Games:
Circuit's Edge
- Platform: IBM PC Compatible
- Release Date: 1988
- Similar Games: Neuromancer (IBM PC Compatible)
Game Description
It's sometime in the future, near the beginning of the 23rd century in the Budayeen, a small and seedy corner of a North African city. You are Marid Audran, a small time courier and detective, no one special. But, you're about to make something of yourself because you've gotten cybernetic enhancements. With them, you can plug in skill chips that enhance your abilities or give you entirely new ones.Circuit's Edge is a text-based RPG adventure based on George Alec Effinger's novel When Gravity Fails. The game is played by selecting an action from a pull-down menu of possibilities located at the top of the screen, then applying it to an appropriate object.
Commands in the game include look, talk, inventory, action, map and exit. Under the action command you select from choices like chip in or chip out, sleep, fight or get item among others. Different windows include a first person perspective of the world or the inside of various buildings, conversation text, directions (when moving within the city) and an option for a pop-up map of the entire city.
The main objective of the game is to find a notebook for one of the largest crime bosses in Budayeen. If you fail to either find Friedlander Bey's property or are too slow in recovering it, you die and the game starts over. The role playing elements in Circuit's Edge include six attributes: food, stamina, agility, rest, strength and life (depicted by bar graphs).
You navigate around the city by using arrow keys or a mouse and can talk to the characters in the game by typing in a subject you want to talk about. You enter a building simply by facing its door. When wandering the mean streets of the Budayeen, you will be accosted by random thugs looking for money and can be hurt or even killed if you can't fend defend yourself.
The game is played in real time, thus game time passes even if you do nothing. Your world revolves around your apartment in the Budayeen where you can rest to recover from work and save the game. Because of the real time element and the inability to save the game other than in your apartment, it is not possible to save in every situation and time is definitely against you.
Can you survive this dark and moody environment replete with drug dealers, strippers and unsavory criminals from Westwood? Enter a world of the future in Circuit's Edge and give it a try. ~ Kyle Knight, All Game Guide
Roots & Influences
Like many text-oriented RPGs, Circuit's Edge is structurally descended from Zork. Both Circuit's Edge and Zork were published by Infocom. The setting of the game Circuit's Edge is drawn from the George Alec Effinger novel When Gravity Fails, which itself was heavily influenced by Effinger's experiences while living in New Orleans. ~ Richard Gilliam, All Game GuideReview: Enjoyment
Gameplay is nothing special but the game world is thoroughly captivating. ~ Kyle Knight, All Game GuideReview: Overall
Playing Circuit's Edge is like riding a roller coaster. You'll find a lot of things to like but plenty to dislike as well. In the end, though, the game is an enjoyable experience.Chances are that, at the beginning, you'll be happy with the game's graphics as the windows are nicely laid out and the menu system is easily accessible. The graphical depictions of scenes, although not drawn too well, manage to successfully convey the sort of rough and gritty atmosphere that pervades the game world of Circuit's Edge.
But, as you play awhile, you'll be fairly annoyed at the poor font choice. The game utilizes a fat and stumpy font that's somewhat hard on the eyes, especially over an extended period of reading. The font also makes it fairly difficult to pick out key words and phrases within the text descriptions.
The game's music has its highs and lows. As you step out of the first location, you're beset with what could possibly rank among the poorest choices of game music ever encountered. The music you hear as you walk around the streets consists of some cheesy synthesizer sound effects that would only be appropriate in a bad alien abduction movie. On the other hand, the hard rock that's played when you enter seedy nightclub joints is quite good and makes you want to visit these places more often during gameplay.
Circuit's Edge is essentially a text-based adventure type game played without a text parser. Instead of typing your commands, you select actions from a menu at the top of the screen, then select the corresponding item or object on which it is to be applied. As a result, the game is quite limited in the range of actions you're allowed to perform compared to a traditional text-based adventure.
The puzzles also reflect this limitation as most of them are of the fetch and deliver variety. The few that aren't FedEx missions rely on your ability to talk to people and type in an appropriate conversational subject. But, these can deteriorate into annoying "guess the word" games when you know what sort of information you need to extract but don't know the exact wording of the question needed.
The greatest success of Circuit's Edge is its ability to deliver a dark and gritty environment in a way that is quite believable. Because of the immersive quality of the game's atmospheric setting, you'll be willing to overlook the crude graphics and average gameplay.
Circuit's Edge is a world straight from a futuristic cyberpunk writer's wildest dreams. Random violence is a way of life with everything either dark and dirty or super-chromed and glittery and everyone is either surgically or cybernetically modified, insane or both! The game world is easily the best aspect of the game's design and you'll remember it long after you've forgotten everything else about the game.
In most respects, Circuit's Edge is no more than average. Some parts of the game are quite well done but are offset by the parts that are poorly thought out or simply sloppy in their presentation. The game is still an enjoyable experience, though, especially for fans of the cyberpunk genre, mainly due to the atmosphere of the game world. ~ Kyle Knight, All Game Guide
