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	Title: (Games & Books) Two New Games from Infocom
	Author: Burt Hochberg
	Source: Games, v12(1)
	Date: January 1988
	Transcription by Steve Derby
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Few Infocom games have been as eagerly awaited as
Douglas Adams's **Bureaucracy** (for most computers,
including 128K Apple; $35- 40). Adams, you will recall,
was the perpetrator of A Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy, a wildly funny and hugely successful interactive
fiction game which he based on his best-selling
book. Now, with another of his books on the best-seller
lists, his second Infocom collaboration (an original
game that is not based on a book) makes a timely appearance.
If you liked Hitchhiker, you’re gonna love
Bureaucracy.

Adams's new game is a wacky adventure of a peculiarly
modern kind. You have just taken a new job
and moved to a new home. Your company wants you to
go to Paris for a two-week seminar. All you have to do
is open your mail, which contains the money you'll
need, then pick up your ticket at the travel agency,
and call a cab to take you to the airport.

Things go haywire right from the start. Although you
notified the bank of your move, they sent your money
to your former address, whose new occupant is not
the least bit cooperative. You have no trouble picking
up your ticket (it was prepaid), but when you try calling
the cab company you get either no answer or a
busy signal.

As you explore your new neighborhood in search of
help, you encounter such hazards as an obscene
one-winged macaw, a deaf matron toting an elephant
gun, an irritating nerd who's always trying to sell you
stuff, and a bleating llama. At the end of the street is a
mysterious mansion protected by a locked gate, next to
which is an intercom through which a voice
keeps repeating, "Unfortunately, there’s a radio connected
to my brain."

The game is full of unexpected shifts of locale (at
one point you find yourself hanging from a tree in a
distant jungle), a brand of silly but pointed humor that
belongs uniquely to Douglas Adams, and, of course, lots
of wonderfully devious puzzles. As you work on the
puzzles, remember the game's description as "a
paranoid fantasy" and the peculiarly cynical mind-set
of its creator.

Bureaucracy is a fairly hard game, not suited for
beginners.

Many interactive fiction fans count Steve Meretzky's
Planetfall among their favorites. They will not be disappointed
in his sequel, **Stationfall** (for most computers;
$35-40).

You are a lieutenant in charge of paperwork. Your
new assignment is to take a spacetruck to a nearby station
and pick up a supply of Request for Stellar Patrol Issue
Regulation Black Form Binders Request Form
Forms. You will be accompanied by Floyd, the lovable
robot from Planetfall. Though maddeningly helpless
at times, Floyd has his endearing moments (each
time you want to save your game position, he chortles,
"Oh boy! Are we going to do something dangerous
now?") and he can be a lifesaver at crucial moments
(if he hasn't wandered off somewhere).

The space station where you go to pick up the
forms, and where you will spend the rest of the game,
is a nine-level module with three sub-modules, two of
which you can’t enter without the proper authorization.
The levels are connected by an elevator and by ladders.
As you explore the module in search of the forms and
a commanding officer to authorize your entry into the
sub-modules, you discover with dismay that you are the
only human in the station. The only other creature you
can find is a robot named Plato, who becomes very
good friends with Floyd (and forces him later to
make a very difficult decision).

In a science lab you find cryptic references to a pyramid
of mysterious power, and in one of the docking
bays you discover an alien spacecraft. On one of the
walls in the ship is a strange series of dots, the
meaning of which was never discovered by the scientists,
as you learn from their notes.

You begin to hear strange rumbling noises from the
levels below. But the elevator refuses to descend to
those levels, and the ladders that lead there have
been blocked. Something very sinister appears to be
going on, and you soon find yourself in mortal danger.

Meretzky (the author of Planetfall, Sorcerer, Leather
Goddesses of Phobos, and others) can always be
counted on to provide a strong story line and unusually
interesting puzzles. Stationfall has these in
abundance, and thanks to his brilliant creation Floyd, it
also has a heart. The game is of medium difficulty.