Deep Space Drifter - SynTax PD 178
   Michael J. Roberts and Steve McAdams / High Energy Software
       (TADS Text adventure on ST (1 Meg required) and PC)
              Reviewed (ST version) by Neil Shipman

"It was a more exciting time, back in the early years of deep
space exploration.  Anyone who could afford a good ship and a tank
full of fuel could strike out into the vast empty reaches to find
his fortune among the stars.

Of course, you'd have a better chance of finding your fortune if
you had remembered to check a nav chart before heading off into
the void.  Now you're nearly out of fuel and air, you're tired and
hungry -- and desperately hoping you can find someone monitoring
the distress channels."

This is the start of Deep Space Drifter, the second game written
with the Text Adventure Development System (TADS), an excellent
utility with which writers can create Infocom look-alike and play-
alike adventures.
Your immediate predicament is obvious but a way out is to hand in
the form of a button marked 'Distress' on the console in front of
you. Fortunately, your signal is picked up by a young woman on an
orbiting space station, so you set the 'AutoNav' and hope that
your ship has enough fuel to get you there.

You just manage to dock your craft but there is little time to
wonder about the absence of a reception because hunger and
tiredness are taking their toll. Grabbing a bite to eat from the
fridge you find a bedroom and settle down for a nap, only to enter
a very strange dream sequence involving huge plants and weird
creatures. But a dream is all it is and you wake refreshed.

Exploration of the station's dozen rooms turns up some useful
items including a couple of tapes which can be played in the log
reader. As you listen to them you sense the increasing paranoia of
the station's crew, Sigourney and Pinback, (the writers are
obviously fans of John Carpenter's cult spoof sci-fi movie 'Dark
Star') which has culminated in Pinback's attempts to get the old
laser cannon on the planet working. From the feel of the

explosions which regularly rock the structure it looks as if he
has been successful.

The only way of getting down to the surface is on the remaining
TripMaster 2000 (tm) tram which is currently out of order. Its
repair involves a well thought out series of interlinked puzzles
which you will just manage to solve in time to escape before the
space station is destroyed.

Arriving on the planet you get a glimpse of Pinback (who is quite
definitely suffering from delusions of grandeur) as he wanders off
to pursue his crazy plans and leaves you to explore the old
military base. Different sectors of the complex, including the
laser and the reactor which powers it, are accessed by means of a
shuttle car. This operates well on autopilot but you need to find
a way of controlling it to your requirements. To do so you must
get past a security DroidMaster robot and run the gauntlet of a
formidable array of weapons which protect the Commander's quarters
from unauthorised entry.

While you are figuring out how to do this you can ponder on the
contents of the xeno-biology book you find in the barracks. The
section on the habits of the brown spiny-beaked pin-headed swamp
weasel, a terrifying man-eating predator, and its only natural
enemy the saber-toothed triple-ringed xeno-beaver proves to be
rather interesting and the mention of such creatures brings to
mind your earlier dream.

It so happens that there is a beaver preventing you from getting
into a spaceship on another landing pad and not very far away is a
swamp. Now if you could just get a weasel out of its habitat and
distract that beaver you'd really be getting somewhere. The swamp
is an easily mappable 7x7 grid with a plant at each location:

In the swamp
   You're in a large, foul swamp.  It looks like you might be able
to travel to the north, east, and northeast.
   In front of you is a large and strange plant.  It stands about
six feet high, and has a red spot and a blue spot near its base.
The top of the plant opens into huge jaws that could easily hold a
human.  The plant is holding a balloon in its jaws.

>touch red spot
The plant ejects the balloon, sending it high into the air to the
northeast. Even as the balloon whistles through the air, you hear a
terrified yelp from the northeast, followed by a loud "fwoop".

Solving this problem - which, for me, was one of the highlights of
the adventure - could take you so long that sleep gets the better
of you once again. Another short dream will then give you an
insight into a sequence of events you will encounter later on.

An enormous complex of caves found underneath the base's reactor
presents you with a similarly well-designed puzzle to that posed
by the swamp. All available directions are shown and this is not a
maze, but making any progress is severely hampered by the fact
that the caves regularly flood and there are only a few places
where you can escape the torrent of water.

Before the story is over you will meet the crazy Pinback a couple
more times. Can you put paid to his megalomaniacal plans? Is
escape from the planet possible? And what has happened to
Sigourney whose answer to your original distress call saved you
from certain death in the first place? Only time and, of course,
your adventuring experience and ability will tell.

Deep Space Drifter is a science fiction tale which should appeal
to all adventure fans who enjoy a real challenge and appreciate
well written text and cleverly constructed, original puzzles
spiced with just the right touch of humour. To have produced such
a work as well as the TADS utility with which it was implemented
is worthy of the highest praise. With a bit of fine tuning and, of
course, some lavish product packaging, Deep Space Drifter could
very nearly pass for an Infocom title of the mid '80s, something
like a Planetfall/Starcross hybrid. Need I say more?