Jeff and Bryan discuss the experience they had playing the 30th anniversary edition of the Infocom Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game available on the BBC’s website.
This has been a Froods for Thought production.
Jeff and Bryan discuss the experience they had playing the 30th anniversary edition of the Infocom Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game available on the BBC’s website.
This has been a Froods for Thought production.
Hey Brian how you doing today I'm doing great Jeff how are you well I feel beat yes we just played the BBC's 30th anniversary edition of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text Adventure game and it is rough whether we spent about 12 hours almost a week didn't spend anywhere near the amount of time that we might have because we did lots of hints and cheats and walkthroughs just to get through this so we could record it and the first thing I will say is everything I have heard about this game is true to go absolutely I mean I remember this game from way back go absolutely this game came out in 1984 I didn't play it back in 1984 but I do have a original copy of it so in the Box you get all kinds of wonderful thing you have the order for destruction of Arthur's house you have an order for destruction of the Earth at least I guess that's what it says because it's written in Vogue on we have a don't panic button some Peril sensitive sunglasses we have pockets Loft and a small bag that contains a microscopic space Fleet I really can't see it in there but I'll I'll take their word for it left to get some pictures up on the side or something about that so maybe we can take some and dump them in our YouTube feed right about this point that we awesome all right I'm going to say it's not impossible to Is point that be awesome all right I'm going to say it's not impossible to complete the game without him but it's highly improbable oh yes absolutely I recalled playing the game I had to be close to when it came out and when we play this yesterday it was different because they have a special type of interface okay right where they showed you what you had in your inventory and they showed you some of the details of the object that you were actually looking at in another window. So on the BBC's website you can find the 30th Anniversary Edition and you can currently play it but like you were saying there's not the same thing as the original game cuz they added a bunch of graphics and cheats and shortcut buttons absolutely when I played it originally it was trying to remember what the work or something in one of the original text games where all you had was your standing in of woods and there's a cabin to your North text game it is prompted by whatever response you give and you have to kind of pay attention to where you are and know where you want to go and remember every detail of what you've seen and type everything correctly yeah they don't give you option there they needed to be exact one of the things that I heard about this game and it is it away true and it away not true which is the game lies to you yes so there's two lies that it does the 15 it will eventually tell you it's lying kind of like hahaha I was just lying what the other ones they don't and the only thing I guess I want to say about that is don't always take no for an answer yeah that's absolutely true there was a couple of occasions where we're mostly where you're attempting to go in a certain direction and they tell you know and eventually they say oh yeah well we were just kidding I want to go in this room know you can't go in this room no I want to go in this room know you can't go in this room are you sure yes okay that's just that's just mean yes and I'm not going to say that the game wasn't entertaining cuz it was entertaining but it definitely was not fun okay I mean I had fun playing with you wasn't a fun game to play think of it like like golf you have not played lots and lots of golf but I played some golf and I've enjoyed a bunch of rounds of golf guess what I've never said that was fun around of golf same thing he will get this okay a part of the game that I specifically did not enjoy was that in at least the first couple of stages it will let you advance to the next stage without completing all of your objectives right the way I was looking at that is the game was specifically designed to make you fail and then have to restart in the previous area and there were a number of occasions where we found that to be true that happens over and over and over but when you're going from one level to the next it should make you die and if you didn't complete everything so you know there's something left to do when you get all the way to the end of the game and realize that there was something in level one that you needed to do you can't just go back to level 1 and do it and be done you've got to go back to level 1 and then play the all your game over again you're absolutely right when we played this game or when I play the game originally I have very distinct memories of trying to orchestrate my way through the different levels and frankly I never got further than the Babel Fish seen or the Babel Fish seen I was totally flummoxed I tried everything I could think of to do and then I just sorta quit trying and I feel that knowledge of the book is both a help and a hindrance because there were things like the Babel Fish that you're sitting there going haha I know when I get this I can just stick it in my ear well when you get the Babel Fish it flies in your ear automatically right you don't have to have any kind of guessing game of what do I do with this fish now that I have it right there's also the guide and if you look in the guide consult the guide about everything it will tell you what to do with the baby Typing game of what do I do with this fish now that I have it right there's also the guide and if you look in the guy cuz you can consult the guide about everything it will tell you what to do with the Babel Fish so if you just thinking I was going to skip a step and not have to read the guide well you don't have to read the guide anyway right we're jumping ahead a little bit cuz obviously the Babel Fish is not one of the first things that happens but as a challenge in the game you can get to that level with knowledge of what happens in the book because it's pretty well parallel up with 16 the level of Jeff Tibbs one of the things that I was also can