I haven’t read the novel, but I have played the game. When I played it, it was new, and it was really slow to load levels, which made it kind of a pain to play, but I did restore a good 3/4 of the ship robot thingy’s face.
I spent days on it. I did finally get the Babel Fish. I think with help by talking about it with friends who had solved other parts of the puzzle… but it got even harder after that!
spoilerFirst you had to put together the improbability drive, then you jumped into different characters’ bodies and had to survive in their bodies AND bring back the items you need to make it an infinite improbability drive and I didn’t get past that, but apparently after that, you land on the planet Magrathea and you have to figure out how to get the door open and that’s where the game ends.
Honestly, if you like text adventures, despite the difficulty, it’s one of the most entertaining ever. Douglas Adams himself wrote most of the text, so even if you don’t get very far, it’s all funny.
Speaking of Star Trek and AI voices… Majel Barrett supposedly recorded her voice so that it could be used in the future by software to make her talk again.
So fuck Google Assistant or whatever. Where’s my Enterprise Computer app for me to talk to?
To be fair, they were often arcade games which required two joysticks. I had a game for my Amiga that I don’t remember the name of that used the keyboard to do it.
Can I go with a game from the 90s? Because the adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is one of the best games I ever played. Ellison himself voices the “evil” computer, AM and instead of trying to win, you have to make the correct moral choices so your character can finally be allowed to die. You play multiple characters (not concurrently), so you have to do this multiple times. It’s brutal but so good. I know very few people who even know it existed.
Don’t underestimate the power of celebrity actors in games in terms of sales. There are people who buy games specifically because certain actors are in them.