Robox

Robox is a German science-fiction adventure for the Commodore 64 from publisher Markt & Technik, and it ranks among the best titles that ever carried the company's logo. It opens quietly: the year is 2036, it is a rainy Sunday, you are sitting at home — and you win a holiday trip to a distant planet. On the way your ship is attacked by UFOs, and after an emergency landing on the planet Mirlandis you learn what you are up against: Robox, half machine and half artificially preserved brain of an ancient ruler, hates everything alive and intends to wipe out life in the universe with his robot army.

It plays as a classic illustrated text adventure. The upper part of the screen shows the current room, below it you type your commands — and the parser is surprisingly capable for its day: beyond basic two-word commands it understands German prepositions and conjunctions, so it accepts noticeably more complex sentences than the average text game of the era. Room pictures load as you enter; F1 switches them off entirely for a faster text-only mode, and F5 lists your inventory.

The adventure is split into three parts and the puzzles stay logical: progress is non-linear, dead ends are rare, and the design plays fair. Only the spaceship section puts you under real pressure, with a thirty-minute time limit. Add an animated title screen with music based on the Battlestar Galactica theme, and you have a production that looked far more expensive than it was.

One big caveat: the entire game is in German, and without a decent command of the language you simply cannot negotiate with the parser. If you do speak it, an honest, fairly built sci-fi adventure awaits; if not, you are left window-shopping. Robox runs at oldgame.cz directly in your browser, no installation and no disk hunting required.