Tass Times in Tonetown
| Tass Times in Tonetown | |
|---|---|
| Studio | Interplay |
| Publisher | Activision |
| Senior Developer | Michael Berlyn |
| composer | Russell Lieblich, David Warhol |
| Erstveröffent- lichung |
1986 |
| platform | Amiga , Apple II , Apple IIgs , Atari ST , C64 , Macintosh , PC Booter |
| Game engine | ADVENT |
| genre | Adventure |
| medium | diskette |
| language | English |
Tass Times in Tonetown is a hybrid of text and graphics adventure , which was produced in 1986 by the US development studio Interplay and published by the publisher Activision for various PCs and home computers . The game was one of the first adventure games to use a graphical user interface.
action
The player takes on the role of a boy whose grandfather Gramps invented a device that turns his dreams into reality in a parallel world. A being from this parallel world, Franklin Snarl, succeeds in making the journey through the device into the real world, from where he takes Gramps into his world. There he puts the grandfather into a permanent sleep in order to secure his own existence by making Gramps dream permanently. At the beginning of the game, the player is looking for the same in his grandfather's apartment, where he inadvertently activates the invention of the disappeared, the most striking feature of which is a large, vertically mounted, tire-like metal circle. Spot, the player's dog, jumps through the metal circle and disappears into the parallel world; the player travels after him. He ends up in the town of Tonetown, where his dog Spot can speak, bears the name "Ennio the Legend", is the editor of the Tonetown Times newspaper and introduces the player to the bizarre parallel world in which picks represent the valid currency. It turns out that Gramps is being held captive in a remote tower by Snarl. The player frees him and goes with Gramps and Ennio to Snarl's mansion, where the three defeat Snarl together by teleporting him into the "real" world through Gramps machine.
Game principle and technology
Tass Times in Tonetown is a text adventure, which means that surroundings and events are displayed as screen text and the visualization is largely up to the player's imagination. In contrast to classic text adventures, which have no graphic decoration whatsoever, Tass Times in Tonetown offers a picture of the respective environment and a point-and-click interface with which simple commands can be created with the mouse or joystick . For complex control commands , however, the player still has to use the text parser . The screen is divided into four areas. The upper left quarter is reserved for images of the environment, some of which are animated , the icons that symbolize the commands for action control are in the upper right quarter. Objects in the picture can be clicked to control actions. In the lower third, the game is shown in text form; there the player can also enter commands by hand. Between the areas is a graphic representation of the player's inventory; everything that he carries with him and can apply to the game world is shown in the form of a pictogram .
Production notes
Tass Times in Tonetown is Interplay's fourth and final adventure game produced by Brian Fargo . Fargo founded Interplay in 1983 after the video game crash that killed his old employer, Boone Corporation. He initially relied on the adventure genre and, together with Michael Cranford, developed an engine called ADVENT , which was gradually further developed. The predecessors of Tass Times in Tonetown were Mindshadow (1984), The Tracer Sanction (1984) and Borrowed Time (1985). From a technical point of view, for Tass Times in Tonetown , the commands displayed as text were replaced by icons compared to their "predecessors" and the images of the game environment were made interactive. Since Fargo realized that neither he nor any of his employees was a suitable writer for the text and content-heavy adventure games, he hired freelancers for the scripts. In the case of Tass Times in Tonetown , it was Michael Berlyn with his consulting firm Brainwave Creations. Berlyn previously wrote text adventures for Penguin Software and Infocom . For Tass Times in Tonetown , Fargo gave him creative freedom; Berlyn's wife Muffy also wrote the script.
The working title of the game during the development process was Ennio: The Legend Begins . The character Ennio was modeled after a dog from the Berlyn neighborhood; the name "Ennio" is borrowed from the film composer Ennio Morricone . The parallel world represented by the city of Tonetown is in some forms a satire on the pop culture of the 1980s. In order to distinguish it clearly from the real world, Berlyn developed a rudimentary dialect from terms that are consistently used in Tonetown instead of English terms . The "Tass" from the title of the game stands for "cool" or "casual" in Tonetown slang, for example. The British magazine Zzap! 64 drew comparisons with the Newspeak from George Orwell's novel 1984 . The original game was accompanied by a printed edition of the fictional daily newspaper Tonetown Times , which reported on daily events in the parallel world, ensured additional immersion in the game world and acted as copy protection through referencing in the game . Tass Times in Tonetown was the first game released for the Apple IIgs , released in September 1986 .
