TRY AN ADVENTURE
or how to get one up on the kidsAFRAID to compete with your kids at Master Blaster or Rocket Raid? Reactions slow, eyesight failing?
Well why not try an Adventure, where your superior intellect and knowledge will revive your ego and their respect. Kill a few dwarves and the odd dragon, solve the riddles, collect treasure and, even better, get a listing of the program and cheat your way through it.The first adventure -Colossal Cave - was written by two Americans, Crowther and Woods, about eight years ago. If they could have patented the idea they would be millionaires.
Now there are literally dozens of adventures available on the BBC Micro with the original, classic Colossal Cave released recently in an expanded version.
I tried six of them and, in order to give a fair review I (eventually) cheated in every one of them.
Sphinx Adventure
AcornsoftBASED very much on Colossal Cave, you start at the end of a road outside a building.
However inside the building there are only a lamp and keys (no bottle, no food) so old stagers had better get ready to draw a new map and to meet some new characters.
You have to collect about the same number of treasures and, yet again, there is a pesky pirate who takes things from you.
Funny thing is that he doesn't pop up unexpectedly like he used to, and now he only takes one thing at a time.
Looking at the listing I was surprised to find that he won't grab your sapphires but will take the bottle which is essential for you to make much further progress.
So first of all you have to learn how to bypass the pirate and then how to cross the chasm. Having done that you get lumbered with a rabbit who follows you everywhere.
He seems harmless enough, but you'll have to get rid of him in order to pass another obstacle.
And so it goes on and, even with a listing, it's going to take a long time to solve this adventure because there are 143 locations, or "rooms", to visit and quite a long maze to sort out before you reach the Sphinx and can deposit your collection of treasures.
A big drawback is that you can't SAVE a position, so whenever you get stuck or killed you have to start from the beginning again and be very patient and careful as you clear out the part of the puzzle which you have already solved.
You have to be patient because the messages don't come up immediately as you move around.
The reason the program is slow is that it decodes your commands such as verb object - GET LAMP, DROP BOTTLE - and describes your surroundings using RESTOREs on DATA.
This obviously saves space in the program because when you reach a location L then RESTORE L neatly points to a description of where you are. But it is a slow technique.
As I said before, Sphinx is very similar to Colossal Cave in atmosphere and content. So if you want a more whimsical British type of humour you could try:
Philosopher's Quest
AcornsoftI SAY this one is whimsical because in this adventure you are unlikely to be torn limb from limb or have axes thrown at you.
Indeed you are encouraged to throw a few things yourself. But if you over-indulge then you get turned into a lettuce leaf.
Another bit of whimsy is that you have to get a cup of tea to a dear old lady otherwise she keeps dying.
There are nearly 300 messages and about 50 locations, plus sundry mazes.
One of these is random, so the usual way of mapping a maze won't work in this case.
The idea is to locate a number of treasures and return them to the starting point to score a maximum of 250 points.
On your travels you encounter various problems, like being swallowed by an enormous whale - in which case you can try what Pinochio did - and being trampled by elephants.
This adventure encourages a certain use of logic and there are hidden clues in the messages. This is different to Colossal Cave, where it is almost impossible to solve many of the problems other than by trial and error or a peek at the listing.
So when you are told that you meet a sad looking octopus there is a reason for its misery.
A nice feature is that you can SAVE your position in this game and this only takes about 30 seconds on a cassette tape.
This program came out in 1982 and was used to set up another adventure, with a different map, problems and messages, which came out in early 1983 as ...
The Castle Of Riddles
AcornsoftTHIS puzzle was hyped by offering a prize to the first person to solve it. I believe the winner cracked the puzzle in less than a day and went round personally with the answer.
A bit unfair to those of us who live outside London, so if Acornsoft want to use that promotion again they will have to set up a telephone answering machine.
I bought it, listed it and then foolishly - completely solved it before sending in the answer. You actually know the answer long before the end, but I suspected a trick that the third and fourth riddles might be switched.
