Reviews by mjhayes
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One of the more interesting pieces of '80s IF, September 17, 2015This is a game which I got as part of the Interplay's 10th Anniversary Anthology. I found it strange in that I liked the two oldest games the most, this being one of them. This game included a fictitious newspaper, which is something I admired even more. The early commercial releases of Infocom games included printed material (which you often had to refer to throughout the game, as a means of copy protection) and odd trinkets, which added to the delight of the gameplay experience. That is something lacking in newer games these days.
Tass Times In Tonetown is set in what the '80s MTV generation thought the future would be like. One thing you discover pretty quickly is that Tonetown citizens do not take kindly to strangers. You'll probably die several times without knowing why, until you read the newspaper articles a couple of times over.
Some of the puzzles were strange, and there was a fair amount of inventory management that you had to do. It had icons for common commands and your inventory slots, but I don't think I ever got the mouse to work with this game. It obviously relied on some kind of proprietary early mouse driver.
The strange people and locations kept the game interesting, and I enjoyed playing it through multiple times. It's worth a try.
Excellent for 1984 - dated by today's standards, September 17, 2015I got ahold of this game as part of the Interplay's 10th Anniversary Anthology. The box art and the accompanying CD audio track with the installer made this game immediately captivating.
It's a rather simple game compared to most IF pieces, but the engine that draws pictures with each room gives the game a unique look. Maybe it's because I'm such a huge retro fan that makes me enjoy the pixellated CGA look.
One thing to know is that the name of the game is to recover your identity, and you need to know there is a command to think about names and places, in order to jog your memory. Between the simplicity of the world model and the use of Condor to help you when you are stuck, this game shouldn't take too long to complete. If you've read The Bourne Identity, you'll see the obvious similarities here.
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