After Tass Times in Tonetown , Fargo broke with the adventure genre and devoted himself primarily to his financially very successful Bard's Tale - RPG series. Michael Berlyn founded the development studio Eidetic in the 1990s. a. was responsible for the PlayStation game series Siphon Filter .
reception
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Contemporary reviews were generally very positive about the game's groundbreaking technology and the fresh setting. The compute! Magazine saw the sum of the "superb" graphics of the Amiga version and the unusual setting as a "fascinating new game". UK magazine Zzap! 64 described the game as "insane, intelligent, allegorical , fun and addicting". Boris Schneider pointed out for Happy Computer that the story touches on the genres of science fiction , fantasy and crime , but still represents something completely new. He praised the technical implementation of the C64 version which, in contrast to the versions for Atari ST and Amiga, makes full use of the hardware. Schneider criticized the control system, which only made it possible to use the mouse or joystick. Happy Computer editor Gregor Neumann also criticized the control icons, which are "clumsy" in design and cannot be grasped intuitively. In a retrospective of the Amiga Joker, Max Magenauer certified that the parser of the game was "approximately Infocom quality". He praised the "revolutionary controls", the "funny presentation" and the "crazy story" of the game and only criticized the fact that the gameplay seemed "slightly antiquated" seven years after publication. In general, Tass Times in Tonetown is rated significantly more negatively in retrospectives. The online magazine Hardcore Gaming 101 , for example, classifies Tass Times in Tonetown as a link between the text adventures that were prevalent up until then and the graphic adventures that became increasingly important from 1986 onwards. The magazine describes the game as a "cult classic", but aims primarily at the technical pioneering role and the unusual setting, because it criticizes the conspicuous emptiness of the game world away from the city of Tonetown and a generic plot. The interface has also been criticized: some of the icons have little meaning or need to be supplemented with manual text input after clicking, and the window for text output is too small. Ultimately, Hardcore Gaming criticizes writer Berlyn for committing "pretty much every design sin in adventure games of the 1980s," from illogical puzzles to inventory management and dead ends that make the game impossible to win. All in all , Tass Times in Tonetown is full of teething troubles and therefore not the milestone in the evolution of the graphic adventure, as it is sometimes seen in the press. The ludo historian Jimmy Maher also criticized the inadequate concealed gameplay due to technical innovation. In addition to various design flaws and problems with the interface, he pointed out that Berlyn's writing style, analogous to his work for Infocom (including Suspended , Infidel and Cutthroats ), was more functional.
Web links
- Tass Times in Tonetown at MobyGames (English)
- Tass Times in Tonetown in the Interactive Fiction DataBase (IFDB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Filfre.net: Brian Fargo and Interplay. Retrieved August 13, 2017 .
- ↑ MobyGames.com Tass Times in Tonetown Trivia. Retrieved August 13, 2017 .
- ↑ a b HardcoreGaming101.net: Tass Times in Tonetown. Retrieved August 13, 2017 .
- ^ A b c White Wizard: Tass Times in Tonetown . In: Zzap! 64 . November 1986, p. 55.
- ↑ Apple2.org.za: Tass Times in Tonwtown. Retrieved August 13, 2017 .
- ^ A b Max Magenauer: Tass Times in Tonetown . In: Amiga Joker . April 1993, p. 97.
- ↑ Martina Strack: No place for tourists . In: ASM . February 1987, p. 64.
- ↑ a b Boris Schneider : Tass Times in Tonetown . In: Happy Computer special issue . No. 17, 1987, p. 72.
- ^ A Great Year for Games . In: Compute! Magazines . No. 77, October 1986, p. 19.