Posted on: June 19, 2018

Hanglyman

Games: 444 Reviews: 141

I Love Douglas Adams, But... No.

As a huge fan of Adams' books, this game seemed to promise a witty, funny, lively experience onboard an exotic starship filled with colorful characters. While the characters are certainly interesting and they do have several witty, funny lines, the overall experience is stark and kind of depressing- wandering around a desolate, sterile, empty ship, only occasionally chatting with someone and quickly exhausting the 10 or 12 lines of dialogue they have to offer, after which they seem like exactly what they are- hollow, malfunctioning robots. Even the parrot, simultaneously the most obnoxious and funniest character, gets stale pretty quickly. The ship itself is rather ugly and sparse and not very much fun to explore. As for the puzzles, they're a mix- some are fair or even easy, others are virtually impossible without a walkthrough. There are almost no hints given anywhere in the game, few indications of what to do or where to go, and the controls are so bad that for several puzzles I had trouble solving them even while following a guide- for example, there's a part where you have to knock something from a tree with a stick. Any other game, you'd just drag the stick over the tree, and indeed most of THIS game works like that. But for this one puzzle you have to drag the stick and wiggle it around for several seconds, with no indication that anything is happening. Anyone playing the game fairly would assume the stick wasn't the solution and never be able to progress. Another puzzle seemed to glitch out when I provided the solution the first time, forcing me to load an earlier save and do things in a slightly different order, which shouldn't have made a difference. And a puzzle involving a light bulb is so obtuse you wouldn't know it even IS a puzzle right up until you solve it. Some of this, particularly the visual design, is forgivable considering the era the game was released, but the gameplay is atrocious. It's worth a play, but keep a guide handy- you'll need it.

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Posted on: November 3, 2019

RetroRocker

Verified owner

Games: 312 Reviews: 2

Unplayable without ScummVM- seriously

Do yourself a favour and go to the ScummVM site, download and install it, then once you've got Starship Titanic from Gog, you can use it to run the game without any of the problems that make it literally unplayable- without it, I couldn't even perform the very first actions you need to do as soon as the game starts. Why Gog haven't done anything to fix this is remarkable. The actual game of course, is exactly what you'd expect from a Douglas Adams point-and-click adventure game. If you know exactly what you're getting into with this genre, you'll enjoy it immensely.

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Posted on: February 23, 2018

_X_X_X_X_

Verified owner

Games: Reviews: 16

neither funny nor fun

Cannot recommend this game at all. The puzzles are so arbitrary that often I did not even notice that there is something to achieve and almost never was any kind of logic to proceed. In fact most puzzles requiere objects placed (often invisible or unrecognizeable) at completely arbitrary locations which might not even be interactable before performing an arbitrary action at a completely differnt, unrelated location - sometimes repeatable. Without any feedback indicating that your actions have an effect att all. This type of trial & error would already be a nusicance with small levels in a perfectly working game, but Starship Titanic's puzzles are over the whole ship and I had several cases of required interactions not working at all or crashing the game. Did I mention that two times you even have to interact in a not-point-&-click style with not-hot-spots? Cherry on top are severly limited controls and repetitive, long cutscenes on transits, making this game slow paced even when following a walkthrough. The nice artwork can fill the entertainment gap briefly, as the low res graphics (even by 98' standards) can only hint at the creative potentiall, the quirky characters are more interrupting than helping the gameflow and Adams' backstory is mostly hidden behind a single puzzle requiering half a dozen interactions at arbitrary locations. Talking about Adams: If your are looking for humour, you should take the Starship Titanic book by Terry Jones. It is nowhere near HHGG, but an entertaining read whereas the game does hide most of its humour deeply in the text parser. Only thing really nice on the Starship Titanic Game is the voice acting. Most convenient way to consume this is the walkthrough on Youtube.

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Posted on: May 6, 2017

AjaxFitton

Verified owner

Games: 40 Reviews: 1

A brilliant game.

This has to be my absolute favourite game. It has the strong interactive storytelling element that was required to make text based games enjoyable, but it's also mixed that with a graphic user interface that makes the game a little more visually appealing. This game hasn't aged all that well (it being a game created on the cusp of 3D graphics creation), but with its style of gameplay; that doesn't detract from the experience. The GOG version is the standard patched version and I had to do a whole lot of stuffing around before I could make it work, but I got there in the end.

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Posted on: September 18, 2015

GuidoJanssens

Games: 245 Reviews: 17

Nomen Est Omen

Although the game promises to have a graphical interface it really is just an upgraded text adventure with some simple click and point interaction. Visual effects have been programmed into 446 AVI files, so there is really a lot to watch, but it starts getting tedious after a while anyway as 'moving around' inside a room isn't always as simple and easy as it looks. In order to solve a puzzle, some objects lying on the floor have to be taken but due to the fact that the right slide has to be triggered before this can be done this becomes a rather frustrating experience. At the end of the game you have to resuscitate the ship's main computer, Titania, and this robotic creature gabbers nearly for five minutes without the possibility to shut her up. While she is explaining what has happened to the ship and who may be responsible for all this and why she thinks you should take the helm and lead us back to Earth the only thing you can think of is that it was a big mistake to wake her up to begin with. Douglas Adams himself can be seen two times in the game, once as the enthusiast author ordering us to hurry up with the game (a237.avi), the second time as Leovinus (a113.avi) in something that can be defined as being the most boring epilogue for a game ever. It's the description of the game in a nutshell, I can only deduct that somewhere during the development of the software the creators must have lost the interest (or the money). It's a pity, because the conversation engine that can handle more than 5000 situations and contains, apparently, 10000+ sentences is a real treat. Ask about The Beatles, about Monty Python, about Douglas Adams, 42, Life, the Universe and Everything, the maximum air velocity of an unladen swallow and you'll get some very daft answers. Forget the game - just keep talking to the bots, that is were the fun is... Full review: http://atagong.com/archives/2006/10/entry_300.html

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