Well you don't have to read the guide anyway right we're jumping ahead a little bit cuz it's obviously the Babel Fish is not one of the first things that happens yeah but as a challenge in the game you can get to that level with knowledge of what happens in the book because it's pretty well parallel up again with 6 eating the level of Jeff Tibbs one of the things that I was also confused by and I think you were too from our conversations is you thought you failed the level but you see in your inventory that you've completed your objective and you're like oh I did it somehow and then you're positively certain you completed the level and you look at your inventory in your like where did that go another one of those frustrating parts of this game yes I'm not sure I guess we're going to end up spoiling some areas for instance when I first played the game this was prior to most internet right and so certainly I did not have the opportunity to scam knowledge or talk to someone or at least on the internet 2 about how I can get an answer to her how I could move forward No in fact in the box that I have is a little if you really need a hint mail this in and buy one of our kids book yeah it is I'm I'm trying to remember I don't recall having done that I must have been playing from the original game but I think I was probably playing on someone else's computer so I might not have been right playing the copy where I had that because frankly the different material that you actually reviewed earlier does have some indication and clues as to how important certain aspects of the game are yes it is important to have those visual pieces of reference in order to progress to 10 parts so I'm just going to go over the parts they have listed on the website so part one is on the Earth part 2 is in the dark part 3 is on the Vulcan ship part 4 is aboard the Heart of Gold there's also a part 4 and a bit of what the heart of gold but it's really more like part 11 because that happens at the end of the game correct part 5 is on trial part 6 is on demogorgon part 7 is at the party part 8 is the earth Revisited Part 9 is the word chamber and Maze and part end yep inside the whale that's a great analysis of the game but I do want to point out that one thing that we quickly determined is once you got past part 4 yes parts 5 through him were randomly selected based on whatever the computer was feeling like doing that because you will go to random places and back to places you've already been that you don't need to be that was another one of the things that kept the game longer than it needed to be absolutely absolutely cell part one is on Earth and if you've read the book or listen to the radio series or watch the TV show you know the goal of this level get off the Earth before it's destroyed the problem is trying to figure out how to do it in the amount of moves you are allowed by typing the correct base commands they give you a certain amount of time to do it so it's not like if you get stuck you can just keep trying and trying and trying and trying it's like oh no Earth destroyed start over there in the dark in the dark and it's time to start again it's called in the dark this game keeps you in the dark a lot both literally and figuratively game is not linear as he mentioned and there's a random aspect to it and you go to and from the dark multiple times in this in the dark is definitely a level but it is a different level every time you get into it right end and I know it's not really a spoiler but when you're in the dark it tells you that you can't see here feel taste or smell repeated pattern is go through You have no sense of the five senses are blocked out and it's a repeated pattern of go through and this isn't just for the in the dark this is for the whole game I hope you like waiting because this game has a maddening amount of times when all you're supposed to do is wait for other things to happen or wait for time to pass and being in the dark when you can't do anything or move or see or hear taste you just wait and you wait and you wait and you wait then eventually yes you will get to the vogon ship the goal on the Vulcan ship is to collect all the items you need before being thrown off the ship and we all know how that happens if you didn't get them all restart the level because it will let you continue on and if you haven't guessed that we discovered that we didn't have everything that we needed and we're on level 11 right and have to go all the way back to 3 because of 1 item yes and it's it's very tricky and I'm not even sure again without hints we probably would have played this game for three days minimum because you just don't have a clue as to what it is you need to get to where you want to be getting off the vogon ship with all of the devices is tricky I'm going to say that the game not actually be as difficult as it is because after you solve the puzzle or got the hint and were shown the answer and you look back at it all the clues were there if you took the time to actually read everything you were supposed to read and thought about it and things that just seems like an offhand comment aren't an offhand comment but are literally telling you exactly what to do you could solve the game but nobody reads that much right video game stuff you read the text but you have to read the text. To finish this game you do oh yeah. Course you're thrown off the boat gunship and now you're on the Heart of Gold this is the level with the most rooms this is basically going to be the hub for everything else this game I'm laughing because when we got to this level you asked me to draw a map if you're old enough to remember playing text games then you know how difficult it is to map out the directions that you have to go in order to get to where you want to be and so it's lines and circles and squiggles and dashes and in but in this particular area A Year Without a visual clue as to where you are which the 30th edition allows you to see you can get yourself lost completely yes on the map that I drew was functional but certainly not beautiful and right and the 30th Anniversary Edition did help tremendously in orienting you of of where you were I think I have all of the rooms listed so you start out in the entry back there's a bridge there's the galley with the Nutri Matt there's Marvin's Room there's an engine room and a small exit space and then obviously there's corridors going to all of those but I think those are