Life is not all monsters and mayhem in Adventure Land, for the latest pair of Infocom games are aimed at the funny bone instead of dead between the eyes. Hollywood Hijinx takes place in Malibu, where you have to find ten treasures hidden in your uncle Buddy's mansion. A producer of B-movies like Vampire Penguins of the North, Buddy had the house rigged up with props left over from the films, and the results will keep you grinning all the way to the surprise ending. Infocom has stopped classifying their games by difficulty, but I'd call this one intermediate level.
More difficult and even funnier is Douglas Adams' latest Infocom adventure, Bureaucracy: A Paranoid Fantasy. Instead of doing a Hitchhiker's Guide sequel, he based the story on one of real life's frustrating events: his bank lost the change of address form Adams filled out when he moved, and as a result, his credit cards soon became useless. The maddening part of the experience was that the inescapable red tape made it almost impossible for him to get bank officials to acknowledge his new change of address form. That's what happen to you in Bureaucracy, whose first scene is not a location, but a form you must fill out on-screen.
Then you find yourself in a new apartment, having just moved from Rhino Drive, New Jersey, to start a new job at Happitec, Inc. The company is sending you to a course for new employees, and you'll leave for Paris as soon as you get enough money to pay for a cab to the airport. That's no problem, for Happitec already mailed you a $75 check. Well, there is one slight problem: your change of address form went awry and your mail was delivered to one of your neighbors. Rounding it up is no easy task, for these folks are so paranoid they make Woody Allen look secure. (One of them even looks like Woody Allen, except for the fact that he's carrying more guns than Rambo.)
Besides the countless Catch-22s that make everyday life so interesting, Adams elicits non-stop chuckles, titters and outright guffaws with zany responses to commands that don't work or are not understood by the parser. When I tried to break a door (yes, adventure reviewers get that frustrated too), the program told me I needed "permission in triplicate from Infocom." Kicking the door, it turned out, "violates the Cambridge Convention, which prohibits it in humorous games." (But you can kick the travel agent, which I strongly recomend.)
In most Infocom games, you read "Congratulations, your score just went up five points!" when you do something right. Do something wrong in this one and a message informs you that "Your blood pressure just went up!" Instead of the score appearing at the top of the screen, your blood pressure is displayed, a novel way of keeping track of your failure instead of your progress. (It's also a subtle form of self-satire that crops up frequently in recent Infocom games.)
Another novelty is that the address you enter on the form at the start of the game is used for the name of the first location, and your street's name appears as part of each location in the early part of the game. The top score is a whopping 21 points, but don't let that fool you. Bureaucracy is the toughest Infocom game since Spellbreaker.
Also look for Infocom's first horror adventure, Lurking Horror by Dave Lebling, and Stationfall, Steve Meretzky's sequel to Planetfall.
Thanks to Frank Skagemo for transcribing and donating this article.