The Quill system is a complicated one and can make for some very complex stories with well described and detailed locations. Barsak wasn’t one of those. The location descriptions were sacrificed to make the game seem large with around 120 locations, but with only so much memory to accommodate the adventure, descriptions were kept to a minimum. It is described elsewhere as “more a series of death-traps to overcome by utilising the right object at the right time than a series of puzzles to be solved”.

It’s a game that suffers too much from sheer frustration, which many of these games from the early days of text adventures do. Puzzles that expect something that the user couldn’t possibly know about, dying from lack of food or water after a strict number of moves, making exploration challenging if not near impossible. It isn’t that Barsak isn’t solvable, but it is designed to be started again and again after dying many times and learning from those deaths. The best games, I feel, did not do this, with the emphasis in later 80s adventures being on fun rather than difficulty. However, like all Quill games, there is a SAVE function and anybody that has read one of my earlier adventure game reviews will know that SAVE OFTEN is a mantra I swear by. Barsak is no exception.

There isn’t much information on the (presumably) Napolitano siblings, and I can not find any information about a follow up game or indeed any other game written by them after Barsak.

The aim of the game is to collect all nine treasures and be carrying, or wearing them, at the end to complete the adventure. You start off in a road in a forest and you really need your imagination to paint the scene. The locations are barely more than a couple of sentences, but exits are shown which makes map drawing much easier. You will need this map, because a few wrong turns or too many tries will result in, yep, your death. The issue here is you’re not entirely sure without multiple tries how far wrong you’ve gone or even if the situation is recoverable, so utilising the SAVE function is perhaps of little use early on, and trial and error may be the better strategy. It isn’t very long before the messages start to appear that you are hungry and dwarves, bless them, obviously have a very low tolerance for hunger.

Food can be found relatively early on, although even then you can’t waste turns by LOOKING or trying to EXAMINE anything, but water is more difficult to find. I played through quite quickly the first time and didn’t read all room descriptions. That’s not surprising as most descriptions are so boring you kind of gloss over them, so I missed the clue for the first puzzle which is vital to get some water to prevent you from dying of thirst.

So, by trial and error and diligent map making, as well as tuning into the clues in one particular room, we end up fed and watered and no longer in mortal danger. We can now concentrate on finding the treasures!

Just because hunger and thirst are no longer the grim reapers following us around the map, it doesn’t mean we can’t die arbitrarily and often. Just walking into a room can do this, as can using the wrong word to utilise one of the objects you’re carrying. I ended up with about 18 save files over the course of the game and it was just becoming so tedious.

From here we’re basically exploring and collecting items. It’s easy to forget what you are carrying at times so don’t forget to check the inventory now and then which will likely jog the memory and give you some clues, but also there is the usual annoying carrying limit (oh thank you D&D for magic pockets!) so you’ll need to be careful with picking up and dropping stuff. This part of the game is map heavy and it will be vital to keep a track and make sure you’re not straying too far. Also, you’ll need to drop some items to allow you to pick others up, going back to retrieve them again when needed. Mark these on your map! I’d suggest once you pick an item up that you save the game. Saving often really helps, and naming the save files correctly is also very important so you don’t overwrite previous ones!

So, lots of wandering around and picking up items and yes, the frustration continues. I’m all for working out puzzles and trial and error of course, but (slight spoiler) who would think to drop a teddy bear near a zombie would prevent death and provide a piece of treasure? It’s guess trying everything until you find the right move is part of the reward.

Another annoyance. There are various situations where you need to kill an an enemy, at least ones that aren’t pacified by teddy bears that is, and to do so you just have to guess what word and what item to use. You can try HIT, USE, STAB, SMASH, THROW, WAVE with the axe, foil and other times and it’s literally just pot luck as to what works and what doesn’t. Again (need I say it) saving is your friend!

Continuing like this, we eventually get to a scroll with some writing on it. Trails are better than snares. As far as I can tell this is useless and slightly odd information. It means nothing and relates to nothing. I can only think it is a leftover item from a puzzle that didn’t make it in to the game. Back and forth, back and forth. Remember you should wear as many items as you can, especially the treasures, as you find them.

Eventually, after one of those annoying labyrinth sections where you just have to guess the exists and each location description is the same, you’ll get to an ante-room where, if you have all the treasures either on or about your person, a gateway appears. On entering this gateway you see a book which you need to sign and here’s another oddity and random move, you can’t sign the book with the lantern lit. I had to look that up as I don’t think I’d have ever thought of doing that.

