Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: Let me tell you about Zork: Grand Inquisitor

[quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"][quote name="Jerry Whorebach"][quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"]Oh, I just remembered the other thing - I liked the opening to Oblivion better than Morrowind. "Break Picard out of jail" is better than "fill out these forms." If that's what they went with to open, I'm sure the stuff they shot down involved the game giving you a vacuum cleaner, a push into town and binding the left mouse button to "knock."[/quote] I know you love Zork, but I don't know how you feel about First-Person Graphic Adventures (or M.Y.S.T.s), so maybe you're not aware that's exactly how Erick Avari's <i>Zork: Grand Inquisitor began.</i> Or maybe you are aware, in which case I just dropped road flares around your flaming wreck of an allusion.[/quote] There wasn't, and hasn't been any game I've been more psyched to buy than Zork: Grand Inquisitor. That thing, in my mind, was gonna be awesome. I was all happy to have an Internet connection at home at the time, and I read everything I could find on the game. I'd read the same articles over and over again. There was "Zork: Nemesis" a few years earlier, but that was just a generic adventure game that had Zork added at like the last second. It was okay, I thought. Not very Zorky. Man, this Grand Inquisitor thing was gonna be awesome. They - Activision - released a free text game to promote Z:GI. It was, haaaa, it was okay! Hey what the fuck, it was just great to get NEW content from two old Implementers. It was like what I heard viewing Star Trek: the Motion Picture was like when it came out. Who cared if it wasn't a classic, it was just great to get everyone back together. Z:GI was going to be Star Trek II: Fucking Awesome! I got the game, and you are right to call it "Eric Avari's Grand Inquisitor." He's the only guy trying to save that thing. Rip Taylor? Rip fucking Taylor? Rip Goddamn Taylor is in the game, wacky! Dirk Benedict, who is still Dirk Benedict. It was like putting Bea Arthur and Art Carney in the Star Wars Holiday Special. The only two characters worth caring about is the announcer dude and the Grand Inquisitor himself. But who cares about characters, that was never very Zork-like. Well, I played that groveling lump of shitware through as many Myst-like puzzles as I could stand, engaging in the one kind of game that is little but eye candy and "use shit x on fuckhead y" that text games were always better than. Where will I use this spell? Ho, ho, ho, Zork reference! Is it time for this spell? Ah, what's this? A worthy challenger awaits, for me to click on! The last thing I did in Zork: Grand Inquisitor was stand before a totem pole while the game told me, literally told me, that I would be engaging in an exercise of clicking. Not only was I going to do stupid shit that I hated all the way back in the 7th Guest, but the game was going to break the fourth wall to make me feel like an empty asshole for buying it. Fuck Zork: Grand Inquisitor, fuck Activision, and fuck the assholes who made that lazy, tiresome, derivative piece of look-good garbage. There will never be another Zork game, Z:GI killed the entire franchise that had been going strong, with a release every few years, since 1977. Killed it by adopting gameplay that a text game was the complete opposite of in every respect. Where you could once type in anything, Zork turned to something where you are reduced to clicking on a hot spot. Z:GI exists to now be nothing more than a punchline as we talk about games that are better in every respect. ... ... I guess this is where I say I'd rather have a buffalo take a diarrhea dump in my ear. ICJ[/quote]