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Hotels | Shows | Concerts | Golf | Dining | Tours | Tickets | About Us | More Info | Contact | Buy Now | Links | Info Meet my friend, Deep Throat By Jack Kernen Majestic is the perfect game for people with no friends. If you're moping around because no one calls you, no one likes you, and even a death threat would make you feel a little better, this is the game for you. This game will call you, e-mail you, fax you and send you messages through an Internet chat program. You don't have to be alone ever again. You will get the occasional death threat, but that's better than no one calling you at all, right? If you're a paranoid narcissist, you'll really love this game. Majestic sets you up as the most important player in an international conspiracy involving aliens, nanotechnology, several murders, arson, mind control, the FBI, CIA, NSA and several other organizations with sinister acronyms. You're Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, Agent Cooper, the Matthew Broderick character in War Games, and the Kevin Costner character in JFK all wrapped into one heroic person, who is so spectacularly skilled that you can do all your hero-work while sitting behind your computer. Me being a paranoid narcissist with no friends, I'm fascinated by Majestic. It does have a few flaws, but these are easily forgiven because the concept is so audaciously ambitious. Think of it as a reality TV show, but without the TV show, and just enough reality to make it interesting. Here's how it works: You go to www.majestic.ea.com and download the first trial episode for free. (If you keep playing, it will cost you $9.95 a month to play.) You'll have to give your credit card number, which is annoying, and you'll have to install AOL Instant Messenger, which is also annoying, but after that you're good to go. Get ready for mysterious phone calls. The first one comes about an hour after you start playing. It's from a mysterious man known as Deep Throat, his voice so horse you'll want to mail him a box of cough drops. I recommend getting the Majestic calls at work so you can have co-workers listen in over the speaker phone, which might help out with your no-friends problem. Most of the game is web-based, with you cruising through various websites (some fake, some real) solving various puzzles of varying difficulty. A small sample: If you scour a particular website enough, you find a piece of letterhead for a company that was recently blown up. On the letterhead is a phone number in Oregon. You call the number, but all you get is an answering machine. The next day, you'll receive a small video clip where one of the company's execs reveals his voice mail passcode. You call the office number again, and this time you enter the passcode. Eureka! You are now listening to that guy's voice-mail, which gives you another clue and off you go. Every day, there are new puzzles to solve, and with each solution, the plot advances a bit through the gimmicks mentioned earlier, phone calls, e-mail, etc. I look forward to each contact, even though I know it's just about the geekiest thing ever to wait next to the phone for a computer pretending to be assassin to call and command me to end my investigation or pay the price. I also love solving these goofy little puzzles and get a little giddy each time I outsmart the game. I've decoded a few messages using a key I found on a hidden website, learned a bit of Morse code to decode another message, found clues by magnifying photographs, analyzed X-rays and have done some minor computer hacking. In reality, these are all ridiculously simple tasks, but in the fantasy of Majestic, they feel rewarding and it's hard not to be proud when Deep Throat calls you to tell you that he's impressed with your work. In the end, Majestic is a lot like a murder mystery party or Dungeons & Dragons. These activities take a lot of imagination and not only a willingness to suspend disbelief, but to knock it out with a tire iron, tie it up in a canvas sack with an anvil, and throw it into the deepest point of Lake Mead. If you can do that, and have about 15 to 30 minutes a day to kill, you'll probably get a kick out of Majestic. If you actually have friends and it's not just telemarketers who make your phone ring, you probably have better things to do. Me? I'm spending Saturday night trying to translate a secret message from French, which just might reveal the identity of Deep Throat. I hope the phone rings again soon.
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