Continuing my occasional series of C64 and Spectrum games by Mel Croucher (see Deus Ex Machina), I present “iD”.

I played iD on an the Speculator spectrum emulator, unlike a lot of emulators this one actually works and loads all file formats. Unfortunately it costs money, but there is a free trial.

A bit of background, “iD” is a consciousness that over the course of time has inhabited various inanimate objects. Now it inhabits your Spectrum (or erm, IBM X31 laptop…). Your task is to gain iD’s trust and find out what it’s past lives have been.

The above screenshot shows you more or less what the game looks like all the time, that’s right kids it’s text based. A lot of the time when you type in a question or statement iD will simply reply with puerile meaningless nonsense. The particular character of which is coloured by iDs mood happy,lost,crazy etc.
Occassionally you’ll be posed question like the one shown, then get you to confirm the answer. It will remember this answer and use it in future meaningless statements and questions (a la Eliza, but not as clever).

Giving an answer increases your trust score, shown in he bottom right. You may also be asked the same question later on, if you give a different answer you lose trust.

If you ask iD who it is, you’ll get a statement like the one above. This is basically the only clue you’ll get, and some of the clues are quite cryptic. Guess the right object and your trust level will increase significantly. In the end trust will reach 99% (oddly enough) and iD will leave your Spectrum, probably forever as it’s not really worth replaying. The whole process probably takes around an hour.

iD isn’t a great game, it’s possibly not even a very good game. With iD you have to make your imagination do most of the work, suspend disbelief and imagine a consciousness really is in your speccy. That seems to have been Mel Croucher’s thing, try and make you believe, or at least pretend, that your computer is conscious, perhaps in the hope that someday it will be.

I don’t know, quite possibly this game is just bollocks. Even so it is different and aiming a little higher than your average shooter, and as with Deus Ex Machina it is a worthy game for that reason alone.