The Resident (Part of SynTax Disk 1195 PC) Author Mike DeSanto, ported to Inform by J. Steingreaber Reviewed by John Ferris The Resident was originally written with a utility called Rexx -Adventure for the OS2 operating system, details of and my personal comments upon are listed in the review for Promoted! which was in Issue 55. Resident is set a century into the future where the World Wide Web has become a virtual reality of sorts. People travel virtually through the Web through transfer points. Web sites are actual locations, other programs or users have actual physical representations. You play the Resident who is some form of mercenary/assassin who works through the Web. The game starts with the Resident being killed by an unknown assailant. Resident wakes up to find his or herself back online but unable to log-off. Some entity called Ringer has linked the Resident's brain directly to the Web and now virtually controls the seriously injured mercenary. Ringer offers to replace the ruined body of Resident with cybernetics on completion of a mission. As a side plot, the Resident can also discover the identity of his or her attacker. I've already mentioned my misgivings about the menu driven way of entering commands in the Promoted! review. However in this case, it actually enhances the atmosphere and goes with the nature of the game. It will take a little while for the player to understand how the game works, but after that it works well. I really did feel that I was exploring a virtual reality, with programs and web sites/bulletin boards given actual physical forms. There is a security program in the guise of a robot in one location and an amusing incident outside the "Shareware Shack." Puzzles are straightforward and logical and seem similar in scope to Prospect, perhaps this is due to the Rexx original having a certain style of play. On the other hand, the puzzles are not really original (few are) but old favourites given a new lick of paint. I have yet to complete the game, but I have found a number of typing and spelling errors that do the game down. I haven't found any bugs and as the parser is menu driven, vocabulary isn't a problem. In summary Resident is a clever game with good atmosphere and logical puzzles only let down by a few spelling and typing errors. - o -