the ones and all of that so you're going up and down and left and right her port and starboard and here they've got buttons that you could just click so you didn't have to type starboard everytime you just click the right so that was a big help and then your main goal is really figuring out how to get in the dark you finally get out of the dark the first thing you have to do is find out how to get back into dark and once you're in the dark your then going to jump back in time and I guess fix some mistakes that were made not in your past with the game but passed in in their Universe correct this is where it diverges from the book story from the radio series stories he bounces back and forth in time to facilitate the moving forward of the game and if you don't successfully change all of the things that you were supposed to So park 5 is trial and this level is actually easier than it first seemed because when you go to any of these text Adventure Games you have no idea what you're supposed to do so as you fail and try and fail and try Phil and try to eventually learn what you're supposed to do and then it's really easy to just do what you need to do and the more you worry about what you have to do the less you'll be able to actually figure out what you want to do so does that mean that they've reached beyond the legal limit of stress and anxiety for the whole game all right so you finished trial jump back to the dark then you're on the Heart of Gold again and then you get back in the dark and it's going to take you somewhere part 6 they called immigrant for this level you're actually playing as they fought so you jump into the consciousness of zaphod when he is at the christening of the Heart of Gold and he's going to steal the ship it's not really obvious in this in my opinion how to get through this level know it it really isn't and when we eventually watch the walk through one of the things I thought is why in the world would anybody do that exactly this this was the one that had the least obvious choices even after knowing the answer correct it wasn't a logical progression that the least way I saw no absolutely not taking forever to figure out because you'd be staying there with not knowing what to do and then you would die so after you finish the damn again back to the article back to the dark you'll come out somewhere and at the party for this level you are trillion right this is the party where she met zaphod and Arthur and that whole thing that they talked about at the beginning of the book that talked everything up 2 infinitely improbable that they got picked up right so now we're short simple level with a course a few ways to mess it up where you have to do it again but I think you accidentally do this right if you establish good habits at the beginning of the games yeah that this one really only has one basic function that you have to do and as we said before it the computer is generating a random sequence of which of these areas that you're going into each time so if you fail to succeed the first time and died out of that see you're going to get another opportunity to go back into that scene and succeed oh yeah absolutely unlike the beginning of the game you get multiple chances to complete the level and I have to replay everything over again you finally finished at the party back to the Heart of Gold back to the dark where do we come out Park 8 was called the Earth Revisited this is the same first scene except this time your Ford correct and again here's one where you just have to read everything absolutely and when you read everything you might stumble into the answer but it's not related to the story in any way no this is definitely a diversions from the book right so it became a little puzzling and I know we had to hint our way through that particular scene once we were told the answer and then went back to the game Game we're like oh that's what it said and again there's nothing that is said I'm going to change my mind on that not everything that is said is just an afterthought or something there are red herrings and a lot of Youth. That they make you get in do that really have no oh absolutely this this is one of the unique features of this particular game is well I don't want to give it all the way but the fact is when you play this kind of games you expect that any thing that you can pick up or interact with you need to pick up interact with right or else why would it be there exactly when you play this particular game you pick up a bunch of items that never become important but you wouldn't know it while you're playing it so you have to pick everything up right and for this level if you go back as forward if you play everything and it turns out exactly the same way it happened in the beginning of level 1 yeah we're going to have to do it again and you're going to have to figure out what it was that happened because there's very little obvious correlation if you really think about it you can figure it out but you because we were restoring and replaying levels in areas I save your game a lot you know make sure you say that this game is going to kill you a whole bunch of time but because we were saving and replaying I wonder if you fail to do this seem right in your first playthrough and happened to get to another scene which were going to talk about I don't know that there's a way back from that I think it's one of these areas where it's going to let you die no matter what you do yeah size I think so so this one has a significance to it that isn't obvious until you've succeeded correct if succeeded and then you're back in the dark and back on the HeartGold and then back in the dark and you come out somewhere else Part 9 they called the war chamber and the Maze they were going to pick align a random line that you typed at some time it's like move whatever whatever you typed they're going to choose that line and they're going to give you the this travel Through the Wormhole all the way to the war zone where the two opposing Generals in one's wearing the black Bejeweled battle short and they even have black speak to of battle swords so that whole thing happens you're on one of those ships in your and you're listening to a conversation between the government and the vlogger go officers yes one of the things I found interesting about this level is even when you completed successfully you think you died that's correct all but but we've got that so I think we're good so of course