The Top 3 Best Games About Janitors

The noble janitor. Custodian, if you prefer. He has played the starring role in some of my favorite games. Rather than spend days at my keyboard writing about the hundreds of examples I can think of off the top of my head, I will confine my comments to only the top 3 titles. These are all classics, so if you have never tried them you should a) be quite ashamed, and b) play them as soon as possible to abate said shame.

#3) Planetfall



This classic text adventure was released in 1983 by the king of interactive fiction - Infocom. Yeah that's right - text only. We don't need no stinking graphics! So you direct your player by typing commands such as LOOK UNDER THE TIME MACHINE or DROP THE FURRY ALIEN IN THE BASKET and watch as the story unfolds before you in pure unadulterated monochromatically glowing alphanumeric characters. The game was written by Steve Meretzky who was also known for such Infocom hits as Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Sorcerer, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and Stationfall - the sequel to Planetfall, but in that game you have been promoted to a paper-pushing desk jockey and therefore that game has no place in this post.

In Planetfall you are a lowly Ensign Seventh Class in the Stellar Patrol serving on board the Starship S.P.S. Feinstein and it is your job to mop the decks, but as the Patrol says in their recruitment flyers - "There's plenty of opportunity for advancement in the Patrol for those who live up to our motto, 'Boldly Going Where Angels Fear to Tread.'" The manual summarizes the story nicely:

Prepare to be teleported 120 centuries into the future and hurtled out of your Stellar Patrol space-ship mere moments before it explodes.  And if the first five minutes of PLANETFALL don’t kill you, you’ll really have your work cut out for you. Because the planet on which you crash-land is plagued with floods, pestilence and mutant Wild Kingdom. And during the next couple of days or more, you’ll be confronted by the bizarre, the baffling and the inexplicable.What destroyed your vessel? Why are there buildings but no inhabitants? How does one gain entry to the secret recesses of the vast scientifc installations? And who is that little fellow who keeps following you around? (It is, in fact, Floyd, a multi-purpose robot who has the personality of an eight-year-old and whose memory banks may hold the secrets of this strange planet. In short, the ideal companion with whom to brave your new world as you explore its secrets and dare its dangers.) Laughs, thrills, tears and triumph. You’ll find it all in PLANETFALL. Have a swell trip, and don’t forget to drop us a postcard!

Before you embark on the journey you should take the Patrol's self-evaluation to make sure that you qualify for their elite squadron. Here is the 2-page questionnaire. Please complete and mail into your local Patrol recruiting station.


 

You can occasionally track down the original Planetfall for PC (that's the one I have) on eBay, but it will be on the 5 1/4" floppy disk - do you still have one of those drives in a bay? Probably not. It is included in the compilations the Lost Treasure of Infocom and the Masterpieces of Infocom (one of my favorite possessions) which you can occasionally find on eBay but they usually go for about $40 and up. You can give it a go online at http://www.accardi-by-the-sea.org/Infocom/Online/, but I never figured out how to save your place on their online games which makes these games an exercise in futility unless you are determined to knock it out in a single textacular sitting.

So - you might consider downloading a copy of the PC file from one of those shady abandonware websites (cough! Abandonia) and playing it in DOSBox or WinFrotz instead. Not that I'm advocating piracy. Oh wait - that's precisely what I just did. Well whatever, just play it wiseguy!

OK, my plan was to put all 3 games on here but this one ran LONG so I guess I'll split it up to one per day.  Tomorrow is #2. And remember, In Space No One Can Hear You Clean.

Infocom and The Gallery of Zork

As I've mentioned on several occasions, I was a huge fan of Infocom's text adventure games back in the day. Actually, I should say that I AM a huge Infocom fan because even though it has been quite a while since I've played through an entire game of theirs, they still hold quite a fascination for me.

I won't torture you fine folks by prattling on for 10 pages in this post about how cool I think Infocom is (although I could!). No, I reserve the right to that hero-worship post later, but for now I just wanted to let you know about a cool website I stumbed onto this evening - The Gallery of Zork.

You might see scans of the fronts of game boxes at some Infocom tribute sites, but the guys at The Gallery of Zork really kick it up a notch. Yes, they offer high-resolution scans of the boxes (front, back, sides, and inside), but they also offer scans of pretty much every other Infocom item ever produced - the manuals, flyers, advertisements, Invisiclues books, newsletters, and all the the miscellaneous pack-in "feelies" that Infocom was famous for like the scratch n' sniffs from Leather Goddesses of Phobos, the pocket fluff and microscopic space fleet from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the swizzle stick from Hollywood Hijinx. Where my own copies of those items made off to I have no idea.

But perhaps best of all you can play ALL of the Infocom games online right on their website - and it won't cost you a single zorkmid!  I've seen some websites where some of the games are offered for online play, but it really looks like these guys have all of them! The Java box you play them in is somewhat small which is a little distracting, but that aside it seems to work great. I suppose you could even make the box bigger by reducing your monitor resolution while you were playing - I might try that.

If you want to skip directly to their online playable games page go to http://www.accardi-by-the-sea.org/Infocom/Online/. They have them all set up quite nicely.

If you would like to take a look at all the goodies for a particular game before you launch into playing it, or if you just want to check out all their other cool stuff, then go to their homepage at www.accardi-by-the-sea.org/ and just start wandering around. Lots of great stuff to see there if you are an old school adventurer like me. So don't Z around for more time to pass, head over there and take a L!

Retro Uprising

I just came across this website called Retro Uprising which allows you to play all kinds of old arcade and console games through your browser. To play some of them (mostly arcade games) you have to install ArcadeOX which is an application that allows windows applications to be run through your browser - and that sounds like a security risk to me so I didn't risk installing it. And some games were too laggy to play - but some worked well.

I did notice they had a bunch of old Infocom text games on there that you could play if you like and those worked fine. So check it out and run the java games just beware about installing anything.

Retrouprising.com

It is Pitch Black. You Are Likely To Be Eaten By a Grue

Anyone familiar with the text adventure Zork knows not to go wandering around in the dark without a lamp. I just read that "GET LAMP" - a documentary about the rise and fall of interactive fiction computer games - should be available for purchase late next month. The classic works of Infocom always held a special place in my heart so I will almost certainly be buying this 2-DVD set. Here is an excerpt from their webpage at http://www.getlamp.com:

"In the early years of the microcomputer, a special kind of game was being played. With limited sound, simple graphics, and tiny amounts of computing power, the first games on home computers would hardly raise an eyebrow in the modern era of photorealism and surround sound. In a world of Quake, Half-Life and Halo, it is expected that a successful game must be loud, fast, and full of blazing life-like action.

But in the early 1980s, an entire industry rose over the telling of tales, the solving of intricate puzzles and the art of writing. Like living books, these games described fantastic worlds to their readers, and then invited them to live within them. They were called "computer adventure games", and they used the most powerful graphics processor in the world: the human mind.

Rising from side projects at universities and engineering companies, adventure games would describe a place, and then ask what to do next. They presented puzzles, tricks and traps to be overcome. They were filled with suspense, humor and sadness. And they offered a unique type of joy as players discovered how to negotiate the obstacles and think their way to victory. These players have carried their memories of these text adventures to the modern day, and a whole new generation of authors have taken up the torch to present a new set of places to explore.

Get Lamp is a documentary that will tell the story of the creation of these incredible games, in the words of the people who made them."