If you think this review reads negatively about Barsak, well that’s because it annoyed me which I think is the exact opposite of what a game should do. It’s hard to strike a balance between playability and difficulty I know, but Barsak does not achieve this at all. Having said that, I admire the size of the game and number of locations. Having programmed games myself in The Quill I know how hard it can be, so hats off to the Napolitanos for creating this adventure. And it isn’t dreadful, really. It would have given younger me a lot of play time for the money, a lot of map making and a lot of lateral thinking which back then is what I loved more than anything else. A disk drive would have made it much more playable with quicker load times for the saves, and of course all modern C64 equivalents (Ultimate C64, VICE etc.) have disk drive capabilities built in.

I think on balance I would recommend playing this game, but be prepared for a long quest, a large notebook and meticulous organisation of your save files. If you are armed with all that information and still want to play Barsak, I think you’ll enjoy it.

_{A difficult and frustrating game at times, but ultimately rewarding with a long playtime and satisfying ending.}

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If you search for Adventure International today you’ll find various outdoor pursuit companies and holiday operators. The one we are interested in was founded in 1979 by non other than Scott and Alexis Adams, who basically pioneered adventure games on home computers. In fact Adventureland was the very first commercially available text adventure! They were hugely successful until 1986, and even had a partnership with Marvel releasing three Questprobe games based on the Marvel characters The Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, The Human Torch and the Thing. I own physical copies of Spider-Man and The Hulk, and no doubt we’ll get around to all three of those games eventually.

At their peak the company employed over 50 staff, operating out of Longwood, Florida, but the video game crash which started in 1983 ultimately claimed Adventure International and they went bankrupt in 1986. In 1980 the source code for the text version of the game was published in Soft Side magazine, something which sounds crazy today. It obviously didn’t do the company any harm though, and they went on to publish 30 games and over 300 more from other independent programmers.

The Game

The purpose of our adventure is to locate treasures and return them to their proper place. After an intro screen explaining what an adventure game is and how to play them (you should ALL know that by now!) the game begins. Having said that, it took me way longer than it should have to realise you had to hit return to see the location description, and return again to see the graphics. Without knowing that it would be a struggle! I found that mechanism a little clunky and going EAST from the text description screen, for example, just gave you O.K. and it isn’t until you hit return again that the screen is drawn and the description is available (after hitting return again). Clunky.

Examining things on screen or in the description can offer up further graphics.

Like all adventures from these days, you’ll need to map as you go. You’ll also need to get comfortable with being frustrated – that is part of the fun after all! Actions are not always obvious but, as a hint, if you see something with a magical word on it is probably worth carrying that item and saying that word in various situations.

Limitations of the vocabulary and interpreter soon become obvious. UP is not recognised, for example, but U is. It is also strictly two word commands – GO IN HOLE or GO TO STUMP are not recognised. GO HOLE, GO STUMP etc. are. It is fairly quick to get used to but can be a bit annoying. Actually, I realise that isn’t quite true – some one word commands are accepted such as SWIM, E,N,W,S,U,D and others.

Anyway, that last paragraph was a bit of a clue and if you do things in the right order fairly early on in the adventure you’ll find the location where you are supposed to dump your treasures and check your SCORE.

This adventure, whilst still very early on in the genre, is head and shoulders above some of the ones we have played thus far. It is a proper adventure game, and it was the reason I fell in love with text adventures. Games would get more complex, bigger, more in depth, they would have better graphics, but as far as game play goes and problem solving, Adventureland shows why Scott Adams is regarded as one of the best in the business.

One thing I quite like about Adventureland is that when you die you are sent to Limbo – only a specific direction can get you out of limbo and you get to live again. The other thing to mention is that you’ll come across chiggers – nasty little things that bite you. If that happens you need to take something that heals you – a sign early on in the game, by the dragon, hints to what that something is. If you don’t heal, your bites get infected and you eventually die, and getting from limbo to where you were can be very frustrating. The key here, and I say this on literally all games that allow it, is to save your game often. Nothing is as annoying as having to retrace all your steps and hard work because you forgot to save your game.

This game, it has to be said, is hard. It takes some lateral thinking and if you play it properly it will take you some time away to ponder and ruminate on solutions. I remember spending a lot of time in school thinking about what I should have tried or how I could solve a particular problem, and rushing up to the bedroom when I got home to put my theories to the test. And there we have the brilliance of a good adventure game in a nutshell. They gave me so much more than a shoot-em-up or platformer ever could.

Couple of other gotchas – the lamp will not last forever, you will need to be economical with it, and don’t drop your treasures off as soon as you find them, they may be useful elsewhere first.

You will die – it’s pretty impossible not to – and this is where your save games come in. You only get 10 save slots (0-9) so use them wisely and overwrite slots as required.