back in the dark back on the Heart of Gold back in the dark one more time you come out inside the whale so now you're in the whale is not a whole lot you can do inside of a whale and you know what the whales faith is going to be so you get what you need and you wait and you wait and then it's dark right right now and I don't think this is a giveaway but I mention it's a flower pot again the flower pot is another one of those pieces of storyline that goes on and on later into the book what I found funny is that it was a flower pot yeah but it's a bowl of Petunias right right so it's still the flower pot is in the whale right and outside the whale is a bowl of potato light the bowl of Petunias and those of you that are like hitchhiker files are going to know how the bowl of Petunias and the flower pot or related but it's just funny that they put the We're supposed to determine a way to stop him from leaving and just seemed obvious to me that that's the kind of thinking the computer game would have and I was completely wrong and I was equally convinced that because he keeps coming in on a regular basis there's something we need to do to get him to interact with us and he would ignore us and leave every single time there's another robot in the story that you'll probably intersect with it also seems like a good lead at the time but doesn't actually do anything so a couple of little hints about the 30th Anniversary game on the BBC website there shortcut typing so when we're watching the walkthrough of some guy playing it we realize that you don't have to actually type out the whole word there is a a minimum number of letters that you can just type and you'll for those of us that play the game that long ago we understand that but it's still hard for me not to type out an entire word so that's why I really liked it but yeah I was getting a little lazy there I can't work pretty quickly but I was definitely clicking on the starboard button that's why I didn't have tipped the frustrating things in the beginning of the game is that there's only so much that they let you carry right you think you're going to need everything so you want to find a way to get everything what we did was little by little as we could we took everything all up to 1 room the bridge right and dumped everything here because of this we have to come to this room every single time so dump it all here and we'll just take what we need when we think we need it and then when we're watching our hints we're watching the guy playing like you can do that so there is there is a workaround of your only so much you can carry going to let you know that it exists right it's so yes it exists I'm trying not to give too many hands right if you want to play the game put a sponge on your desk in your head but it's it Outlook look up for a walk through the walk-through that we watched was 25 minutes so 25 minutes Gets You Through the game if you click everything correctly and in fact it would be less than that because in the dark the guy we were watching kept going to the same place over and over he could never get to the new place so there was a lot of wasted time of him having to go to and from places he's already been right at the dark scenes you'll learn very quickly are formulaic and once you understand the formula you can shorten the play through but it does require you're paying a little bit of attention and that's all I wanted to say thank you for assist Eagles Vikings are you going to fix that at the beginning of this episode I I clearly stated My overall impression is of this game so now that we've gotten to the end what are your overall impressions of this game right I will say again I know I'm repeating myself here that when I played the game originally I was able to get through to the level of the vogon ship with the Babel Fish dispenser and never figured out how to get the Babel Fish it's of what I think it's like a five-step process yeah and it if you do it in their correct sequence it works exactly the way you expected to again it's one of those areas where if you fail to do something at the very beginning you're going to get to the see no matter what and you won't be able to have what you need to do about this what you what you're trying to accomplish and if you don't know that you needed it by having failed every time you put them then you're going to just look at that screen person yell and scream and the other thing I want to say though is that because the BBC did this with their anniversary thing they have a very good They have a very good well-thought-out hint page and what I liked a lot about the hint page was it literally treated itself like a hint I mean you're eventually would tell you the answer if you didn't get it but it said are you sure you want another question you want to ask that question sure okay here's another okay here's the answer yeah it wasn't I want a hint and they just tell you the answer right now so you'll have a problem and you look and there's 8 hints underneath it ain't like all right and you're like what's the first hint that surely you'll get down to where it's your stock that's what I love cuz we're 3 hours into the game and he's like okay here's the fourth end what the heck are they talking about oh I know you're remembering the first and I'm like yeah yeah cuz that wasn't a part of the in the dark rotation I am absolutely happy that I finally went through the whole game and played it farther because I got past the Babel Fish I think by cheating and then I was going to play as long as I could and then I got stuck walking around the Volga and ship with everybody deserted me when you first get there trillions are they fight their forward is there and then they all go to the sauna and you can go in the sauna but they kick you out of the snow on the right away and you will feel refreshed so you know you cannot interact with any of the characters then Marvin shows up but like I said he's ignored us the whole game so I just started walking around having absolutely no idea what to do so having a buddy to talk with and kind of lodging things out is also a much much better way of playing there's no doubt when we played this game together we were able to be much more successful than I was individually made it playable absolutely absolutely all right well I think that is a great place to stop this episode give anything else to add not that I can think of and Say Goodbye Bryan smell you later it's a hint