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This might be the best parody game ever made. Bureaucracy is a hilarious game
written by Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy creator Douglas Adams. The plot is simple
enough: you have just moved to a new town and must get your bank to acknowledge your
change of address form before embarking on your all-expense paid trip to Paris. That
the game is something special is obvious when you open the box - freebies, which are
Infocom's hallmark, are among the best you'll ever see: everything from the Popular
Paranoia magazine to four copies of Beezer Card application will make you laugh out
loud even before you install the game. Once you do, you'll be treated to a
rollercoaster ride of a plot that contains more twists and turns than Adams' zany
novels, seeing your on-screen alter ego suffer Bureaucratic mishaps that range from
missed flight connections to surly waitresses. The puzzles are as difficult as any
other Infocom game (it was written by the same guy who invented the Babel Fish puzzle,
after all), but they do follow some logic no matter how twisted it may be (how you
dispose of the stew on the airplane is one good example). There are many well-developed
characters who represent some of the most annoying people you meet in real-life, from
the delivery man to Random Q. Hacker. Bureaucracy, quite rightly, has become the
standard by which almost all tongue-in-cheek games about real life are measured, and
has been imitated many times but seldom equalled. |