Starship Titanic

The Good
Douglas Adams has had more than his fair share of really great ideas. There was a throwaway line in one of the Hitchhiker's books about The Starship Titanic, and eventually the idea was resurrected (coincidental with a big project by James Cameron... hmmm...) and the hype started writing itself. Assuredly the computer game technology had come a long way since Adams helped with Infocom's Hitchhiker's text adventure - the potential for a great game was there.

The Bad
But they didn't write a great game. They wrote Starship Titanic.

The puzzles were terrible. Many of the puzzles took the form of a malfunctioning piece of machinery standing between you and some goal. Which (as other reviewers have said before me) makes sense in a ship that has all gone wrong.

What I find most offensive was the machines that were working as designed, and yet were presented as puzzles, which means that you were presented with interfaces that no intelligent being (human, alien, or robot) would ever have deliberately created except to make their users miserable. This even made exiting back to Windows 95 pleasant for once.

There is a point where you need to find two secrets from two characters who are murderously opposed to one another. Surprise - the secrets are in plain sight, and what strains credibility more than any of the other puzzles in this game is that these two people who would each go to insanely convoluted lengths to dispose of the other seemingly cooperated in placing these secrets together in one place. And somehow the obvious advantages of using these secrets never occured to either of these characters.

In addition to implausible puzzles, the overall story was unsatisfactory - I was convinced to do something catastrophic early in the game, and I now suspect that that was mandatory to continue the game past that point, but I still was left feeling that I was stupid to have done the action, thus dooming the game to a marginal ending at best.

And the technology wasn't any great shakes, either. A bunch of hot spots on the screen, with blurry movies connecting mostly still scenes. When standing in one location, I might be inclined to look to my left. Click. Wait for the movie to start. Wait. Ok, watch the world spin around my head. Ok, now I can see the view off to the left, and maybe I want to click on the lamp doodad, which I know has a hotspot. But the hotspots - for some inexplicable reason - took over a second to load after the interstitial movie finished, which led to one of the inexcusable sins in a find the pixel game - if the player clicks on a part of the screen and gets no response, there ought never to be a requirement that the player click there again without motivation.

Between fighting with the bad interfaces inside the game that were called puzzles and the bad interface that was the game, I was furious that I had purchased this game. I keep it now just to remind myself how terrible a game you can make in spite of gorgeous graphics and expensive voice talent.

The Bottom Line
Like being poked in the eye with a hot poker made of salt while simultaneously having teeth pulled without any form of pain killers unless you count the repeated kicks received in the sensitive parts of the lower body.

The Good
Just about everything except for the gameplay in Starship Titanic is good. The first thing you'll notice is how nice the graphics and music are. The animation is good, and there are transitions when you walk from one scene to the next, unlike most 1st person adventure games. The music is also of high quality. But the best part of the game has to be its characters. The things the characters say are funny and the voice actors did a good job as their roles, especially Terry Jones as the parrot. While the conversation system isn't particularly useful, it's still fun to play with.

The Bad
The main thing that drags down the quality of Starship Titanic is the gameplay. The conversation system was hyped a lot and like I said earlier, it isn't particularly useful. In fact, it's almost completely useless and only needed a few times. There is almost no plot and you wander around for a while until you find out what you're actually supposed to do (find the parts of Titania). With the puzzles being the most part of an adventure game, it's a shame that they're only mediocre. While most of them aren't too hard, there's one that's almost impossible to solve unless you look on the box for the solution or you look at a walkthrough. Plus they aren't very good, they usually just require you to find a piece that is missing, and just put it in the empty slot.

The Bottom Line
Starship Titanic has a lot of good qualities. It has good music and graphics, and the characters of pretty funny. Unfortunately, the gameplay, the most important part of a game, is of low quality. The puzzles are unoriginal and uninspired. And the most hyped part of the game, the conversation system, is almost useless. Starship Titanic is a disappointing game coming from a great author.

The Good
This game was hyped to no end prior to its release. For one, it had Douglas Adams' name on it; since he has actually pulled off a game or two way back when, expectations were that it would be an actual game, and not just the sort of linear abominations you get when movie directors with bloated egos decide to make Interactive Movies.

Initial screenshots were extremely pretty, and it promised something genuinely new: A conversation system to push the state of the art of NPCs, which, let's face it, has been standing still for quite some time. This conversation system would revolve around a natural language parser which would - gasp - actually work, and provide you with hours of stimulating interactive conversation! (How exactly the publishers managed to pull this off without mentioning that it would involve touching a keyboard is beyond me.)

It's pretty, I'll give it that. The interior of the ship is designed in a 20's-inspired architecture, with shiny glass, gold, speckled stone and extinct tropical wood aplenty. This fits beautifully with that particular kind of shine you usually see in pre-rendered 3D.

The Bad
Everything else.

The FMV flythroughs get extremely annoying after about the second time, so getting around becomes a right pain in the expansion ports. This isn't improved by the fact that all means of transportations have long, pointless animations of getting there, which there's no way to skip.

The bots were hyped up to true natural conversationalist status, when in reality they're just slightly rewired Elizas whom you have to prod in the right spot just to get them to tell you what their function is - in particular, the maitre'd and the puzzle associated with him is laughably pathetic. The poor state of the natural language parser is excused by the starship and its bots going haywire, although the achieved effect isn't that of malfunction, but annoyance. Ironically, this makes the only believable character the only organic one: The parrot, whose obnoxiousness matches the parser.

Then there are the puzzles. Apparently, whoever designed them was smoking rolled-up marketing hype about the bots' natural language capabilities, crippling the game completely as you plod away trying to find out exactly what phrasing you have to use to get a bot to perform a particular action.

The story? Don't make me laugh. There are a few shards of it at the beginning and you might be able to wring some more of it out of the bots if you're lucky, and at the end you get some dodgy footage of Douglas Adams pretending to be the ship's constructor, but really, it's all an excuse to dump you in an empty shell of a setting with arbitrary puzzles. Honestly, didn't we leave this kind of thing behind, like, fifteen years ago?

And poof, that's just about everything that makes it a game in ruins. What's left is an arguably pretty-looking shell to wander about, but that fades quickly after, oh, the first couple of hours.

The Bottom Line
Avoid, unless you're looking for a schoolbook example of puzzles, FMV and NPCs done in all the wrong ways.