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	Title: (Games for Two... or Ten) Deadline
	Author: Phil Wiswell
	Source: Family Computing, v1(4)
	Date: December 1983
	Transcription by Steve Derby
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**Deadline** *by Infocom. available for Apple II/II
plus/IIe/III, Atari 400/800/1200XL (disk),
$39.95; Commodore 64, IBM PC, Osborne, TI-99/4A
(disk), S49.95.*

*Deadline* is an interactive murder mystery
whose object is to accuse the correct suspect
with enough hard evidence by nightfall (a 12-
hour game-time deadline). As the detective, you
are provided with much more than a disk — you
also get a lengthy interview with the characters,
including the widow of the deceased, a
police memo and lab report, a coroner's report,
a letter from the crime scene, and a bag of
tablets found near the body. And because you
will never solve this crime without serious
study of all the evidence off screen as well as
on, the experience feels very real.

This is an excellent puzzle requiring logical
thinking and clever, sometimes intuitive,
deductions, which makes solving the case easier
with more than one player. The entire game
consists of text — there are no graphics on
screen — but it's great text! Like other Infocom
games. *Deadline* has a vocabulary of more
than 600 words it can understand, most of
which you have to discover by trial and error.
Figuring out which words work is half the fun.

Using short or complex sentences you can
walk anywhere in the house, examine anything
you find (and send it to the lab for fingerprint
ing), and talk to the many suspects, some of
whom hold valuable information. There are
many possibilities to explore, and the game,
like real life, doesn't wait for you to stumble on
clues. If you aren't in the right place at the
right time asking the right question, too bad —
you'll have to look for the answer elsewhere!