Gamma Force in pit of a thousand screams is quite a rare game, in fact you couldn’t really call it a game in the first place. It’s really an electronic comic book down to the pages being turned over when a new scene is shown. The story is about a group of superhero’s fighting injustice but being the first episode you are introduced to the group one by one first. The threesome consists of a human male with a flaming body much like the human torch in the fantastic four. The other two are an elfish princess and the strongman of the pack is a creature from the sea that looks a bit like the swampthing.
It would be a pretty boring affair just watching the game play out but the gimick was that you did not have to follow the main storyline but there were branches where you can select to view things from another perspective or get a more indept explanation of a certain subject. For example at the start the story of the elfish princess is told and when there is a large fold in the upper right corner of the book you can press SPACE to see a more indept history her originis or you can simply go on with the main story. This gives the game some replay value but it doesn’t mean you have to sit back and start from the beginning of the story instead you can simply rewind. and then get back to the main storyline. Obviously once you’ve finished the entire story there is little else to keep you coming back to the game but this can be said of most games out there. Another thing that made the game different was that is used a lot of vector graphics which means they can be scaled and rotated to a degree, in some places this is used to very good effect almost like a movie. The downside ofcourse is that vector graphics aren’t very detailed compared to regular graphics.
Gamma force is quite a departure from what was available at the time and I applaud Infocom for trying something different. There were actually several other titles made using the engine, Lane Mastodont vs Blubberman, another superhero comic and Zorkquest the only one to get a sequel. I never saw these games before until now so I can’t tell if they were very popular but the fact that there aren’t sequels or more titles leads me to believe they weren’t big sellers. Still the different routes you can take in the story and the story itself are at least worth checking out just don’t expect much interaction.
Overal rating: 6.5/10
This game was released for two different systems here are some notes:
| C64 | Released in 1988. There doesn’t seem to be as much scaling and rotating in the PC version most likely because that is one of the weak points of the C64. In some places it looks better though because of the added colors. |
| DOS | Released in 1988. Because this is CGA (4-color) only it means that most of the game is in black and white which is still better than using that awfull purple some game have. |
| Date added | May-15-2006 16:14 |
| Name | Gamma force in pit of a thousand screams |
| Developer | Tom Snyder productions |
| Publisher | Infocom |
| First released | 1988 |
| Genre | Misc |
