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Zork: The Undiscovered Underground  Manufacturer: Activision In Brief: Fun text game harkening back to the Infocom games of old.
The first adventure games I ever played were text adventures. They were a lot of good games back then, but they can be a little tedious to play nowadays when compared to the graphic adventures. All the mapping and stuff, and the almost inevitable maze puzzle. But then I got a Palm Pilot.
They don't have games like Myst and Sanitarium for the Palm Pilot, but there is a textgame interpreter called PalmFrotz (or PilotFrotz) that allows you to play textgames, and that's what I've been doing. I've been playing the games based on size, because I don't have much memory and PalmFrotz seems to need as much free memory as the size of the game. So I played a little of Zork, but it was kind of boring and I stopped. I played a bit of Starcross but didn't like that either. A friend recommended Planetfall, but when I started playing it I realized I'd played it before.
Then I heard about "Zork: The Undiscovered Underground". This was not one of the original Infocom Zork games, but was a promotional effort for either Zork Nemesis or Zork: Grand Inquisitor. And it's so good that I thought, even if it is some a text game in a world of adventure games, people must be told that it exists.
ZTUU is far superior to the Zork text games I've played before. It's one of the best text games I've ever played, although one of the shortest. It's very funny, with the sort of in-joke humor of Zork: Grand Inquisitor. You are a hapless adventurer forced to explore a recently uncovered section of the Underground Empire armed with a plastic sword and a cheap souvenir lantern. You must solve a series of challenging but logical puzzles (I didn't cheat once, although I was stuck a few times) and you can have a bad win or a good win, both of which are amusing.
This is the perfect game to play on a Palm Pilot. There's no need for mapping, there are only a handful of locations, and the one maze that exists ("the theatre rows are laid out in the 'twisty little passages all alike' manner popular at the time") you don't need to enter (and, in fact, you'll be made fun of if you do enter it). The whole thing is loads and loads of fun. -- Charles Herold -2000
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