Suspended

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Suspended
Logo Suspended (Infocom) .jpg
Studio Infocom
Publisher Infocom
Senior Developer Michael Berlyn
Erstveröffent-
lichung		 February 22, 1983
platform Apple II , Atari 8-Bit , Atari ST , Commodore 64 , Commodore Amiga , Commodore Plus / 4 , iOS , Mac OS , MS-DOS , Schneider CPC , TRS-80 , TI-99 / 4A
Game engine ZIL
genre Science fiction
Game mode Single player
control keyboard
medium diskette
language English
Current version Release 8
copy protection Feelies

Suspended (English for hooked, latched is) a science fiction text adventure from Infocom from the year 1983rd

action

The player is in an artificially induced deep sleep that normally lasts 500 years. It lies in a facility beneath the surface of the human-inhabited planet Contra. He is connected to the vital systems and infrastructure of the planet through his consciousness. The control of the systems such. B. the traffic or the weather is normally automatic, and the controlling person is only woken up by the system in the event of an emergency. Such an emergency occurs at the beginning of the game and the player wakes up. The control station in which he is located was badly damaged by earthquakes. For lack of knowledge of the earthquakes, the inhabitants of the planet assume that the controlling unit (the player) has lost its mind and is trying to destroy the planet. It is the player's task to repair the facility around him before a delegation sent from Earth arrives to kill him. During the repair work, the planet supplied by the facility is plagued by several escalating crises, which the player must solve using his robots.

The aim of the game is to save the planet Contra. The success is not a binary one, rather the degree of success is measured by the number of surviving people. If the player saves the planet but lets too many people die, the survivors will still storm the station. Only a large number of survivors enables an ending in which the player is rewarded with a property on earth and an unlimited bank account. In contrast to most other games in the genre, Suspended has a certain replay value .

Game principle and technology

Suspended is a text adventure, which means there are no graphic elements. Environment and events are displayed as screen text and the player's actions are also entered as text via the keyboard. The parser of Suspended understands about 700 words, about as many as the parser of Zork dominated.

At the time of publication, the game came up with a narrative innovation: the player does not act himself, as he is fixed within the facility surrounding him. Rather, he controls six robots distributed throughout the facility, all of which have different perception sensors and special abilities. The goal of the game must be achieved by using and combining these robots and their special abilities. The robots are in detail:

  1. Iris - Is the only robot equipped with cameras and can thus provide descriptions of rooms and objects. Can only move in the area around the Central Chamber. At the beginning of the game, Iris is defective and must first be repaired.
  2. Whiz - Mainly used as an interface for communication with the central library computer.
  3. Waldo - robots for physical manipulations, equipped with several artificial extremities. Is needed for repair work. Has a sonar and can therefore provide information about the environment based on echolocation .
  4. Auda - Has multiple microphones and provides information about acoustic signals and vibrations in the area.
  5. Poet - diagnostic robot that can measure electrical circuits. To the chagrin of the player, it provides very cryptic diagnostic messages.
  6. Sensa - Measures magnetic waves and photon emissions and provides corresponding evaluations.

Production notes

The Suspended project started at Applefest 1982, the predecessor of Macworld - iWorld . There Marc Blank, one of the founders and managing directors of Infocom, met Michael Berlyn , author of three science fiction novels to date and managing director and main author of the small software company Sentient Software, for which he had written two text adventures. Blank was looking for a distinguished author; Berlyn felt that his artistic freedom was limited by the technical limitations of his parser. Blank hired Berlyn for Suspended as a freelancer, but the latter soon moved from Colorado to Boston for organizational reasons and became a permanent Infocom writer. The working title of the game was suspension .

With the help of the programming language Zork Implementation Language ( ZIL ) designed by Joel Berez and Marc Blank , Infocom had developed the best parser of its time. For Suspended , however, extensive modifications were necessary in order to implement Berlyn's design concept. Dave Lebling had programmed a robot for Zork II that could be given simple instructions, and Marc Blank had experimented with a dynamic game world in Deadline . In Suspended , however, six NPCs had to act on the basis of complex player inputs, sometimes at the same time or even cooperating, while the game world itself was constantly changing. The requirements were successfully implemented, but were never needed again in this complexity in the 24 subsequent Infocom games running in the Z-machine .

As enclosures ("Feelies"), the early publications of Suspended contained a map of the facility and six rubber chips for the six robots so that their current whereabouts could be reproduced on the map. Since the game renounced the naming of available room exits, this card actually represented a copy protection, since only with it one could keep an overview of what was happening. Furthermore, some documents that were supposed to illustrate the background story were enclosed.

Commercially, despite its bulky subject matter , Suspended was a huge hit with over 100,000 units sold.

In 2012, Suspended was made available to mobile devices with iOS operating systems by the then rights holder Activision as part of the compilation Lost Treasures of Infocom . In 2019, the source code of the game was published on the software development repository GitHub .

reception

reviews
publication Rating
Zzap! 64 91%

Suspended received almost consistently positive reviews from the trade press. Were praised u. a. the parser, the loving character design of the six robots and the built-in help system. It was criticized that the lack of basic functions (seeing, grasping) of some robots cause frustration. The zzap! 64 magazine praised atmosphere and addiction potential of the game and held on an example that one could panicked slightly when the planet kollabiere around you in the game's life-support system. The author and ludologist Jimmy Maher drew content- related parallels between suspended and cooperative board games such as Pandemie , which are formally reinforced by the Feelies, especially the card and the rubber chips. Maher also analyzed that Suspended strayed more from the conventions of text adventure than any other game before; the connection between the player and alter ego in the game world is completely cut, and Suspended does without traditional storytelling. Maher criticizes the dynamic gameplay approach as not being sufficiently extensive; Ultimately, the game follows a rigid script, and only the timing of certain events (catastrophes on the planet) depends on the skill of the player. For the specialist magazine SPAG , interactive fiction author Graeme Cree stated as a reviewer in a retrospective that Suspended is a polarizing game that "speaks to one part (the player) but makes the other angry"; it can only be overcome by repeatedly failing in the game and learning from previous mistakes for further attempts. He assessed that Suspended was ultimately not a text adventure at all, but a proto-simulation game, appeared at a time when technology did not yet make real simulation games possible. As a target group, Cree identified "frustrated would-be air traffic controllers" who would find fun in controlling widely ramified events from a central point.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Resonant.org: Suspended Fact Sheet. Retrieved March 2, 2017 .
  2. ↑ a b c Filfre.net: Suspended. Retrieved March 2, 2017 .
  3. ↑ Mobygames.com: Suspended. Retrieved March 2, 2017 .
  4. ↑ GitHub.com: Suspended by Mike Berlyn (Infocom). Retrieved April 18, 2019 .
  5. ↑ a b Zzap! 64 # 41, September 1988, p. 47: Suspended. Retrieved February 1, 2017 .
  6. ↑ David P. Stone: Suspended Review, in: Computer Gaming World, Vol. 3 No. 4, p. 10ff.
  7. ↑ SPAG # 8, February 1996: Suspended. Retrieved March 2, 2017 .