Amazon.com (ISBN 0345368436, Paperback)

Starship Titanic is a science-fiction adventure set aboard a colossal spaceship (which is named after a fairly well-known cruise ship from the planet Earth). It seems that something has gone horribly wrong aboard the Starship Titanic--a fact that becomes evident as the vessel slams into the cozy confines of your living room. Now, at the request of the ship's robotic crew, you must go aboard, figure out what went wrong, and fix it.

The game uses impressively rendered graphics to depict Starship Titanic's opulent interior. For the most part, you can make your way through the ship and the game using the mouse as you would in Myst. For conversations with the robot attendants, you use the keyboard and the game's text parser. This combination of contemporary adventure-game graphics and classic-style text conversations works well.

As with any adventure game, this one has a lot of puzzles for you to solve. And like everything else Douglas Adams comes up with, the puzzles in this game are complex, challenging, and often downright silly. You'll have to disarm a bomb, for example, that has a 20-digit "combination" and that constantly taunts you. (Monty Python's John Cleese plays the voice of the bomb.) You'll also have to deal with an annoying, chicken-eating parrot (played by Terry Jones, another Python veteran and author of the Starship Titanic novel).One thing to keep in mind as you play Starship Titanic is that the puzzles will leave you frustrated at times. That's OK--in fact, that's probably what Adams had in mind from the start--because most of the solutions to these puzzles are incredibly bizarre and unusual. If you get really stuck, the DoorBot and BellBot can usually be of some assistance.

Even with a little help from these automated assistants, however, Starship Titanic will have you puzzling for hours and hours. --Michael Ryan