocom.

As enclosures ("Feelies"), Stationfall contained detailed plans of the space station in which the game is played, three application forms satirizing an excessive bureaucracy, and a patch that identifies the wearer as a first class lieutenant. These supplements are referenced in the game and therefore represent copy protection.

In 1989 Avon Books published a novel about the game, written by the American science fiction author Arthur Byron Cover .

reception

Contemporary reviews have been almost entirely positive. The American Antic Magazine positively emphasized the humor of the game and the clever referencing of the previous Infocom works. Reviewer Harvey Bernstein came to the conclusion that Stationfall is a game "full of challenges, humor and tension". Analog Computing magazine noted "entertaining and logical puzzles" and found that the NPC duo Floyd and Plato were "probably the best comedy team in the history of interactive fiction ". The memory-related repetitive behavior of the Floyd robot was noted negatively in the magazine. Computer Gaming World called the story "disturbing" in parts, but praised the pointed humor of the game and found it overall as "fascinating".

In 2015, the ludologist Jimmy Maher assessed retrospectively in an analysis of the game that Meretzky's “talent for flawless game design and his willingness to undermine genre conventions from behind” emerged as clearly in no other game as in Stationfall . The game designer is still not an impressive writer, but has perfected his technique compared to the previous game: “Meretzky knows exactly what he is doing at every moment of the game and has complete control over his creative possibilities: All the individual parts (of the game) fit together seamlessly together. ”Maher pointed out that the game completely changed its character during its course: It began as a light-hearted comedy, which gradually became dark and dark through knowledge of the whereabouts of the station crew and the gradual changes in how the robots deal with the player Subversive tones mixed until Stationfall mutated into a downright horror game, when the player walked alone through the corridors of the station towards the end, always on the lookout for possible attacks by his former robot companion. Maher noted that Meretzky had recycled countless details from Planetfall , which in Stationfall, in addition to formal parallels , makes the spirit of a follow-up game. He criticized the fact that the game had several situations in which it could be put into an unsolvable state.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Filfre.net: Station case. Retrieved February 10, 2019 .
  2. ^ Arthur Byron Cover: Station Case . Avon Books, New York 1989, ISBN 0-380-75387-1 .
  3. ↑ Harvey Bernstein: Stationfall, Lurking Horror, Moonmist . In: Antic . 6, No. 10, February 1988, p. 54. (PDF, 87 MB)
  4. ↑ Steve Panak: Panak Strikes! . In: Analog Computing . No. 59, April 1988, p. 55.
  5. ↑ Charles Ardai: Titans of the Computer Gaming World . In: Computer Gaming World . No. 39, August 1987, p. 47. (PDF, 23 MB)