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The term "state of the art" is often misguidedly applied to things not worthy of the accolade. However, having spent many hours exploring the bizarre world of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, I am now convinced that the art of computer adventures should always be in this state!

Hitchhikers, the computer game, comes from the Infocom stable, famous for such thoroughbreds as Deadline and the Zork trilogy. All Infocom's products feature highly sophisticated language interaction and have been labelled "Interactive Fiction", rather than adventures. A description which perfectly describes a good night's interaction with Hitchhikers.

Adams and Infocom collaborated on the project from start to finish and this marriage of talent has proved an unqualified success with much of the text being original rather than taken straight from the book or the play or the radio series or the feature film or the T-shirts, or the...!

Having spent so long hitchhiking around the galaxy, I'm not about to make it easy for anyone else but a few ditties should serve to wet your appetite.

As in the book, the game starts with you, Arthur Dent, trying to persuade a particularly silly civil servant that demolishing your home to make way for a motorway wouldn't be at all friendly!

Still, none of this matters because the Earth's going to be destroyed in twelve minutes to make way for a new Hyper-Space Bypass being built by a Vogon Constructor Fleet.

Having hitched a lift off the Earth with your friend, Ford Prefect, who, you have just discovered, is really a researcher for the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you are captured by the Vogons.

The Vogon captain insists on reading you some of his poetry (the second worst thing in the Galaxy, according to the Guide!) before throwing you out into space.

So, Babel fish in ear, you are flung out into space and are picked up by the Heart of Gold, a revolutionary new ship powered by the Improbability Drive. To reveal just what exactly you would have to do would spoil your enjoyment, but suffice it to say that in order to do it you must "become" other characters in the plot!

The best way to illustrate this is with a couple of examples... On the bridge of the Heart of Gold, you find a handbag containing a pair of tweezers. Later on you wake up at a party and you are being chatted up by Arthur Dent (he who you just were!) from whom you get a Very Important Thing (V.I.T.) which you put in your handbag. Back in the future, as Arthur Dent again, you examine the contents of the handbag on the bridge of the Heart Of Gold, only to discover that tweezers have been joined by the V.I.T...!

As if that wasn't enough, how about being on board a microscopic spaceship heading into battle when it's swallowed by a dog! Suddenly, you remember a dog yapping outside the pub where you and Ford went drinking six minutes before the Earth was destroyed. In fact, if you have brought a cheese sandwich from the pub and fed it to the dog, this is what would have happened...

"The dog is deeply moved. With powerful sweeps of its tail, it indicates that it regards this cheese sandwich as one of the great cheese sandwiches. Nine out of ten pet owners could happen by at this point expressing any preference they pleased, but this dog would spurn them and all their tins. This is a dog which has met its main sandwich. It eats with passion, and ignores a passing microscopic space fleet."

This is just one example of the detail and humour of the text in Hitchhikers, which will appeal to all lovers of Adams as well as more serious adventurers who will find enough puzzles to keep them going for months.

Hitchhikers is a bug-free, highly interactive and excruciatingly funny adventure. I'm convinced it's a major contribution to mental derangement and definitely worth buying a disk drive for.