Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Remember the days of old? When everyone was younger, the sky was a little bit bluer and there actually were adventure games being made? Zork Grand Inquisitor is a nice bit of adventure gaming from 1997, one that I've planned to get since the first time I read about it back in those days.
Speaking of old, ZGI is the last game in the Zork series of adventure games, a series that started pretty much before there were computers, when mammoths still walked the earth and people still lived in caves. ZGI as such has a lot of ancient history to connect to, but it's highly enjoyable even for all of us who never played any of the old ones. You should probably be interested in adventure games to get the most of it though. And learning some about the old games helps too. If you know about grues it's more fun.
If I write here that ZGI is a classic first-person point-and-click adventure game, will people of today know what I'm talking about?
Screw them, they're probably not interested
in a game from 1997 in any case. They're the ones missing out.
Anyway, ZGI sets out to be fun, lightheared and humorous, and a homage to the classics. No big ambitions about changing the world or giving tearful moralist messages to anyone. It's such a relief, really. Characters nag you for trying every inventory item to try and solve puzzles, you find spells that turn purple things invisible, and the puzzles are strange. It all works, on its own angle relative to common logic and the real world.
Most puzzles gave way pretty easily, and ZGI indeed isn't such a long game. But I did get rather stuck a few times, walking around feeling like I'd tried everything and clicking somewhat randomly on stuff with other stuff. It happens, I think I would feel smart but somewhat cheated if it didn't in adventure games, and it's no worse than in other games. On the contrary, I'd say it's pretty easy, but it could be me being used to puzzle games as well. In any case, getting stuck made me discover the nice Universal Hint System (see external) which provides very gentle pointers in the right direction without giving away anything at all unless you want it to.
Graphics are decisively dated by today's standards. Grainy 640 by 480 stills of rather low-detail 3d environments to pan across and even grainier full motion video. To me it all feels kind of old and quaint. I'm not one to really comment on sound quality, but I like the dialogue. There's quite a lot of it, and much of it is very funny. And unless you reload or bang your head on something you won't hear much repetition. The music is there but I didn't notice it at all. Nothing catchy but nothing annoying either. Working background music I guess.
And there's the old menace known as Full Motion Video. If the gaming kids of today should be glad of one thing, it's missing out on the era where games felt the need to spend horrendous amounts of money on hiring actors to act out poor scripts against a bluescreen and then be awkwardly inserted on top of computer geneated backgrounds. As you might guess, it often didn't turn out very well. ZGI does a bit of this, and while the characters certainly don't blend in too well they still do their thing well enough (and have a script funny enough) that it all works. I'm the most fond of the Grand Inquisitor himself, and the opening cinematic.
I wonder if the old text adventure Zorks would be digestable to a soft, squishy, graphic-violence-overloaded modern-day brain like mine?
This is a game with a heart. People had fun making this.
So, tell me ...
Who is the boss of you!?
ME!
I AM THE BOSS OF YOU!