The sense of achievement in this game is huge – solving the problems does fill you with a sense of pride and it is clever writing, not treating the player as an idiot but also giving enough subtle hints along the way to help you out. I’m not sure I’d recommend this one unless you’ve played a couple of easier adventures first, although saying that this is the first commercial game so logically you should start here.

One thing Adventureland will definitely give you is a good grounding for the games to come.

Before I end the review, a special mention to Brian Howarth who ported this game to the Commodore 64. He worked with Scott Adams a lot and ported more than 17 games across to the commodore and other home computers. He also wrote his own original games such as The Golden Baton and The Time Machine and had a film deal for The Gremlins and TV deals for Robin of Sherwood and Supergran! We’ll be covering some if not all of Brian’s games in this series.

Rating

One of the best. Only not 5 stars due to slight limitations with vocabulary and too many deaths! There are better to come, but at the time this was the definitive adventure game.

Music & Context

I have tried to find out the month of release for this game but failed, so 1982 will have to do.

Released fairly early in 1982 was English Settlement by XTC. This has become one of my favourite albums ever but I was limited fund wise as a kid in 1982, so only had the single, Senses Working Overtime. I played this a lot back then (still do) and I am certain this would have been playing in my room as I was tackling Adventureland.

Also music related, in the news in 1982 The Who began their ‘Farewell Tour’.

I had already by then formed my love of The Who largely from playing my brother’s collection, but also because they were among the first albums I did own as a kid. I remember thinking of them as somewhat past their best by the time their farewell tour was announced so I wasn’t surprised. The Who for me were all about the late 1960s and 1970s, and so I accepted the fact that they were no longer to be around. Silly me

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Although originally a type in, this game was published by The Guild, a homegrown software label set up by Tony Collins, himself an adventure game author in 1991, who ran the label until the autumn of 1993. As well as self published games, and those from other authors, The Guild built up a large public domain collection, and this game was one of those. We’ll likely come across quite a few of The Guild’s titles during our adventures.

Originating as a type-in this game is obviously written in BASIC and is a pretty small, text only adventure.

So, our buccaneering reputation preceding us, we have been chosen to recover some gold for some prince or other from a dangerous, fierce dragon. The prince needs this gold to fight an evil king, apparently.

We start, as we so often do, at the entrance to a cave.

There is nowhere really to go except into the cave, so we do that. We find ourselves in a passage leading south. Being small, we can’t expect too much from the parser, and although a door is mentioned there is nothing that can be done with it. Even LOOK DOOR tells us nothing. I guess we ignore that for now then.

There is a boat at the bottom of this passage which we can miraculously pick up and carry, but without giving too much away, it is of little use yet.

This is very standard adventuring stuff – with the help of pencil and notepad to map out moves we soon find our way around to the door we saw at the entrance to the cave, picking up the obvious things we come across along the way. The parser, as mentioned above, is very limited – the usual commands don’t work and the game uses LOOK instead of EXAMINE which always jars me, but it is just about usable. It can be frustrating though, especially as it recognises TOSS but not THROW, for example.

So, back to find the dragon (if you found the dragon too soon you’ll realise now the power of the sword!) and the gold. A fairly simple puzzle presents itself to escape back down to the boat storage area and to a more useful boat, before we can get to the prince and give him the gold.

No. No, I don’t want another go.

A quick adventure (15 mins max?) and with the aid of a mapping tool or good old pencil and paper it is extremely easy to solve, the poor parser aside. I would have been happy enough with this as a type-in but if I’d spent any money on this it would be very disappointing. Having said that, I have played worse games

Next time we’ll be playing Adventureland from 1980, released by Adventure International (Thunder Mountain in the USA). Actually, we’ll play the 1984 graphic version of the game.

Until then, try not to get hoisted on your own, or anybody else’s, petard.

The post Adventure Without A Name appeared first on SoundHog.

Ray Hoffmeister coded this game (an appropriately beery retro name!) in CBM BASIC and it’s the only one attributed to him on Gamebase 64, but it is recorded as being published by Binary Zone PD who have been around since 1990. Binary Zone distributed public domain games on disk and cassette and are still around today.

On loading up the tape image we’re presented with the above screen before being told we have a limited supply of air and a back pack that will only carry 3 items. Putting the familiar sinking feeling one gets with these PD games to one side, let’s see what the planet Zeeble has in store for us…

This is one of those adventures that has minimum location descriptions, but reveals a lot more when you type ‘look’, so the key here is to move, map and look around. It’s a small adventure, and limited in terms of vocabulary and has a weak parser. It also isn’t particularly logical and gets stuck in some place. Having said that I quite enjoyed it.

