PIC Video Game Review

Here at Pat Is Crazy, we love video games. Our favorite type of video game: 30 year old games that we can play for free on the internet. So today, we're going to take a look at the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game!

As you may know, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a popular comedy science fiction franchise created by the late Douglas Adams. It originally started as a radio show, and has since been adapted to just about every medium you can think of - books, TV, movies, and 30 years ago, a video game. Fans of the franchise will enjoy the game, while people who aren't familiar with the franchise will find it very difficult to get past the first level (fans of the franchise will find it slightly less difficult).

The game, originally created in 1984 for this new-fangled device called a home computer, is completely text-based. You type in commands like "stand up" or "drink beer" to guide the characters through the story, and hopefully not kill them. You will almost certainly kill them. A lot.

The game is very difficult. Unless you consult a guide (but not the Guide - you don't get that until later in the game), you may give up before you even get out of the room that the game starts in. If you do manage to get out of the room, or even make it all the way to the Heart of Gold, you probably will still fail in the end and have to start all over again, because the game is perfectly happy allowing you to skip over items or actions that are absolutely essential to beating the game with no possibility of back tracking. A good example of this is the Babel fish. You can easily go right on past the level where you get it, and once you do you can't go back, and you can't beat the game without it. In fact, when the game first came out, they started selling "I got the Babel fish" T-shirts because it was so difficult to solve the puzzle necessary to get it. It gets rather frustrating. I've been playing the game for a few days now, and even with cheating by reading some of the hints when I got utterly stuck, I still feel very far away from beating the game.

So if you've read the books, seen the movie, watched the TV show, or traveled back in time, moved to England and listened to the radio program, I encourage you to give the game a try. Adams was heavily involved in the making of the game, and it shows. The writing in the game is top quality, and it has a wide range of commands that it recognizes. If you do decide to play, a word of advice: look at everything, and pick up everything you can - even the pocket fluff. And of course, always know where your towel is.