YMPT ON THE QT

We've put our ears to the ground to bring you the latest rumors and speculations:

• Hard-hitting football sim Madden 09 will receive a sequel by the end of the year.


• Look for a certain big-name publisher to have the "vision" to snap up some smaller developers during the current economic malaise.


• Multiple sources have told YMPT that Nintendo is planning to release a stripped-down console whose main selling point is "motion control." But will it compete with the HD behemoths?

YMPT EXCLUSIVE: Zork HD

You may be wondering where You Must Play This has been these past few months. The answer is simple. We've been on the beat, obtaining our very first exclusive, which we can now reveal: Zork HD! We traveled to Santa Monica, CA, in December to get the first look at this exciting remake of the text adventure classic coming to Xbox Live Arcade this summer.

Now, before the fanboys start spamming the message boards, know this: the game, true to the original, will feature NO visuals. Not even on the title screen. "The Zork universe already exists in gamers' minds," states Zack Grueman, lead programmer at upstart studio Go There Games. "Nothing we could create would compare to that. I don't think the public wants Zork imagery, anyway."

But if there are no graphics, why remake a text adventure in today's world of eye-bleeding high def visuals? Explains Grueman: "People talk about the mind-boggling graphics of a Gears of War or a Killzone, but as an old text adventure geek, what really struck me the first time I turned on an Xbox 360 was how crisply it rendered text - I mean, I could read every last word of the damn legal screen! Immediately I started thinking about Zork."

Once the proper licenses were obtained, Grueman's team set to work reformatting the original game's text in a pleasing Gill Sans font. They then tackled the problem of translating keyboard commands to a gamepad, eventually settling on a setup similar to a cell phone keypad. A box appears in the lower-right portion of the screen, with cut into eight segments - the top segment is labeled ABC, to the right of that is DEF, and so on. Move the left stick in the direction of the letter you want, press the A button, and predictive spelling will take care of the rest. Press the B button to cycle through possible permutations. To spell T-A-K-E, for example, you would press Down-A, Up-A, A, Up-Right-Diagonal-A. For anyone who has sent a text message, the system is intuitive. One wonders why Microsoft hasn't implemented this feature into the Dashboard.

After clearing all of these hurdles, one technical issue remained. "The game looked like crap on a standard TV at first," Grueman admits. "And, since the game is totally text-based, we couldn't just tell gamers to put up or shut up like Capcom did with Dead Rising. We realize that a large portion of the gaming audience hasn't made the jump to high definition, and we also recognize there's a small contingent of Zork fans out there that will play the game in nothing but its old-school, pixelated glory." To that end, Go There Games is offering a "Classic" mode featuring the original font in one of three monochromatic colors: green, orange, or white. "The only difference between this and the original Zork you played on your Amiga is that we've enlarged the text for television," Grueman says. "I think both SDTV owners and Zork enthusiasts will be pleased."

YMPT played builds on both a dinky old Zenith CRT and a 42-inch Samsung flat screen in 1080p. Both versions took us right back to 1980. Zork is back!

Must you play this? Let's answer that with a hypothetical situation:

You are browsing the New Games section of Xbox Live Arcade. You see that Zork HD has just been released.

>buy zork
Zork HD bought. Enjoyment ensues.