Summary: 45/100

Introduction

Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic is a new CD-ROM adventure game. The game has nothing to do with the recent film Titanic, except that they both feature a luxury ship in which something goes badly wrong.

Game Overview

In this game, the Titanic is a space-going luxury liner that is empty of guests. In the opening sequence, the mammoth ship crashes into your home (on planet Earth). The ship is unharmed, but your house is destroyed. A robot comes to you from the ship to plead with you to come aboard and fix whatever's gone wrong. Of course you agree, and the adventure's begun.

The basic structure of the game is a combination of Adventure, Eliza, and Myst. Like Adventure, you wander around a series of connected rooms, collecting improbable items that you use in improbable ways to solve puzzles. Like Eliza, much of your time is spent typing English at (and reading responses from) the robot inhabitants of the ship. Unlike Eliza, which constructed responses based on your input, these robots attempt to understand your freely-typed input and respond with the most appropriate piece of pre-written, pre-recorded dialog. And like Myst, the 3D environment is highly-produced and pre-rendered, often with great detail. You move through the world by stepping from one pre-rendered image to another by using the mouse to click in the direction in which you want to move. Most of the visuals are static images, though there are several cut-scenes as well (pre-rendered pieces of animation that are triggered by specific events).

The game is packaged on 3 CD-ROMs, and includes a pair of red/blue glasses.

The Interface

The game documentation introduces you to your PET (Personal Electronic Thingie); the opening sequence repeats the basic information. The PET is a user-interface that covers about the bottom quarter of the screen. It has five modes: inventory, control panel (for devices that need to be operated), game control (for saving/loading games), a text area for talking to robots, and a means for referring to the rooms you've visited. Although a couple of these modes are explained to you early on, much is left unmentioned. Part of the game is figuring out the interface.

The modes are generally clear once you figure them out, though I had some minor quibbles with the design. The most interesting choice is that you can only save and restore 5 games. This is easily circumvented if you leave the game occasionally and use the Windows Explorer to save your games in a new directory, where I found it useful to include a short text document in the directory that described the state of each one. This was rather clumsy and unnecessary; I feel that if the designers are going to let you save games, then you should be able to save as many as you please.

As with many adventure-style games, figuring out what things are for and how to deal with them is much of the point.

The Review

Alas, I had high hopes for this game, and it stinks. I have enjoyed Adams' books, and I had heard so much about this game for so long, that I hoped it would prove to be worthy of all the time and energy being put into it. But it was not to be; the game is really quite bad.

First, the good things, since there are some very good aspects to the game. Some of the visual design is quite nice; many of the sets (though by no means all) are very imaginative, well-designed, and look wonderful. The technology for moving from one pre-rendered image to the next is terrific; you see a sort of motion-blurred field as though you were turning quickly, giving lots of context and continuity. Some of the unexplained user-interface information is ultimately capable of being discovered, and quite useful. The music and sound effects are sometimes quite good, and the pre-recorded dialog is often witty, well-acted, and crystal-clear on good speakers. Finally, the overall concept of the game - that you are on an abandoned luxury spaceliner surrounded by malfunctioning robots and must fix things up - is novel and appealing.

Unfortunately, that's pretty much the whole list of positives. The game fails for several reasons, but the single most important flaw is that the entire gameplay is based on what I call arbitrary complexity. This is a holdover from the very first adventure games, where authors created a game by simply stringing together a sequence of puzzles. To make the game non-trivial the puzzles had to be hard, and in the absence of a really well-designed puzzle, the authors simply made puzzles that required you to do a specific set of actions in a specific sequence, with very little purpose other than to make the solution time-consuming. For example, consider an adventure game where you have to cross a bridge guarded by a troll. The only way across is to first squirt whipped cream into the troll's ear, then call him a salamander, and then light a fire by the side of the road to distract him. No other actions, and no other sequence, will do. Gamers had to simply search out the right solutions by exhaustive trial-and-error, or by deciphering clues made deliberately vague and with only weak logical links to the puzzles themselves. The puzzles were only weakly related to the story and environment, if at all.

Starship Titanic has this in droves. Of the many steps that must be taken to solve the game, most of them could have easily shown up in any other game after minor changes to the visuals. And they get worse as the game goes on, so that some of the steps, even after I had guessed them or read them from a web-published walkthrough, made little to no sense. I am amazed that anyone had the patience to actually get all the way through the game. Some of the puzzles are of the most objectionable type of this category: given a sequence of possible actions to do in some location, you must simply try them all, in all combinations and in all orders, until you can accomplish your goal. Even in retrospect, for a couple of these puzzles I can discover no reason at all why these steps are sequenced the way they are. Yet no other sequence will do. Exhaustive search may be fun for some people, but I find it, well, exhausting, and not much fun.

There are many other problems. The game relies on magical items; random things that you pick up in key places and then use in unlikely ways in other places. This is another artifice left over from primitive adventure games that simply should have been long eradicated from new game design. The game suffers from painful movement: you often must move from place A to place B, and to do so you must wearily plod through all the intervening locations, which can take many, many steps. This can be entertaining and even informative the first few times, but by the fifteenth time you take the journey it has been reduced to a huge waste of time, and thus frustration. They do allow you to skip the intervening animation on some motions (by using the Shift key), but not all - the ubiquitous elevators being a principal offender. The game replays animation over and over, particularly in the elevators and other transit devices. Again, the first few trips on the elevator are fun as you watch the world go by outside. The fifteenth trip on the elevator is simply a matter of gritting your teeth and waiting; there's no way to bypass the process. There is no undo - some delicate actions can be accidentally done (or not done in time), and then you have no option except to laboriously re-create the situation, which can involve (surprise!) a lot of plodding back and forth from one place to another. Finally, the game allows you to "talk" to the robot characters by typing to them in English; they respond with one of their pre-recorded answers. Although the designers make a big deal of this facility, I found it to be pretty useless, since I rarely got useful information when I actually asked a question. Clues were haphazard; often a robot suggested I solve a puzzle I'd long since completed. One could argue that the robots simply aren't very smart and are doing their best; very well, but that's no reason for the game designers to waste my time trying to deal with them. I ended up often simply typing in the key words of my question and hoping for the best, which was usually disappointing. I ended up ignoring the robots altogether, except when they were required to solve a puzzle.

Aside from gameplay, there are problems with the visuals and audio. Some of the objects are not modeled or animated well; they move in awkward ways. The robot's mouths and bodies are not synchronized to their voices. Thus I got the disconcerting feeling I get watching a dubbed monster move - characters gesture wildly and their mouths are working, completely unsynchronized to the sound of their voices. I found this very annoying. There is often no ambient music, and some of the music that is provided is quite annoying. I think this is deliberate in some places in order to make a point about the surroundings, but still, bad music is unpleasant to listen to.

About two years ago I wrote an essay on game design, which I published on the web and have presented at several conferences. In that essay, I describe a number of specific computer-game design elements which I consider to be fundamental design errors. I looked at that essay again after playing Starship Titanic, and found that this game deeply relied on almost every one of them. In this sense, I don't think I could have designed a less enjoyable, more annoying and ultimately frustrating game if I had tried.

Final Scores

Technical design and execution: B
Gameplay: D
Final score: C-