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Fooblitzky ('Boardgame' Adventure for 2-4 players)
Compatibility: 128K Apple IIe, IIc, IIgs
Requirements: One disk drive; joystick optional
by Jeff Hurlburt
For years a favorite diversion of experienced game players has been speculation over the question of when (or whether) a certain well-known vendor would publish something besides a text adventure. Perhaps it is only proper that, in the year of the IIgs, Infocom should render the issue moot with the release of "Fooblitzky". Featuring color graphics, windowing, and (gasp!) animation, this full-scale boardgame without the board challenges you to adopt the role of scavenger-hunting hound and be the first to identify and retrieve four secret items.
The game is played on a 36x24-square map of downtown Fooblitzky, only one-fourth of which is shown on-screen at any given time. To make your hunt a little easier, each quadrant of the map has a drugstore, grocery, and other shops selling toys, hardware, pets, and sporting goods. Each kind of store sells the same items, one priced at four foobles, another at eight, and a third selling for sixteen foobles. All drugstores, for instance, sell hairspray (4F), toothpaste (8F), and an eyedropper (16F). Altogether, there are eighteen different items.
To start, each peerless pooch gets to decide one secret item, picked while others look away. (For two or three dog games, the computer picks the rest.) As play commences you have some money and a shopping bag which can hold four items. In addition, one of the item you chose is placed in your locker where it may be picked up at any time by moving to the appropriate square. To win you must go to a "checkpoint" square carrying all four secret items.
You can run your paws ragged, wasting time and foobles, unless the numerous clues and other available resources are employed to best advantage. The price of each secret item, displayed just prior to play, is one example. Another is the information provided by visits you and your fellow hounds make to checkpoint squares. Here carried items are listed and a display shows a check for each correct item, with an "x" for those not correct. However, checks and "x's" are not matched to specific items. (That would be too easy.) Recognizing that all this process of elimination stuff demands careful note-taking, Infocom supplies four super-colorful, 11x17-inch laminated fold-out "workboards", each complete with map, item lists, and ample note space.
Well planned and nicely executed, "Fooblitzky" is a comprehensive computer 'boardgame' that works! For ease of play and just plain fun it actually surpasses some old tried and true die-and-token favorites. Though repleat with such embellishments as game save/restore, a "Chance Man" substitute for stacks of cards, risky street crossings (and a hospital), rapid transit via the Underground (of course) Gliding Highway, restaurants where you can earn foobles licking plates, and much more-- the game's great attraction is the underlying simplicity of the puzzle. Supplied with workboards, felt-tip pens, and superb documentation, "Fooblitzky" sets a high standard for an entirely new kind of high-interaction, multi-player entertainment.
Available from Infocom: 125 Cambridge Park Drive, Cambridge, MA 02140. (617) 492-1031. $39.95
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