This is the eighth game in a series of classic home computer text adventures from American author Scott Adams via his company Adventure International. These adventures were ubiquitous across many popular 8-bit platforms due to being written in a completely portable machine-independent format, running under the "Scott Adams virtual machine". The advantage of this system was that once the virtual machine was implemented on any particular platform, all Scott Adams games were then theoretically available on that platform with no further porting to be done. The main disadvantage was that the in-game parser and engine had limits to their flexibility and expandabilty and could not realistically be upgraded without breaking compatibilty with the established VM. The whole story of this system and the subsequent games produced for it by various authors is beyond the scope of this review but is elsewhere on the web and is very interesting. (well to some of us anyway!)
A number of the Scott Adams titles were released on the ZX Spectrum by a variety of UK publishers, often using the speccy's extended capabilities to various extents. Some of them had no graphics, whereas some later ones have quite impressive half-screen graphics, it really depended on the publisher.
What interests me about "Pyramid of Doom" (apart from the fact that I have just completed it) is that to my knowledge it was never officially commercially released by any UK publisher for the ZX Spectrum. The entry for this title in the WoS archive reflects this fact. (Therefore I think this may be the first review I've seen on here that isn't actually linked from the WoS archive at the time of writing.) A few of the other Scott Adams games similarly were never commercially exploited on the speccy.
So, I have been playing an unofficial release of the game converted from the original Scott Adams format to the Infocom "Z-machine" format. (another virtual machine environment for text adventures) This version auto-runs under a pre-packaged copy of John Elliot's excellent Z-Machine interpreter for the Spectrum +3, ZXZVM.
You can obtain this version of the game in +3 DSK format from the WoS archive here:- ftp://ftp.worldofspectrum.org/pub/sinclair/disks-inform/ScottAdamsAdventures2.dsk.zip
It seems that most, if not all of the original series of Scott Adams games are availble in the same format via similar disks on WoS.
Pyramid of Doom was co-authored by Scott Adams and Alvin Files and was originally released in 1979 for the AppleII and TRS-80 systems. As it apparently bypassed the speccy market in the '80s, it then only became available for the Spectrum +3 in the late '90s via the rather circuitous route outlined above.
It goes without saying that on the speccy, a native Scott Adams VM version of the game would have been preferable to this conversion. Since the memory requirements would be much less than that of the Z-machine, such a native port could have theoretically ran on any speccy from 48K up, with or without graphics and without needing a floppy drive. Also, a native port would probably run faster than this Z-machine conversion which is a tad sluggish no doubt due to the added complexity of the Z-machine itself. Not to take anything away from the immensely superb technical achievement of this Z-machine implementation.
Having said that, it's just impressive that this strictly text-only version of the game eventually became available on the speccy at all. The font on this version is too small for my liking but I believe there's a way to switch ZXZVM back into the native, larger 32-column speccy font, which I never investigated.
As for the gameplay, you'd really want to have played a significant number of the preceding seven games in the series before tackling this one. This would allow the player to become familiar with various idiosyncrasies of the Scott Adams parser (No "examine" command, use "look" or "search" instead). In fact only the first three letters of any inputted word are significant. Also the previous games have similar goals (collect and store treasure) and similar types of puzzles.
The difficulty is really ramped up in Pyramid of Doom and the player will find that they have to work the grey cells a little bit harder than previously in order to find most of the 13 treasures stashed in the ancient Egyptian pyramid. A couple of the puzzles are downright illogical IMHO, but luckily we have the full range of hints and even the complete solution for this game available on the excellent TipShop website. I'd suggest there are at least two places where many players, like myself might become stumped for a long time due to needing to enter a somewhat esoteric command sequence.
However, despite the limitiations and shortcomings of a 1979 game, the feeling of the desert pyramid scenario is still absorbing for those who enjoy text adventuring and the vast majority of the puzzles are reasonably fair and logical and quite satisfying to solve.
In-game antagonists include starving rats, a desert nomad, a giant oyster and a mysterious purple worm. Treasures to be plundered consist of the usual assortment of gold and precious stones etc..
In summary, this one is well worth a go for text adventure fans, particularly for fans of the earlier games that kick-started the whole popularity of text adventuring on home computers. Games such as this have many rough edges and with hindsight can seem very primitive almost to the point of frustration, but still they remain very enjoyable and captivating. Perhaps a couple of weeks of enjoyment can be found from this game. The exact duration would depend on the level of player willpower to refrain looking at the hint sheet.
I would have given it a score of 4, but one point deducted because of a lack of a potentially better official commercial release which would have been compatible with the standard 48K speccy. You may wish to play this game on a different platform than the +3. I completed parts of it under a native UNIX Scott Adams interpreter for example. Nevertheless it's undoubtedly a novel experience to see it running in a Spectrum +3 environment.
