Starship Titanic (1998)

Starship Titanic (1998), concept, story and script by Douglas Adams, developed by The Digital Village, published by Simon & Schuster Interactive

Imagine chillaxing at your home, just about to pop in a CD in your state of the art computer of 1998, when a huge metal fin crashes in your roof and a ditzy robot appears, urging you to get in the spaceship because the AI system has gone haywire. So, like any sane person, you decide to follow the robot to take a trip on the most magnificent luxury tourist starship ever built.

After a rather rude reception bot grudgingly signs you with the lowest quality cabin, the journey can truly begin. The main goal of the game is to locate the missing modules of the AI Titania, who is currently in hibernation mode in her command centre. And that's pretty much it. To do this, you need to, in a proper Myst style 90s first-person game style, solve some puzzles ranging from easy to trial and error hard.

The receptionist bot. This is a grumpy one.

The game itself is based on the original idea by Douglas Adams of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy-fame and he was in the design of the game as well. The first appearance, or at least a mention of it, actually is in the HGTTG, where it was described as the most luxurious cruise line ever, which didn't even manage to complete its first message, an S.O.S, before its first trip ended in a catastrophe. 

One of the main features of Starship Titanic is, besides the back then rather nicely rendered art deco style spaceship, the parser system the game has along with its mouse-driven interface. This parser is used when talking with robots. the biggest surprise is, that the game actually is rather good in determining what you are trying to say and on a couple of occasions, you do have to give at least seemingly complex commands to the robots via talking to them. Other than that, you can use the parser to pick their brain on various matters and try to squeeze hints out of them, especially after you get to the robot behaviour centre, from where you can alter their mood into a more serviceable mode. These grumpy robots are one of the constant annoyances of the game, really, as you do need to re-check their attitude from time to time, as only sanction your buffoonery to a certain point.

The dialogue of the game, and therefore the comedy elements of it, is pretty solid. This isn't really a surprise, considering the writer, though I do have to add, this might not be the sharpest writing from Douglas Adams. Nonetheless, the humour of the game did give me a couple of chuckles here and there. This is, perhaps, helped by the voice cast as well, which, has some pretty recognisable names in it, from Terry Jones and John Cleese (who did his role as a smart bomb under a pseudonym Kim Beard) to Adams himself.  As a side note, now defunct Terry Jones actually wrote a novelization of the game, so if you don't want to play it, you might want to read it instead. Or listen to the audiobook.

The barman of the ship. This one is stuck in a loop.

As I briefly mentioned, the game itself is a 1st-person adventure, with pre-rendered backgrounds in the style of Myst. You move from location to location by hunting the navigation points from the scenes, some of which are harder to find than others. There's obviously no in-game map to help with the tedious back and worth this style of gameplay is plagued with. Obviously, each scene change is animated with a camera drive, because of the 90s pre-rendered FMV and the amount of money spent on it.

At times it is easy to miss some navigation points. This leads to aimless wandering from place to place. Especially with the hotel rooms, this gets a bit annoying. Though this might just be me, as I've always found Myst-style controls to be somewhat disorienting, as the camera goes where it's set to go and this is not necessarily where you expect it to go.

The puzzles range from easy to "annoyingly obvious but easy to miss and how the hell should I have known that"- kind of a deal. From time to time, you need to use the ships Suc-u-bus system, which takes your items to a location where you need them, but it is easy to send them to the wrong place, as the addressing system isn't the most obvious. It's not a difficult game, as such, more than it is annoying and time-consuming for the wrong reasons.

The 1st class luxury cabin.

I do think the idea of Starship Titanic is better than the game itself is. The setting is rather nice and the interior of the ship does look nice. Some of the voice actings is pretty solid and it does deliver some laughs. It just is, that game itself doesn't quite work as well as it could. In many ways, it feels like a wasted opportunity.

Perhaps one of the biggest missed opportunities of the game is, that the starship is a rather empty place, inhabited only by a handful of robots. You are the only passenger of the whole ship that was on its maiden voyage that didn't even manage to begin properly.

All said, Starship Titanic, while not a complete disaster, is a rather mediocre and forgettable game. It could have been a classic, but in the end, it doesn't quite manage to work as a game nor as a rousing sci-fi comedy. It has some of the trappings for it, but the end result just isn't there.

Titania