If you look around and there is an object in your location, you’ll generally need to pick it up for use later on. Some clever swapping of items is required to keep within the pack limit of 3. You should eventually end up at a cave of ice and, ahhhh, there are Zeebs here! If you got here before finding the things you need (namely stones and a pistol) then run away and find them.

Once the Zeebs scramble and the ice door of the cave is melted, you move inside. Some annoying logic follows with dropping stuff and picking stuff up, but you should eventually end up in the cave, near a metal chest carrying a raft and a parachute.

Getting the chest open is a bit annoying. If you are using VICE or the C64 Ultimate save a snapshot as you can easily blow the thing up and you’ll need to start again. The key is to keep the chest ticking softly. If it ticks loudly then that press is wrong. Start with one colour, then trial and error until you get all three ‘softly’ options and the chest clicks open.

Once that’s done we want to go back to the high mountain where we first used the rope (you’ll need it again here) and drop the raft. Then a jump and a climb down with the rope lands us in an area where there is a radio waiting to be fixed with the wire. Do that, turn the radio on, and Bob’s your Zeeble.

And that is our reward, complete with spelling mistake.

This small adventure played ok, a little inconsistent and slow in terms of code and the parser really struggled at times depending on location, but it worked, it was fairly logical in that the player knows what they need to do. It reminded me a lot of PD games I used to be able to afford and although I can’t remember ever playing this one, I think it would have certainly provided enough entertainment in a late peanut butter sandwich and coke fuelled afternoon.

Back in sequence next time with Adventure Without A Name from The Guild Adventure Software.

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Right, where was I? Oh yes, just finished up escaping from Cleopatra’s Pyramid, had a little break (19 months), got myself a brand new Commodore 64 Ultimate, had a nice cup of tea and thought it was about time to get back in the saddle.

As it happens we’re on to one of the proper big titles now. 1982’s Adventure Quest from Level 9. Level 9 games were my hearts desire in 1982/84. I used to look longingly at adverts in magazines, but they were either only available on disk, out of my price range, or very often both. Eventually cheaper cassette versions did start appearing in the UK (not all though, if I am remembering correctly) and I certainly did manage to get hold of a couple, but they were still very expensive for my pocket money budget. When I first got back into the C64 around 15 years or so ago, Level 9 adventures were the first titles I collected. It was simply impossible for me to envisage back then how readily available all the commodore software would be today and how easy it is to use thanks to kit like the Ultimate 1541 and the new 64 Ultimate.

Adventure Quest was not Level 9’s first game but it was the first alphabetically, and as I am sticking to that ridiculous notion, it comes next in the list. It is part 2 of a trilogy of games, initially released separately, which featured themes and names inspired by (stolen from) the books of J. R. R. Tolkien and so became known as the Middle-Earth Trilogy before being expanded and rereleased together in 1986 as a compilation. At that point the references to Middle Earth were removed and the trilogy was retitled Jewels of Darkness.

There are many in depth reviews out there of Adventure Quest, so this won’t necessarily be another one, but I will share my thoughts on playing through and try to give a feel for the game.

The first thing to mention is this is a large game for an 8 bit platform, something Level 9 were famous for, and a sophisticated adventure given it all fitted on one disk. As the included manual explains, this is achieved with the use of A Code.

Adventure Quest is not written in ASSEMBLER or BASIC, either of these would have made it too big – and BASIC would also have been too slow. Instead it is written in a super-compact language known as ‘A-CODE’, which is specially designed for writing adventure games.

So let’s dive in. We start outside a small brick building and like all good adventurers the first thing to do is probably go inside. Already we are slightly overwhelmed with the amount of objects and information available. This is the point you need to get your notepad and pencil out. Mapping is hugely important and clues will be found along the way, so a notebook should be the first item in the bag when packing your essential adventuring kit.

Without giving too much away, there is just no way you are going to know what to pick up, what to consume, and what to look at in more detail yet without trial and error. And this is what makes these games so great. Unlike a quick blast of Space Invaders, these games occupy your thoughts through school days (or work days!) and solutions and ideas can come to you when least expected. Rush home, try it out, feel on top of the world and move on to the next puzzle. Needless to say, make frequent use of the save feature!

I’m going to cover the first important puzzle here, so read no further if you want absolutely no spoilers.

If you go outside and look around (remember to map everything!) you will come across an area where you are stumbling over sharp stones and you can see a rare orchid two feet above you. Getting here requires getting lost in the forest, a common Level 9 mechanism, but careful mapping and trial and error will help you find your way through. Try every direction, and save, save, save. We need to get that orchid and use it later on to woo a unicorn. If only we had something to stand on! Right. The small table from the brick building. Why didn’t I pick it up when I had the chance? Well firstly you can’t just go around picking up and carrying everything as, like in real life, there is a limit to what you can carry. It’s a good lesson to learn as going back for stuff once the puzzle becomes more clear occurs throughout Level 9 adventures.

