Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders - Lucasfilms/US Gold
         (Graphic adventure with point/click text entry)

               A second opinion by Neil Shipman

Sue reviewed Zak in Issue 2 and very kindly lent me the adventure 
to play. It was the first one I'd seen from Lucasfilms and, to 
start with, I was impressed with the graphics, animation, sound 
and gameplay. It was easy to control Zak (and, eventually, the 
other 3 characters) simply by using the mouse and clicking on 
verbs and objects or locations.

However, I very soon got frustrated with the slowness of the game, 
not so much with the movement of Zak & Company jerkily plodding 
along as with the delay of 10 to 20 seconds every time a new cache 
of pictures was loaded. This happens very often and you're left 
staring at a blank screen with, appropriately, the usual busy bee 
symbol replaced by a sluggish snail to indicate that the drive is 
running. Also, with just a single-sided drive, I found that the 
frequent need to swap disks interrupted the flow of play. I 
suspect that if you're able to take the optimum path through the 
story as intended by the programmers then the swapping is reduced 
to a minimum - but, of course, you've no idea what this is!

The puzzles are not particularly difficult but, because the game 
has a fairly "open" style and (for me) not enough clues to point 
you in the right direction, you can spend a long time searching 
around wondering how to make any real progress. In addition to 
your San Francisco home you can take a flight to 9 other locations 
worldwide and, when you've made contact with Annie, there's lots 
to do on Mars as well. Then there are the mazes! I don't usually 
mind the odd one or two but there are far too many in this game 
for my liking.

I did appreciate not being killed off for no apparent reason. In 
fact it's quite difficult to die unless you insist on breathing 
the thin atmosphere on Mars. You're pretty sure to have your mind 
bent a few times by the aliens though before you've managed to 
stop them taking over the world. I loved the wacky humour too!

Despite my reservations I couldn't help being impressed by the 
slick presentation. George Lucas's influence as a movie director/
producer certainly shows through. Broderbund call their adventures 
"electronic novels" and Infocom use the term "interactive 
fiction". Perhaps it's a bit early to think of games like Zak 
McKracken as "interactive movies" but, with this type of 
production from Lucasfilms (and other software designers), maybe 
we're heading in this direction! Try it and see for yourself.