Anyway, enough griping. If you like riddles and logical problems then this one should appeal. The advantage you have over your kids is that "Richard of York gave battle in vain" should mean more to you than a 10-year-old wizard at Space Invaders.
The castle has a similar number of locations to Philosopher's Quest, plus the added interest - if you are competitive - that someone solved it in about 24 hours. So you can get some idea of how good you have to be to win competitions of this kind.
Incidentally, and digressing, have Acornsoft thought of the foreign market for these programs? It's not too difficult to translate the verbs, objects and messages into, say, French. But the Castle of Riddles would present certain semantic problems. Just a thought which I can't patent, so no charge.
So far I have only discussed Acornsoft products, and one year old ones at that, so you would expect more recent adventures to be, if not better than the classics, then a bit different.
However the "traditional" style is still very popular as evidenced by ...
Old Father Time
Bug ByteONE improvement here is that you can, and have to, be more precise in what you command. The old verb, object, commands are not sufficient to solve this puzzle. The example given is Put apple on table.
Bug Byte also invite anybody who thinks they can write a better adventure than this to get in touch with them. I suspect that this program came from just such a source.
To be fair, I did try all the adventures before looking at the listings and, Old Father Time does not give a separate sheet of hints, like Acornsoft, because "all necessary clues are in the program". This is quite true, in fact, you can't stop it giving you rather more clues than you really need. For example, you are told not to drop things, but you find that out soon enough.
Experienced adventurers will have little trouble finding the key or the lamp in this one because such people dig up everywhere as a matter of course.
The program has a very quick SAVE, which means there can't be many rooms or objects in it. This encourages the solver to try quite risky moves, unlike the Sphinx, where one mistake is fatal, and Colossal Cave, where you had to wait about half an hour before you could try again.
When I did list the program I had more difficulty trying to sort out the map than I had done when actually playing it.
There are about 20 important rooms in it, but some simple tricks make it appear a lot bigger and the way you move around is not via a two dimensional array of (rooms) X (directions) with dependencies on whether you have a "key" or say the correct word.
The program is totally unstructured, with IF . . . THEN . . . RETURN/GOTO almost everywhere - literally hundreds of them. Edsgar Dijkstra was quite right, it's impossible to sort out what's going on! It's easier to solve this game by playing it fairly.
Now I know that unstructured programs like this must have bugs in them because it is impossible for the author to verify the performance. I did find one - try GET DIAMONDS before you have the lamp.
Another of the new adventures is ...
Circus
Digital FantasiaTHIS is one of a series of 10 adventures by Brian Howarth and I was immediately thrown by the split screen.
The top tells you where you are and what you can see and the bottom 5/6 scrolls your commands and the program's replies.
If you are going to split the screen then the natural place for the fixed messages is at the bottom, not the top.
Anyway, having solved the puzzle of where the messages were, I had a lot of trouble playing fair because you have to get some light in the circus tent, and I thought you might do this by mending the generator.
Consequently I dug everywhere with the shovel - which this program treats like a spade - and even inside the car. But I couldn't find anything useful.
I gave up and tried to get a listing but - tricky - it's in assembler.
So the next move was to isolate the printing characters and get the messages. These can be very laconic, such as You are on a trapeze, and objects like boot, trunk, and - eureka flashlight.
So back to running it and trying to OPEN GLOVE compartment in the car - no luck -and then digging everywhere again.
I had cultivated the outside of the tent so thoroughly that I really needed boots to get around. Anyway I did eventually find the flashlight.
The only help you get from this program is to be told to EXAMine things. All I can say is that if you drive a Volkswagen you ain't never gonna find that flashlight.
Once inside the tent your flashlight reveals an enormous circus ring where you can walk a tightrope, tame a tiger, swing on a trapeze and be shot from a cannon. All these lead up to the revelation of what you really have to do.
