Suspect (computer game)
| Suspect | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Infocom |
| Publisher | Infocom |
| Senior Developer | Dave Lebling |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
1984 |
| platform | Amstrad PCW , Apple II , Atari 8-Bit , Atari ST , Commodore 64 , Commodore Amiga , Kaypro II, Macintosh , MS-DOS , Schneider CPC |
| Game engine | Z-machine |
| genre | Text adventure |
| Game mode | Single player |
| control | keyboard |
| medium | diskette |
| language | English |
| copy protection | Enclosure referencing ("Feelies") |
Suspect is a computer game by the US company Infocom from 1984. It belongs to the genre of text adventures .
action
The plot in the style of a crime story takes place on the property Ashcroft Manor in the fictional town of Rappanoc, Maryland (USA). The player is a reporter for The Washington Representative and is invited to a Halloween masked ball at her home by the wealthy Veronica Ashcroft-Wellman . A short time later, the hostess is dead and the player is suspected of murder because parts of his costume are found on the corpse. He must try to prove his innocence and convict the murderer - one of the other guests at the masked ball.
Game principle and technology
The text adventure is controlled via keyboard. English words and complex English sentences are entered into a text parser . The player must look for evidence of his own innocence and the conviction of the murderer at the Ashcroft Manor estate. The dialogues with the other characters play an important role. There is a time limit for solving the adventure.
Production notes
The adventure has no graphics and no sound. Technically, it was developed on the basis of the Z-machine and implemented for the C 64 , DOS , Atari 8-Bit , Atari ST , Amstrad , Mac OS Amiga and Apple II . The game insert contains several items that will be useful for the game solution, such as a newspaper report on the annual masquerade ball at Ashcroft Manor, an invitation card and a receipt from a costume rental. The game developer is Dave Lebling , who also wrote the first three Zork games (as co-author) for Infocom , Starcross , Spellbreaker and Shogun .
In 2019, the source code of the game was published on the software development repository GitHub .
reception
In the 1980s, the very interesting and varied plot as well as the excellent descriptive texts that could come from a book were recognized in a game review.
In a study on computer game history and theory from 2006, the independence of the non-player characters - an essential feature of "Suspect" - was seen as ambivalent: on the one hand, it would make the game more varied, on the other hand, the interaction of the player with the non- Player characters are also made more difficult by their unpredictable behavior. In addition, due to the limited hardware options in the 1980s, only limited dialog options were available.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ GitHub.com: Suspect, by Dave Lebling (Infocom). Retrieved April 18, 2019 .
- ↑ See M.Kohlen / Heinrich Lenhardt : Witness / Suspect / Deadline . In: Happy Computer special edition 3/1985.
- ↑ See 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 - The Early Mysteries: Deadline, The Witness, and Suspect ) .