Journey to Alpha Centauri (In Real Time) / Julian Fleetwood (1998)

Game Information

The Internet has oft been compared to the Wild West of 19th century American yore and lore in various mainstream print publications during the past few years. This is mainly because that particular romantic imagery is a lot more appealing than, say, the image of a lot of little twelve year old boys glued to their respective computer screens trying to find a way past their parents' kiddie lock software so they can view a lot of nekkid porno pictures and then maybe download a gig or two of that crazy c00l war3Z stuff. But also the comparison is fairly accurate to a certain extent. The Internet and the Wild West are/were both lawless, free, vast, and ungovernable. For every livery stable or general store in a two-horse, dusty Western town, there were also a couple whorehouses, saloons, and gambling parlors to be found. Likewise, the Internet. Only in the case of the Internet none of the buildings actually have signs. What looks on the surface like a hardware store, or, say, an interactive fiction review site might turn out to be just another effing brothel. You just have to sort of stumble around blindly to find what you want for the most part. So it is even with our well beloved interactive fiction archive at ftp.ifarchive.org. There was a man named Muckenhoupt who once tried to index the whole archive, but I think he stopped updating regularly around 1997 and of course he's almost completely vanished since November '99 - nobody knows where the heck that guy is. Reviews From Trotting Krips has stepped in and successfully picked up some of the slack, but we've only reviewed a very small portion of the contents of the immense IF archive thus far. When it comes time for me to pick what game I want to download next I pretty much commit myself to the hands of fate and choose something at random that looks like it "might be interesting." Usually it's not because I tend to download a lot of AGT games hoping they'll be better than even I can possibly expect them to be, but I was hopeful as I downloaded "Journey to Alpha Centauri" from the Inform directory of the archive. Sure, it was only 50k, but I've created dozens of stupid little BASIC programs that are a lot smaller than that - even more importantly, I've played a lot of stupid little BASIC programs that are pretty dang good and a lot smaller than 50k(ever played Donkey? Crap, that game ruled.) Unfortunately, this game...just isn't much of a game. It's another frigging joke excuse for a text adventure. OH NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lord have mercy on my poor pitiful soul.

Did I just say this was another frigging joke excuse for a text adventure?

NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Like it or not, that is exactly what this game is. Julian Fleetwood took the concept from a bit of dialogue in some novel by Terry Pratchett: the idea was that if it takes three thousand years to reach Alpha Centauri from the planet Earth, a computer simulation of a journey to Alpha Centauri in real time would also take three thousand years. So, Julian Fleetwood's adapted this concept and made a text adventure out of it. You are placed aboard a spaceship headed for Alpha Centauri. There are no rooms inside the spaceship for you to visit. There are no switches, buttons, or controls that you are allowed to mess with. There is no paranoid robot or hyperintelligent ship computer. None of that. There is, however, a timer on the top of your screen that is slowly counting down every second, minute, hour, day, and year remaining before your voyage to Alpha Centauri is completed. So, essentially, what you can do here is look around the room you're in(not much to see), type "help" and read a few things, type "xyzzy" for laughs, watch the timer count down for a few minutes, and then quit. That, my friend, is the game. The entire game. I peered at the source briefly and there doesn't appear to be any way in which to win the game aside from...umm... leaving your computer on for three thousand real years. The message you get for winning is kind of lame anyway, so I would say that it's just not worth it.

Surprisingly, unlike most other small one-room joke games, this one isn't even implemented that well. Julian had some helpers who aided him in creating the game(and whom he generously notes in the help section) and you'd think would have cleared out most all of the bugs in such a small game as this one, but for some reason I found myself often having to repeat commands before the game recognized them. Even with commands like "help" and "quit" the first time I typed them resulted in a scintillating blank line appearing on my screen rather than the function I requested being invoked. Nothing particularly serious about that - the comp version of Eric Mayer's The HeBGB Horror! also had some similar instances, and that certainly didn't lessen my enjoyment of that game. But it does make this game seem even a little more questionable - okay, it's a joke. Fine. It's got only one room and no objects or NPCs. Fine. But does it also have to be BUGGY? I realize that this game was not uploaded to ftp.ifarchive.org to be an example of a text adventure that is supposed to be brilliant and impressive. Nah. This fellow wrote a game and wanted to share his work with his fellow humans. Nothing wrong with that. But the truth is that in its present form this game is not really anything but clutter - if only a few authors tried a little harder to make their games better there would be an unbelievable reduction in the number of crap games on ftp.ifarchive.org...and that would be better for us all. Better for newbies just getting into IF who might be repelled by a pointless, unwinnable game - better for veterans looking for something to really dig their teeth into - better for me looking for new AGT games that don't suck. Most importantly, it would also be a more satisfying experience for the author of the game to create something that is worthwhile and at least entertaining to play. Eh, I'm probably just wasting my words here anyway...just consider yourself warned: don't go downloading alpha.z5 and expect a game you can really play. Instead, you should download it for the neato timer! Yeah. That's the ticket.

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