Star Cruiser is an interactive text adventure which was originally written for the TRS-80 in 1980. It is the second adventure game I’ve played from Roger M. Wilcox’s collection of games that he wrote between 1980 and 1983.
These games were never released commercially but were written by the author for his own enjoyment or for a close group of family and friends. Roger M. Wilcox as part of a “remembering my past” endeavor rewrote his old games as a WPF .NET application. Mr. Wilcox also provides the complete Visual C# source code for the game on his website. You’ll have to install the full .NET 4.0 framework if you want to enjoy this collection of games.
The premise of this adventure is that an alien space ship has landed in your hometown. Several people have managed to enter the ship to investigate it but only one ever managed to make it out. Now it’s your turn to enter and explore the alien vessel.
There are 23 different locations to explore in Star Cruiser with many of them blocked by an opponent or locked door or gate. The solutions to bypass the obstacles are not surprising and make practical sense. One of the puzzles which might have presented some difficulty to players even has it’s solution hidden in descriptive text. All of the puzzles require that you find a particular item or key to get past said obstacle.
One of the more difficult puzzles involved a menacing black sphere at one of the security checkpoints that blocks your progress and can even kill you. It took some trial and error but one of the items that you find on the ship is a silver ball. When you throw the silver ball at the black sphere it creates a “hole” in the entity which causes it to wink out of existence. This solution was a bit obtuse, however, simple trial and error with the items in your inventory would have gotten you through this puzzle.
Once you are in the control room of the alien vessel you are presented with a panel of 3 buttons. Pressing button number 1 begins an automatic self destruct countdown. Pressing button number 2 ends the self destruct sequence if you first pressed button 1 otherwise nothing seems to happen. If you press button number 3 the above message is displayed; ending the adventure.
Star Cruiser was a short game that took me about 20 to 25 minutes to beat. It was just as enjoyable as Misadventure and again I felt like I was playing an entry short for an interactive adventure Game Jam. I am glad that Roger M. Wilcox decided to make his private game collection available to the public. If you’re a historian it presents yet another “category” of games that we’re being introduced to and if you enjoy playing interactive fiction Mr. Wilcox presents you with a lot of choices.