The Lensman

For those of you old enough to remember and have played the Zork games....here's an image for you. And when I say "Zork games" I'm talking the original text games, not the later, inferior graphic based Zork games. The last game was the closest to how I imagined some of the G.U.E., image wise. But they've been stuck on the "goofy" humour too long (Sans Nemesis), and they've lost the dry, yet eloquent humour of the text games.

The games took place in the Great Underground Empire (or G.U.E.), a vast underground kingdom, abandoned two or so centuries before the game starts. There's an excellent sense of "great things having passed", as you make your way through the silent ruins of the Empire. Silent except for the occasional demon, dragon and grue.

It's like playing those old "What Do I Do Now?" books, except that it predates them. These games, as well as most by Infocom, are considered by older gamers to be to video games, what Shakespeare is to literature. The Great Classics. I remember trying to explain this to a gaming store clerk around 91, with him not getting it. Cooly enough, a couple of the big video game mags made the same Shakespeare analogy in the late 90's, early 2000's.

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