Zork: Grand Inquisitor
          (ADVENTURE)


   In the first of many clever references to its predecessors in the Zork
   series, Grand Inquisitor opens with a bald foppish dictator banning
   the use of magic throughout the Great Underground Empire. For gamers
   who plodded through the rather tedious Return to Zork and oddly
   humorless Zork Nemesis, the plot device is an obvious metaphor for
   what has happened to the longest-running series (20 years!) in
   computer gaming. Zork's signature wit and absurdity seemed to have
   been lost in the jump from text to graphic adventuring. Well, the
   magic may be gone from the land, but it has not vanished from the
   game. Grand Inquisitor is the best graphical Zork yet, and one of the
   most consistently entertaining adventures of the year.
   
   Of course, your job is to usurp the technocratic Grand Inquisitor and
   his repressive anti-magic policies. After a brief visit to Port
   Foozle, you locate the Great Underground Empire and spend much
   of the game hunting down the three lost artifacts (the Coconut of
   Quendor, the Skull of Yoruk, and the Cube of Foundation) that will
   restore magic to Zork. All that remains of last year's Nemesis title
   is the basic gaming interface. Full motion video sequences punctuate
   your movement among static, prettily drawn settings. The "Z-Vision"
   device is here again, letting you spin 360 degrees in place at various
   locations for a more involving view of the terrain. Very handy menus
   of usable objects and magic spells appear at the top of the screen,
   and a good inventory screen lets you examine and combine the many
   found objects and learned spells along the way.
   
   While the basic item-gathering and puzzle-solving of Grand Inquisitor
   is far from innovative, the triumph of the game is its seamless, witty
   execution. Enemies of the Inquisitor are "totemized," squished and
   consigned to spend eternity in steel reinforced hockey pucks. One such
   resistor, a wiseass Dungeon Master, is sealed within a lantern and
   accompanies you through much of the journey. He blurts asides to most
   of your unsuccessful actions: "Ooh! That's gotta hurt." And these
   snide characterizations form the real charm of the game. A two-headed
   Cerebus blocks you at Hell's door, mocking your standard attempts to
   get by. "Go ahead, dig into the old inventory. Something's gotta
   work!" A pair of talking torches, one grumpy and the other neurotic,
   refuses to be picked up or to work properly in certain situations.
   Thankfully, and unlike most "humorous" computer adventures, the
   scripting is genuinely funny and well acted. 
   
   The puzzles themselves are familiar Zorkisms. How do you retrieve the
   Coconut of Quendor from the soft palate of that sleeping dragon with
   some combination of inflatable toys, a gold tooth, and a bicycle pump?
   What exactly is the use of a magic spell that makes the color purple
   invisible? Of course, you will need to figure out how to make the
   Totemizer machine work in your favor and decipher a cryptic map of
   prison cells in order to free poor Dirk Benedict - the usual reverse
   engineering tasks of the computer adventurer. They are not tiresome or
   gratuitous, however. Grand Inquisitor succeeds in keeping the
   obstacles solvable and sensible (in a Zorky kind of way) within the
   fictional world.
   
   The weaknesses are few and forgivable. The game world feels too small
   and short-lived. Much of the hunting and gathering involves fewer than
   a dozen major areas, like the Great Underground Empire University,
   the Dungeon Master's house, and the Monastery. Brief hops into Hades
   and Port Foozle are fun too, but I wished for greater vistas to explore.
   It all ends in about 15 hours of playtime. And the only irritating part of
   the gameplay comes from the Z-Vision spinning panorama. The cursor changes
   to a directional pointer when you face a new open area to explore, but
   some of these places are so close together that you can overlook an
   essential little niche too easily.
   
   Compact and unspectacular as it is, Zork: Grand Inquisitor is a model
   of adventure gaming as good entertainment. Many of the genre's
   conventions (FMV, item hunting, absurdist humor) get polished to a
   high sheen here. It is funny and reflexive without being geeky or
   pointlessly ironic. The third-string actors exploit their comic
   trademarks to good effect. Real attention is paid to the pacing of the
   whole affair, so there are no overly quiet dead zones of tedious
   activity. And the puzzles are fun to solve rather than gratuitous
   brain-teasing exercises.

   Finally, this Zork adventure is definitely the best I have played, fun
   graphically breathtaking and the people at Activision have proved that
   they can still cook up stories for the Zork adventures. I wonder and
   wait eagerly what's next.