If you’ve been mapping correctly, finding your way back to the building should be straight forward. Or, as we haven’t really done too much yet, you could simply ‘quit’ and start back there again. However you do it, note the white dot over the door here. You can’t do anything with it, but white and black dots are important later! Now, get the small kitchen table, ignoring everything else, and retrace your steps to the orchid where you can stand on the table and reach it. NB randomly wolves may start stalking you. You will have a few moves to scare them away by throwing anything at them but if not they will attack and kill you. It’s worth remembering not to go empty handed anywhere! If this does happen, remember to pick whatever item you threw back up.

Worth mentioning also that carrying the table restricts you from climbing other things, such as huge oak trees you may come across. In that case just drop the table, climb up and down and grab the table again. If you’ve been exploring and mapping you’ll know the area I mean. Get to the orchid and drop the table. Simply asking the game to ‘get orchid’ works as it is assumed you are climbing the table at this point.

Leave the table there and continue exploring. If you come across an onion (it’s actually garlic) then get it and eat it. We know garlic is very good for warding off certain blood sucking baddies! Continue exploring (and mapping!) and eventually a wizard will give you a scroll to read. Make a note of it in your notebook.

Return to your map and try other directions you haven’t ventured down yet. We need to get to a clearing with a unicorn. You may have already come across it on your travels. Now we have the orchid we can give this to the unicorn and follow it north. There are some pipes to pick up and a medallion, and if you’ve been mapping correctly you’ll see we’re not too far from our starting point, the brick building.

With the scroll clue and the other items we have found it feels like the adventure has just started. And you would be right thinking that.

I have deliberately not given a ‘walkthrough’ of this first area but more of a strong guidance – you’ll find exploring, getting into trouble, back tracking and problem solving will be required throughout this adventure. Who knew unicorns liked orchids for example? That you can’t pick an orchid without a table? That you can’t climb a tree whilst holding a table? Well, maybe I knew that last one. But things like simply throwing any object at the wolves took me an age to realise the first time around.

With all Level 9 games it’s a case of writing everything down, trying and interacting with everything you find in all situations, and thinking firmly outside of the box. It isn’t meant to be easy, but it is meant to be solvable. There is a lot of love for this adventure out there and rightly so, it’s a great advert for the genre.

Oh, and those white and black dots I mentioned earlier? They are teleport dots. Going through an exit with a black dot will transport you back to its corresponding white dot. This is very useful for going back to retrieve objects you have left behind either on purpose or accidentally.

Level 9 were my absolute favourites back in the day. Along with Infocom they provided the very best in adventure gaming and I don’t think these text based games would have survived without those two giants of the genre.

The D64 game file can be found in lots of places on the internet, or there is a browser playable version at the Internet Archive here. And remember, save often, map precisely, and note down everything!

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Philip Newton is attributed as the original author of the TRS-80 listing, and it looks like Nathan Butcher was involved (or wholly responsible) for the Commodore conversion. I could only find one listing for Philip Newton, this adventure, but Butcher appears to have many listings and releases under his name, mostly conversions, some of which we will no doubt cover in this series.

So, let’s start the adventuring….

We start at our camp, outside the tent and with all four major compass point exits available.

OK, so obvious first move, Enter Tent right? Nope.

I have to say, my heart sinks when this is the first thing you come across. I understand the limitations, believe me I do, but this stuff is important for a good experience. So, after typing VERB and having a look through the limited list, the only one that makes any sense is GO. So, Go Tent, of course.

All items appear to be randomly placed in one of two maze locations. The first maze location is the Hot, Sandy Desert, and is a bit of a nightmare. The map doesn’t really make any sense with random directions either taking you back to your camp or another hot, sandy stretch of dessert.

You’ll need to pick up all the objects you find along the way in the Desert, providing you don’t come across the Scorpion of course (it will eventually sting and slowly kill you) and make your way to the Pyramid for the next frustrating maze. You’ll need the Flashlight, Sceptre and Backpack before entering, which you should find in the Desert somewhere, and you should also have dropped all of the treasures found thus far back at the tent.

Once you make your way to the Pyramid, the game is made even more maddening by a randomised roaming mummy who can strip you of your inventory and scatter the items around in the catacomb maze. If you are lucky the mummy ignores you or simply shouts ‘Go Away!’. You can also wave your Sceptre at the mummy sometimes to make it disappear, but you need all the stars to align for this to happen, and you need to have found the items you need in the Desert without being killed by a random Scorpion. The fact you need to go back and forth makes it almost impossible to complete.

