Some games are too good for kids only.
We have a great deal of respect for the early science fiction writers, folks like Ted Sturgeon, Bob Silverburg and Fred Pohl. If it weren't giving away Judi's age, she'd tell you that she met those men when she was young and impressionable and found them to be ethical giants, not just great writers.Fred Pohl's name still signifies quality. Frederik Pohl's Gateway, a computerization based on Pohl's novels, is so slick and attractive, it takes adventure gaming into the 21st century.
It turns any IBM-compatible owner with a hard disk into a space-age prospector out to get rich in deep space. How? By finding and activating five vital components of a lost defense system.
You start out in a space-station city, learning the ropes and the rules. You must take classes and qualify to fly an interstellar ship. Once you do, you can fly off to new worlds. There, you battle aliens, navigate mazes and solve puzzles that lead to your goal.
As with most computerized adventures, the story begins in your room on the space station. As you look around, read messages, find useful objects and take them, you begin to rack up points. Once you leave the room, you direct the adventure.
The computer screen is divided into three parts. One shows visually where you're at and what's there. The drawings are excellent (especially on Judi's NEC MultiSync 4FG VGA monitor).
Another one-third of the screen is for text. Here you may talk to anyone in a scene via your keyboard. When people answer, they sometimes offer clues and insights. You can also get information from the computer. If you see a book and type, `Examine book,' the computer may tell you what it's called and what's in it.
The final one-third of the screen has a compass showing directions you can take from where you're at. It has a bunch of buttons that bring up inventory lists (of things you're carrying) and other useful gaming aids. And it has two long word lists, one mostly consisting of verbs and the other of nouns.
Clicking a mouse or arrow key on a word puts it in the dialogue section of the screen. This lets you write sentences without typing a letter - a boon for abominable spellers. It also lets younger kids get in on the fun.
The word list makes the game a good introduction for beginning Dungeons and Dragons players. We soon figured out that if an action or object we wanted to get at wasn't on the list, we were barking up the wrong tree.
Made by Legend Entertainment, Gateway is sold by Accolade through local computer software dealers. Listed at $60, it can provide many hours of challenge and enjoyment for anyone from junior high on up.
Speaking of space, remember Taito's Space Invaders? We do because we lost our children for hours at a time to its mesmerizing charm. And they spent a lot of quarters trying to beat it! Space Invaders was one of the very first arcade games. Its `story line' was so simple, a five-year-old could catch on. As lines and lines of robots advanced toward the bottom of the screen, you had to shoot them and rack up points - or die if they reached bottom. End of game.
Accolade is now selling Taito's Super Space Invaders. It's a two-player shoot'em-up. It adds patterns and tactics and tricks. But it's still basically the same dumb, hypnotizing arcade game. For mindless fun, we recommend it highly.
It lists for $55 for Amiga computers and $40 for IBM-compatibles, for which you don't need a hard-disk computer, mouse or joystick, though you do need 640K RAM.
One of the first games we fell in love with, back in 1985, was Sierra On-Line's King's Quest. Sierra just released the sixth of what's become a charming, challenging series of adventure games. There's also a Nintendo version of Quest V.
We've tested many hundreds of games since King's Quest. Many are so mesmerizing it's hard to tear ourselves away. But none has enough charm to make us turn on the computer on weekends after we've spent a long week working on the dumb thing.
None, that is, until Sierra's Gobliiins arrived. That's three 'i's, for the three goofy goblins whom you must shepherd through scene after wacky scene. Like King's Quest, it's a quest game. But it's even more seductive, if that's possible.
And no wonder. It was written by a French software maker Coktel Vision, and the French are masters in seduction. At first, the game seems so simple. There's nary a word that needs to be read or typed, so you needn't know how to spell - or read.
But while three-year-olds will beg to have a go at it, solving each screen's puzzles is an adult-sized challenge.
Each goblin has a special gift. One holds, one throws and one casts spells. Solutions only come if the three cooperate. In what order? That's what you must figure out. Happily, if you kill your characters before you solve a scene, you needn't work through the whole game again, just the scene.
Gobliiins runs on 640K VGA hard-disk computers. It sells for around $35.
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