Try an Adventure or how to get one up on the kids
AFRAID 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 Acornsoft
BASED 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 Acornsoft
I 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 Acornsoft
THIS 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 Byte
ONE 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 Fantasia
THIS 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 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 Dobsoft
IN 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