I made quite a lot of use of the SAVE feature to stop getting killed or stripped of my possessions too frequently, but it soon became far too tedious to continue. I never did finish getting all 25 treasures back to my tent and quite honestly the sweet, lingering death of a scorpion sting was blessed relief.

It isn’t actually a bad game, certainly not the worst text adventure I have played, but the BASIC listing and typed in nature of the code kind of showed, and an attempt at being cutting edge with randomising mummies and scorpions just made for a frustrating experience. There was too much random luck involved and too little problem and logic solving for my liking.

Having said that, I am already sitting here thinking, well, I got 14 items….maybe I’ll try again for the full 25! I’ll give it some time and maybe revisit one day. That in itself might persuade you to give The Adventure of Cleopatra’s Pyramid a go…

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Adventure Land was distributed by The Guild, aka The Guild Adventure Software. We’ve already come across The Guild as it was they that distributed Dorothy Millard’s 1989 game Adventure In Time And Space. Distributed is the right word here, as they only published their own games from about 1991 and anything on their books before that date was either public domain or first published elsewhere.

When The Guild packed it in, a lot of their titles were snapped up by several houses, including Adventure Probe Software. The same Adventure Probe that published the magazines, including the one from my last post featuring J.B.Cattley. So in the course of three consecutive reviews we have a veritable family tree of software.

The Guild and Adventure Probe have links to The Adventure Workshop and Pegasus Software, as well as 50/50 Software and Recreation Re-Creation Software – all of whom have published or distributed text adventure games, so we will learn more about those as we come to them!

Adventure Land was written by Nick Corr, and I have failed miserably to find any firm information out about him. As far as I can tell he only wrote this single game, and I don’t think I am being too harsh when I say I can see why.

So first off we are told our objective is to locate a golden key (yes, another one) which will enable us to enter a castle and claim our prize. We are warned of goblins and trolls and other magical creatures who are all hell bent on stopping us in our quest. We are also told to look out and memorise (I’ll write them down if that’s ok?) the magical words we may or may not find.

A clue to the complexity of the engine is that we are told we are only allowed one word commands. Fine.

We start in a forest. A large forest, with trees on all sides. Entering a command, any command, just repeats the short description of the forest. So I guess we just have to assume that we can’t do anything other than move in the directions it is telling us to go in. But even that is a challenge. The game will not accept E, W, S, or N – no you have to write the whole word. It took me way to long to realise that and I thought the game was simply broken, or deliberately nasty.

Anyway, you soon find that the forest is pretty unmappable and any old random directions eventually lead you to a field with a tree and lake in it. What do people do when they see a tree in an adventure game? Yep. And once you climb it you find the golden key already!

After that it is obvious what you need to do even if the parser makes it as difficult as possible to achieve.

Choose the right door and you are a millionaire. Game over.

This is a terrible game. I only reviewed it and wrote it up as it was officially distributed through The Guild and is listed in GB64 and that is my remit. The parser is terrible, the game has what, 5 rooms in total and it’s incredibly easy to solve. Also, the colours!

One to skip, but at least its also one I can cross off the list. Onward and upward !

The post Adventure Land The Guild appeared first on SoundHog.

Adventure Island is a public domain game written by J.B.Cattley and playtested by none other than Ms Millard! This is the second time Dorothy Millard has popped up in this blog and I know it won’t be the last.

As I always like to get a little context and backstory on authors, I tried to find out a little bit about J.B.Cattley. There is a reference in a juggling group back from 1998 – I am making a huge assumption this is the same person, but somebody who used to enjoy writing text adventures on their beloved 8-bit computer is absolutely the sort of person who would end up on a juggling group.

Actually there is also a reference in a rogue like developers group from the same year too so pretty sure this is our guy.

A bit of a digression but I had no idea Google Groups was still going strong – this Commodore one (of which I am a member and have no memory of ever joining) is still really active!

But, the best find of all was an article in Adventure Probe from December 1994, volume 8 issue 12.

I’ll put a link for you to download the PDF at the bottom of this post – I just love magazines/fanzines like these from those days. There was a fantastic global community formed around text adventure games and you really felt part of a scene. Just reading through this issue got me quite emotional!

The pertinent paragraph is written by, once again, Dorothy Millard – how I could go all these years without hearing her name before is beyond me. Anyway, here it is…

OK, on to the game itself.

