<!--
	Title: (ST Product News: ST Reviews) A Mind Forever Voyaging
	Author: John Kosiorek
	Source: Antic, v4(12)
	Date: April 1986
	Transcription by Steve Derby
-->

Infocom, Inc.<br>
125 Cambridge Park Drive<br>
Cambridge, MA 02140<br>
(617) 492-6000<br>
$44.95

As any longtime reader of **Antic** probably knows by now, I have been an
avid Infocom text-adventure freak ever since I bought my Atari 810 disk
drive and Zork I on the same day. Thus it was with great anticipation
that I greeted **A Mind Forever Voyaging** -- Infocom's first 128K-minimum
game and its first original release for the ST. Written by the
venerated Steve Meretzky, whose previous credits include Planetfall,
AMFV is the most original game to come out of the Infocom stables in
ages.

The game begins in the year 2031, when you make the shocking discovery
that your life and memories until now are just electronically implanted
delusions -- that you are actually a sophisticated computer known as
PRISM! The reason for revealing your true origin is somewhat sinister. Society
is on the verge of collapse, so the ruling powers have instituted the
Plan -- a complex series of socio-political steps designed to put civilization
back onto the right course. your job is to enter a series of simulations --
10, 20, 30 years into the future -- in order to test the long-term effects
of the Plan. But what is the Plan, and who is really behind it? Is the Plan
truly a boon to mankind, or does it need to be stopped? And if so, how
can it be stopped? Answering these questions becomes the ultimate goal
of A Mind Forever Voyaging.

As expected, AMFV makes no use of the GEM interface and contains the
usual Infocom parser, only larger. Command structure is actually
two-fold. In the early parts of the game, you cannot move or pick up objects --
don't forget, you are a computer. Instead you can enter different "modes,"
allowing you to tie into a worldwide news service, communicate with human
beings, review your own message banks, or even interface with
other terminals. In this manner, AMFV is very much like Suspended. Once inside
the simulations, however, it becomes a standard adventure.

AMFV is considerably more open-ended than your average text adventure.
You can wander almost anywhere, and you don't get killed (at
least not that I've discovered). The bad news is that this game continues
the trend started with Cutthroats and Hitchhiker's Guide -- if you don't do
the right thing at the right time, everything comes to a standstill. Oh you
can walk around, all right, but nothing happens to advance the story and
the other characters can't be found. At least with a locked door you have
some idea of what to try next.

The expanded memory of the ST allows for one of the nicest upgrades
of the Infocom parser -- the "oops" command. If, like me, your mind
works faster than your fingers, you might type something like "Unlock
the doob." Rather than retype the whole command, simply typing
"oops door" will correct it. Nifty!

A Mind Forever Voyaging is an essential addition to the library of any
ST owner who loves Infocom games as much as I do. Whatever else they
may have in the works for 128K-minimum computers will have to go
a long way to beat this.
