Look, look at, examine and (+Deadline)

Spoilers
#1

**>**look at lawn
The lawn is well manicured.

**>**examine lawn
The lawn is well manicured.

**>**check lawn
Sergeant Duffy appears with a puzzled look on his face. “With all respect, I don’t think I can take THAT to the laboratory! I’ll be nearby if you need me.” He leaves, shaking his head slowly.

**>**check house
Sergeant Duffy appears with a puzzled look on his face. “With all respect, I don’t think I can take THAT to the laboratory! I’ll be nearby if you need me.” He leaves, shaking his head slowly.

hah, just found out that check is a different verb in Deadline. who would tell?..

#2

Oh, the horrible memories of Ms Dunbar…

A friend and I played a lot of Infocom when we were kids, but Deadline was the one game we never even came close to figuring out. That thing was hard… no wonder, I guess, if there were unexpected secret command and such.

#3

BTW:

**>**ask Ms Dunbar about will
Which will do you mean, the new will or the present will?

LOL, don’t you hate when vital information about the world model get away like that?

I’m still to make a real serious effort at this classic - and certainly IFComp is not the time - but one thing it does get right is the writing, which really resembles, text economy aside, those from Raymond Chandler, clean descriptions from a P.I. point of view. I’m sure to play it and The Witness.

#4

From Wikipedia:

A bug in the program made it possible to follow a certain set of instructions that resulted in Ms. Dunbar dying while another Ms. Dunbar continued to walk around the house. Upon hearing the gunshot that killed Ms. Dunbar, the alive version of Ms. Dunbar executed her AI script faithfully and ran into the room to see what had happened. This led to an amusing exchange with the game parser:

examine dunbar
Which Ms. Dunbar do you mean: Ms. Dunbar, or the body of Ms. Dunbar?

I actually think I remember that happening, but it was so long ago. The game was released in 1982, and it was probably not long after that we were playing it. Even now it would be a quite difficult game, but we were ten year old kids, and this was long before the internet and the age of walkthroughs, youtube playthroughs, etc, so there was no consolation when you were stuck.

I also recall from that era being a bit jealous of my friend. We mostly played Infocom games at his house, because he had a Commodore 64 and most of the games were available for that platform. I on the other hand had a TI 99/4A, and the only title Infocom ever released for that machine was Suspended.

You’re right about the tone, which was well written. The game also had first-rate supplementary materials.