You start off onboard the QE2 and are none too happy with how things have been going. This type of holiday is obviously not for you! Not to worry, it is but a matter of a few lines of text and you can say goodbye to this vacation as you are thrown overboard, where you have to swim to the eponymous Adventure Island.

Once you have slept off your ordeal you can have a look around and see if you can’t sort this situation out. It soon becomes obvious you’re in a very bad mood. Irritated by the beach, the cliffs, the boredom. Even the parser prompts are a bit snarky ‘Any more Brilliant Ideas?’ it asks you.

Going up and down the beach seems the only options open to you at the moment, but references to the cliffs to the north are obviously supposed to make you think – so experiment here with the objects you have found so far and one will help you on our way.

You will find yourself climbing cliffs, navigating gorges, slooshing through muddy bogs and feeding the local wildlife, before they start eating you! There is even, as Mr Cattley says in the description, a thicket to find, as every adventure game needs a thicket.

This is a fairly logical problem solver of a game, and you should be able to think your way through it apart from a couple of areas where help may be required. The map isn’t too big but you do need to open it up by utilising the things you find. Without that you won’t get very far. Almost everything you find strewn around the island has a use – there is one red herring but I’ll let you find that for yourself. Keeping tabs on the map is essential though as there is a good deal of doubling back.

If you get stuck, HELP brings up a list of verbs which are extremely useful – almost cheating – but without that I don’t see how you would guess the right words to use. The bridge problem in particular doesn’t make much sense to me, and it had to be done in a specific order.

There is actually a subtle clue in the opening text as to what you need to do at the end, and those cleverer than me will work that out. I had to use the help system again!

If you do make it to the end your ‘reward’ is to find yourself in a tourist hotel – your worse nightmare apparently!

Incidentally, Escape from Adventure Hotel mentioned at the end here, doesn’t appear to have ever been written – or at least I can’t find a reference to it anywhere.

The parser for Adventure Island is pretty basic and none too clever, but it’s ok and does the job well enough. It’s also fairly slow but again, acceptable.

I really enjoyed this adventure game, it had a really old school feel to it and I enjoyed it even more because it led me to the wonderful Adventure Probe magazines, which I am now going to read in their entirety! As promised, see the issue in question below. The map I did during my play through is also at the end of the post.

Thanks for reading, and until next time, keep safe out there adventurers!

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Dorothy wrote 16 games in all, according to an interview from 1999 I read over at the Solution Archive site, plus a few she ‘fixed up’ for other people. She lived in Australia for many years but was born in England and, like me, started her love of computers with the Commodore 64. Early games were written in BASIC but she also wrote quite a few using The Quill, a system most of you will be familiar with, and one I am really trying to get to get grips with of late.

Alas, Dorothy’s website appears to be no more, but thankfully there are several early captures on the Wayback Machine, including all of her hand-typed solutions for many, many different adventure games! I am in the process of downloading all of those solutions to help preserve them – another backup can’t hurt!

If you want to read the whole interview you can do so here, but let’s turn our attention to the game itself.

The game, written in 1989, is in 2 parts of several sections each. It takes us to many different places, such as a deserted space station, medieval England, up into the Alps, a far-off planet, and the London suburbs, in our search for the golden key which has been stolen by ‘the evil time warrior’. We are told that in order to find the golden key we must first find the other 6 coloured keys.

We are called The Professor, and the game is about traveling through time and space in our time machine. So yeah, it’s unashamedly Doctor Who

The game starts in the laboratory and we are already introduced to the professor’s time machine, although we can’t get in it yet. Have a good look around and examine everything here, but it soon becomes fairly obvious we need to leave here and go look outside. Like a lot of text adventures, you have the illusion of choice but really there is nowhere else to go but North to the car park and (I assume) the professor’s nice red car.

Again, examining is key, and once you’ve looked and picked up anything you find, you will make your way down the road, in the car, to a house.

This is a very good text adventure and really showcases, I think, the power of The Quill as an authoring solution. The Quill itself is quite tricky to get to grips with – something I am working on solving currently and I hope to release something into the wild soon!

It’s also very big – too big for me to go through each section and area, and too big really for a map – I did sketch one on paper as I played it through and will, one day, create that properly and include it here. Instead I need to try and review these text adventures in a new format otherwise I will never get through them all – some background info, a few screen shots, a bit of context etc. followed by a magazine style review.

One thing I do want to start including is my other passion, music. I’ll start including what I would be playing in the background in the month and/or year of release.

Thanks for reading, and feedback is welcome on the new format. I suspect it will keep getting tweaked as we go along – there are a LOT of adventures to get through.

