Sneak Previews

World Under Glass, a new Inform game-in-progress by Chris Bethea (synthbrain@aol.com), is a race against the clock to save the Earth from the fiery doom that your psychic powers have foreseen. As the game begins, you are in the house you've inherited from your uncle and are trying to find the key for a huge steel door in the basement. Through that basement door is an entryway to an astral plane, where you'll find a kooky store with pocket-doom triggers, a universal translator, a mean little demon and a psychic fountain. A brief trip through a green maze will send you to a time portal, where you hurtle through dimensions only to be tried in a court of horrors to determine whether the earth is worthy of being allowed to survive. You have only 600 turns to accomplish your mission, or say goodbye to Planet Earth! "World Under Glass" will be a freeware game; it has an expected release date of March 25.

A Day in the Life, the first complete game written in the adventure language ALAN, takes place aboard a starship in the distant future. Written by Marc Sachs (sachs@crayola.cse.psu.edu) and inspired by Infocom's "Suspended", this science fiction adventure gives players the unique perspective of acting as an artificially intelligent being embodied inside a computer. Life as an AI is no picnic, however; ever since another AI apparently went berserk several years ago and caused a horrible disaster that no one will discuss with you, your kind have been reviled and gradually replaced by a dumbed-down generation of computer systems. You find yourself shunted off as a backup program while another computer flies the starship Floodland and its cryogenically frozen human cargo between the distant space colonies, until one day a terrible calamity overtakes your ship. The controlling computer is wrecked and the crippled spacecraft is on a collision course with an inhabited planet. Much to your surprise, you are reactivated and given control of three shipboard robots to help you correct the situation and avert disaster. As you fight to save the ship, you must contend with damaged systems, corrupted and hostile computers, and your three eccentric robot charges who each have their own unique abilities and world views. Sachs plans to release the game in Amiga format by the beginning of summer, and in PC format immediately afterwards. He also plans to release the source code to help anyone who might be programming with ALAN. "The game will be completely freely distributable," Sachs adds, "as long as people are playing interactive fiction, I'll be happy!"

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