Remember Zork? Yes, the original text adventure game? The one where you tried and tried to find that last treasure, but couldn't seem to? Where is that darned songbird anyway? And that stupid thief keeps taking your stuff...
Remember Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy? The four-book trilogy by the late great Douglas Adams? They made a text adventure game out of that too, right?
Well, I just finished reading Starship Titanic, by Terry Jones. Originally, it was supposed to be written by Adams, as a companion piece to his work of Interactive Fiction entitled, well, Starship Titanic. Unfortunately, he didn't have time to write it, so he passed it off to Terry Jones, a part of Monty Python who apparently likes doing things in the buff.
*scrubs brain for a second*
The novel (I would actually call it a "novella") is a quick, light pageturner that unfortunately reads like...well, an Invisiclues(tm) hint booklet. Only it's not in "invisible" ink, and it's not Infocom. But it is funny in bits (like Invisiclues), and does seem like it provides solutions to some of the puzzles in the game (not that I've played the game). Overall, though, I'm not reading it as a clue booklet--I want it to have an actual structure.
Not that any of the HHTTG books have any structure, really, but they do hang together. This book just comes across as a sad wannabe.
Pity Adams is dead and gone and wasn't able to write the fifth book in the Guide trilogy. Oh, and the Guide movie's coming out in a couple of weeks--from what I've seen (they call Marvin the Paranoid Android a...a...robot!and Zaphod's heads seem to be wrong) I am afraid. Very, very afraid.
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