<!--
	Title: (Computing at Chaos Manor) Comic Books?
	Author: Jerry Pournelle
	Source: BYTE, v13(6)
	Date: June 1988
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

I like Infocom games -- I really do -- so when I got the latest release from Infocom
I was ready to try it despite the title: "Lane Mastodon vs. the Blubber Men of
Jupiter."

What I had, I soon discovered, isn't a game at all. It's a kind of comic book
with primitive animation. It is not an interactive story; there's only one action
line, one ending, and nothing you can do will change the story at all. The gimmick
is that you can read the comic book from the viewpoint of the hero, the villain, and
subsidiary characters. The idea is to read along until you come to one of the (obvious)
choice points, where you can jump off the track and follow some other character.
You can also run the "projector" backward to a choice point and shift
again.

From time to time, the action is interrupted to let you witness a comic book dialogue
between two critics who have supposedly been watching this mess on a
movie screen. For reasons best known to the designers, these rather unattractive
male cartoon figures aren't wearing any clothes. They say a few meaningless
things about the action so far, and the story continues. The breaks are clearly
intended to make you go to the main character's story line from time to time, and
they're needed, since hero Lane Mastodon is so dumb that only a twit would
want to watch things from his point of view.

The artwork is pretty grim; it's certainly so compared to what real comic
artists are doing now in Marvel Comics and the Watchman series. The story line
might amuse cretin dwarves, though I doubt it; not only is the story implausible,
but it knows that you know that. The notion is to invite you to share the joke. If
you can do that, feel free; you might even enjoy this mess.

I watched this thing through to the end because I was interested in the technique,
but you'd have to pay me money to get me to do it again. In my judgment, Infocom
has come up with the answer to software piracy: a story so dumb that no one in
their right mind would want to steal it.