Adventure In Time & Space: A large, complex text adventure. This one will take you a while to complete and really get you thinking. It’s an impressive title, and one that showcases The Quill to its full potential. A map is essential but it does get very complicated, especially with the time and location hopping.

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Cavern of Riches started life as a PET game in 1980 written by John O’Hare.

I guess this should come under ‘C’ really, but it is listed as Adventure 1 – Cavern of Riches in the GB64 catalogue, which was its original title on the PET I believe, so comes under ‘A’ in my self-imposed rules. The others, I think, are listed properly under their titles so I will come to them at some stage down the line.

So Cavern of Riches starts off on a dusty path in a clearing and tells us you can see an ‘old cabin’. The aim of the adventure is to find 12 treasures, all with a ‘*’ in their name so we know they are treasures, of course (such as *trident*). We know little else at this stage, but we do know there is a cabin so it seems logical we should go inside and take a look around.

Here we learn that this cabin is where we are to deposit our treasures once we have found them, and there are a couple of useful objects here for us to pick up too.

On leaving the cabin and wandering around you’ll quickly come to a typical dungeon-like maze in a Forest – one of the ones where it matters very little which direction you moved in. You basically don’t move, unless you go in the correct direction that is. These sorts of mazes drove me mad as a kid trying to map them out, as you’re never quite sure if you’ve moved or stood still!

From here on in full spoiler alert. 

Once you find the first and easiest treasure, the Trident, you’ll enter this maze-like Forest and as long as you stick to going West you’ll end up where you need to be. At the end of the road is a building containing several items, one of which is an empty bottle to be filled with something no doubt. This is the first simple puzzle and it should be clear by now where some water is to fill our bottle up.

Once that’s done follow the road back to our ‘old building’ where you can find the trapdoor and enter the underground cavern. Now we’re talking! This is already the best text adventure by far I have played from the list, it’s fun, and I already have a true sense of the buildings and the forest with really quite minimal descriptions. That’s the skill of the adventure writer, I guess, and a good lesson to learn.

One thing to remember is you can only carry so much stuff, so tactical dropping and taking of objects is required.

Exploring underground and picking up treasures as you find them, you’ll come to a Deep Chasm where seemingly you can not proceed. But have wand will travel! Once you find your way over the chasm there is more magic to learn. Words that when said out loud will reveal treasures! Where you say these words is not clear at all, so you’ll need to experiment. 

After some more exploring it becomes obvious what the water is for, and the bird you have been mysteriously carrying around too! Both are used to open up more areas of the underground caverns where more treasures can be found. You’ll eventually find a harp and harps are made to be played, so like the magic words, experiment on where to play the harp. If you find the right place you’ll come across another treasure, the plaque, which also contains a cryptic clue so make sure you read it.

There is a lot of exploring and a map is essential here – see below for my full map! I make this sound like a quick and easy game, but I have deliberately left out a lot of detail as I do recommend you play this through, and you’ll enjoy working out the exact order to do things and the rooms to say the magic words in. On that note, you’ll find soon enough that you are stuffed so full of treasure that you’ll need to dump some off back at base. Thankfully, one of the magic words we discovered transports us straight there from a certain location and transports us back again when ready. A nice touch.

Depending on what order you locate the treasures you’ll need to zoom back and forth between the underground cavern and the old cabin. There is no location-based score here, you just earn points for each treasure dropped back in the right place, so it’s very possible to score the maximum 120 points to beat the game. So once you drop the final treasure just say ‘score’ and you’ll be congratulated and classed as an expert no less.

I really enjoyed Cavern of Riches and it totally reminded me of playing these games when I was younger. Armed with snacks, fizzy pop, paper and a pencil to draw the map, this was a true, old-school 80s text adventure. Change the fizzy pop to a bottle of wine and the pencil and paper to an online map creation tool, and nothing much else has changed. 

The puzzles are all logical and solvable, nothing is a red herring so if you come across an object you will have to use it somewhere and it is nearly always obvious where that is, or what you need to find. What is less obvious is where you say the magic words. That, as far as I can tell, is only apparent through trial and error. I wouldn’t say that was a frustration as such, but it did increase the time it took me to complete the game. As mentioned above, the world we explore is created wonderfully, with very little wasted text. I think the length of the game helps to conjure up the universe we play in – quick and small games don’t really give the player time to immerse themselves into the story, but Cavern shows that minimal text and saving that precious memory for the story really works. It’s a balancing act.

I got the file from GB64 and the full database ISO images, but it is available elsewhere too. Be warned that some C64 versions have a scoring bug, but mine did not, so if you can do use the one on GB64.

I’m looking forward to playing the rest of this Adventure Pak now but have to say, the bar has been set pretty high with Cavern of Riches.

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