The Broken String Punk-Rock Interactive Fiction Harel Malka and Ran Kramer (TADS text adventure for the PC - part of Disk 1064) Reviewed by Neil Shipman You wake to another morning in your filthy squat, deep in despair that the great days of punk are over. Your friends have dropped out of the punk scene and got into rave-acid-techno-dance or, worse still, MTV. The police have evicted most of the squatters and your band has folded. But there's still that driving anger in you, that one last rage against the system. Punk's not dead yet, not if you can do anything about it. There are still some punks out there in the city and together you can make the scene live again. Now I'm too long in the tooth to have been a punk and, before I played Broken String, I knew very little about the culture. But for players like me there's a lot of detail included in a folder you find at the start of the game. It contains everything you ever wanted to know (and probably an awful lot you didn't) about anarchism, punk music, sub-classes of punk like hardcore and straight edge, skinheads, MTV, squats and the Animal Liberation Front. Did you know, for example, that bands like Crass espoused anarcho pacifism, that NoFx or Lagwagon played melodic hardcore, that Straight Edge punks don't smoke, don't take drugs, don't drink alcohol or eat meat and that the skinhead movement was originally multi-racial? Armed with a few useful items like a packet of gelatin and an egg (to fix your hair into a Mohican!), some veggie food and your stash (well you're not a Straight Edger are you?), you exit onto the city streets. The location descriptions of the gameplay area between 2nd and 7th Street and 22nd and 27th Avenue are bleak to say the least but you could say that their very terseness - 'You are in yet another nothing to do, boring street' or 'Everything in these streets is so grey' - actually enhances the nihilistic nature of the adventure. There are a number of fairly simple tasks for you to achieve in order to set you on the road for getting a band together and holding a gig in the B.C.B.G. Club like the Glow Skulls, Glue Gun and Boris The Sprinkler used to do. These include finding a missing kid and getting him back to his grateful parents, queuing up for your dole money, expressing your disgust at the fur trade by lobbing a brick through the local furrier's window, finding some sixties records for the pawn shop owner and going to a play in an abandoned warehouse. There are a few people to talk to - Jake in the Red Fox pub, Mike in the record shop, Elton in the music store and Dick the club owner will all respond to questions but their answers don't often impart much useful information. I'm not as used to playing text adventures as I used to be and this undoubtedly affects the ease with which I can find the right input. A few years ago I didn't mind struggling for ages but, as time has gone on, I find it increasingly frustrating to know what I want to do, be pretty sure that I've got all the right objects to enable me to do it, yet not be able to find the right two or four word input. I'm currently stuck in Broken String trying to open a door with a crowbar - so if anyone else has done this please let me know. Other difficulties and annoyances in addition to the limited vocabulary are a number of bugs and, of course, the obligatory errors in spelling and grammar (although, thankfully, these are relatively few). If you're a punk with a hankering for your past then Broken String might interest you but, other than educating me in the details of punk culture, I found it had little to offer. ------------------ In Frobs We Trust! ------------------ - o -