The program is very similar to Scott Adams' original series of adventures published in 1980 in that it's a standard program manipulating a different set of rooms (there are 35 of them), objects and short messages.
The advantage for the author is that he can mass produce his adventures, but the drawback is that he cannot introduce much humour or variety, and the result is that all his efforts must be very similar in atmosphere and method of solution.
The last of the new adventures is so dreadful that it could be used as an example of how not to write any program. It is . . .
The grange
DobsoftIN this one you have a guide, called Dob, who shows you round his "dump of a school" in which you have to find a number of cream buns and return them to the headmistress's office. In the process you will be set some really tricky problems like "Where did the Norman fleet anchor in 1066?" and "To which Phylum does the roundworm Ascaris belong?"
The toughest problem is getting past a prefect at the beginning. As you emerge, fully armed, from a cupboard he stops you and you have four choices of what to do to get past him A,B,C or D (no, you can't shoot him) where
A$=GET$: PRE$=CHR$(RND(3)+65): IF A$=PRE$ THEN rightchoice
If you guess wrong then you get an advert about other Dobsoft products and the program stops - it takes eight minutes to load it in again to try another random number.
Of course I could have copied it to disc for a fast restart, but that would be illegal.
There are 27 rooms in this game and it took me quite a while to sort out how the program moves you from one location to another.
Very briefly, if you say WEST it READs a DATA list, matches the word WEST and then takes the next number in the DATA list (4).
It then scans another DATA list related to the room you are in, finds a 4 and takes the next number as the next room.
The whole program is a similar dog's spaghetti dinner, and crawls with bugs. Don't try to EAT BEANS in the whitewashed room else you go into an infinite loop and have to break the program and reload.
That wouldn't be too bad except that you have to play Russian roulette with that prefect again.
All in all, it's an atrocious program, seemingly written by a self educated teenage "genius" and I found it quite fascinating trying to unravel its ghastly innards.
You are actually expected to EXAMine things that you haven't been told about and, as I said before, if you want to know how not to design or write an adventure then I seriously recommend this one.
This was my overall impression of the six programs programs I reviewed:One of the skills of writing an adventure is to cram as much as possible into the program, so I have never seen much point in having the program respond to four letter words - that is until we get porno adventures.
All the last three, programs reviewed above wasted space in this way when it would have been better, and more accurate, if they replied I DON'T UNDERSTAND to such input.
Acornsoft, probably under the influence of Auntie BBC, don't recognise swearing and quite right. After all, you're dealing with a dear old lady in Philosopher's Quest.
Apart from this distinction, how does one rate or compare these and other adventures?
Not just by how long it takes to solve them because then you penalise programs that give you a SAVE facility and promote programs like The Grange that depend on sheer luck.
Nevertheless if you are going to spend £10 I think you should expect at least 10 hours sorting out the problems, in which case I think Old Father Time is a bit too easy to get through for experienced players.
The Circus is also fairly easy to crack, particularly if you've already bought one of the 10 games in this series.
Overall, I thought the Acornsoft games were more than twice as good as the new ones, with Philosopher's Quest the best of the bunch.
Although Acornsoft seem to have a common author and program, the situations are far more complex, amusing and inventive than the more recent offerings from other software houses.
As for Dobsoft's The Grange - once was enough. Any more and I think the author will have to sit in the corner and be condemned to playing them himself.
As a final point, I would be happier buying a new adventure if the manufacturer gave some indication of the minimum number of moves required for an expert solution.
Take the original Colossal Cave - it was possible to score the full 350 points in 167 moves, a fact that the authors probably didn't know.
This would not only indicate that the program had been tested, but would also add a further element of challenge to the puzzle solver.
A few years ago people delighted in writing to magazines saying that they could beat some micro-chess program in eight moves or so.
Maybe some readers would now like to write in telling us how many moves they have taken to solve a particular adventure.
Alice
This article appeared in the January 1984 edition of the "Micro User", published by Database Publications.
Scanned in by dllm@usa.net
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