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	Title: (Reviews) Trinity
	Author: Scott Thomas
	Source: COMPUTE!'s Gazette, v5(3)
	Date: March 1987
	Transcription by Steve Derby
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*Trinity* is the latest in a long line of successful and high-quality text
adventures from Infocom. Infocom has earned an excellent reputation for
"interactive fiction," where the program user becomes the central character in a
fictional story that unfolds as the user reacts to circumstances presented in the
story. *Trinity* follows the Infocom tradition of high quality and excellence, but
is unique to Commodore users in that it is exclusively for the 128 mode of the
Commodore 128 and requires an 80-column monitor. The depth, complexity,
and flexibility of *Trinity* apparently made the program's memory requirements
too large for the Commodore 64. As a 128 owner, 1 was glad to see Infocom's
support of the 128, but *Trinity*'s inability to run on a 40-column monitor
will exclude many 128 owners who have not acquired or upgraded to a monitor
ca pable of displaying 80 columns.

The program comes on a single two-sided disk that will load on a 1541,
1571, or compatible disk drive. Side 1 of the disk is loaded first; you are then
prompted to "flip" the disk over to finish loading the program. Because
Trinity does not take advantage of the double-sided storage capacity of the
1571 disk drive, Commodore 128 owners who have single-sided 1541s will be
able to run the program.

Once the program is loaded, you are thrust into a world where fantasy
and reality coexist. *Trinity* provides you with two objectives. Your preliminary
objective is to survive a nuclear holocaust. Trinity's story begins with your
character on vacation in England. While you're minding your own business
and touring London's Kensington Gardens, World War II breaks out and
world destruction is imminent. Your only hope of survival is to not be there
when it happens. But how does one escape world destruction? In *Trinity*, you
escape by entering a new time, place, and dimension.

Once you've succeeded in discovering the escape route from Kensington
Gardens, you are thrust into a strange new place reminiscent of Alice's
Wonderland, with giant toadstools filling the landscape. From this strange new
land you embark on a quest. With no explanation of how to accomplish the
goal, the primary objective in *Trinity* is to alter the history of the development
of the atomic bomb. As you work to accomplish your goal, your intelligence
and ingenuity will be put to the test with the curious new universe in which
you are placed and its challenging and perplexing puzzles. I found the most
unique aspect to the Trinity universe was that its shape is what is known as
"Klein bottle" or "Mobius strip," which is one of those curious solid shapes that
has no sides. In a universe with a "Klein bottle" shape, if you moved in one
direction long enough, you would end up where you began. In Trinity, this results
in some very confusing navigation, as you instruct the program to go east, but
actually end up going west.

<blockquote style="border-top: 0.25em solid; border-bottom: 0.25em solid;">

As you work to accomplish your goal, your intelligence
and ingenuity will be put to the test with the curious new
universe in which you are placed and its challenging
and perplexing puzzles.

</blockquote>

The quest to obtain your goal reaches truly epic proportions, as you
travel through time and space to certain times and locations key to the
development of the atomic weapon. If you are cunning enough, you'll wind up in the
New Mexico desert, minutes before the culmination of the greatest scientific
experiment of all time: the world's first atomic explosion, code-named Trinity.

The program comes with several "props" to both add to the atmosphere
and realism of the story, and to provide hints and clues to help you on your
quest. The props include *The Illustrated Story of the Atomic Bomb*, a somewhat
amusing and satirical comic book on the A-bomb; a map of the Trinity site; a
cardboard sundial; and instructions on how to make a paper bird (a crane). The
instruction manual is well written and provides many helpful examples and
explanations, particularly to text-adventure novices. *Trinity*'s parser is
complex and flexible, permitting a much smoother and friendlier approach
to communicating your commands. The program boasts a vocabulary of
over 2000 words and permits fairly complex sentence syntax. The user can
put several objects with certain verbs in a single command by separating the
objects with the word and or by a comma. Further, you can put several sentences
on one command input line if you separate each sentence by a period or the
word *then*. I found communicating my commands to Trinity easier and less
intrusive to playing the game than with any other text adventure I have played
before, including previous Infocom titles.

Since *Trinity* will take several hours to complete, and even longer to
fully explore all of its universe, the program allows you to save your position
and restore to that position at a later time. You are allowed to save up to four
different game positions per data disk. Saving your position can be strategic in
the game, particularly when you are about to embark on a dangerous action
which may threaten your life and continued involvement in the story. By
saving your position just prior to taking such action, you can return to the place
just prior to that action without having to start from scratch.

*Trinity* has several special commands, permitting you to vary the
length and detail of descriptions and dialogue the story provides. Also, if you
accidentally mistype a word, you can use the Oops command to correct the
mistyped word without having to completely reenter the previous command.
Finally, the Script and Unscript commands permit you to make a hardcopy
of the story as it unfolds with your printer. Trinity will work with
Commodore printers or printers that can emulate Commodore printers.

Bryan Moriarty, author of Trinity and the previous Infocom title *Wishbringer*,
did an excellent job of making such a curious blend of fantasy and reality
meld into an intriguing new universe. The dialogue in *Trinity* is well
written and often very amusing. The only time the dialogue is puzzling or
confusing is when it is intended to be so. Prior to seeing *Trinity*, I was some
what disappointed to hear that Infocom had not added graphics to its text
adventure, particularly since it was utilizing the larger memory of the
Commodore 128. However, Infocom stuck to what it knows best, a pure text
adventure, and the program does not lack for excitement. The descriptive
dialogue in *Trinity* invokes one's imagination to visualize the *Trinity* universe,
similar to the way a good book does for its readers. Therefore, after having
explored *Trinity*, I believe Infocom made the correct choice to leave graphics up
to the user's imagination.

All in all, *Trinity* is a first-quality text adventure that will entertain and
challenge its users. The program, as with all good interactive fiction, was
more addicting to me than arcade-style games, as I discovered myself spending
much more time engrossed in *Trinity* than intended. Both newcomers to
interactive fiction and experienced players will find *Trinity* enjoyable and well
worth the purchase price.

*Infocom<br>
125 Cambridge Park Dr.<br>
Cambridge, MA 02140<br>
$39.95*
