Producer: Adventure Software
Retail Price: £1.99
Author: Nigel Brooks

Believe it or not, this game is based on THAT famous mainframe original. To the author's credit, this game has a third more locations, a completely new 30 location introduction, and is 100% machine code with over 50% compression of the memory used up to house the text (whew!). Further, the vocabulary is developed enough to take on board the sophisticated GET ALL and DROP ALL commands, and location descriptions can be FULL or BRIEF. All the major problems have been reworked, and a great many of the old locations have improved and expanded text. Add to this a new 'end game' and you into wonder why the game didn't cut any remaining links and call itself by a totally new name!

It is Summer. You are a lowly farmhand on ditch-digging duty while everyone else is gathering the harvest. Suddenly you uncover a buried casket. Inside you find some keys, a map and the mildewy remains of a book. It is the journal of an uncelebrated, but clearly successful explorer.

Apart from the opening, much of this adventure is the same as Colossal. I've left the best of this adventure to last. What makes any adventure special is the amount of real effort put into making the gameplay more interesting, and in this adventure much thought has been brought to bear on old adventuring ways. Most interesting is the way in which the game has tackled the much-maligned problem of object carrying. Clothes may be REMOVED or WORN, objects are weighted (eg a nugget counts as two weights), and to add a degree of realism, pockets have been added to the clothes whereby PUT KEYS sees the keys, or any other pocket-sized item, safely in your pocket. I must admit I couldn't work out how to get the keys back out of the pocket without dropping them - a most inelegant solution, but no doubt this is only a minor omission from the instructions. Other refinements include a GET ALL which doesn't work in the dark, FULL and BRIEF location descriptions, full versions creating a new location as this is a feature to get the adventurer quickly used to the terrain, and five instant RAM SAVES, which come in very useful.

Adventure is the most unoriginal name of the whole bunch, and on the face of it another version of Colossal is the last thing we want. Adventure Software, 21 Ditchling Rise, Brighton BN1 4BQ.

COMMENTS

Difficulty: playable
Graphics: none at all
Presentation: very readable redesigned character set, and that's about it
Input facility: verb/noun
Response: fast

Label: Adventure Software (soon to be released on the Players label)
Price: £1.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Gary Rook

This program left me in something of a quandry, because Adventure is, unashamedly, a copy of the first ever adventure game.

For those of you who may not know your computer game history, back in the mists of time (the early 1970s) two computer geniusses called Don Woods and Willy Crowther - Americans both - wrote a game called ADVENT. They called it that because at the time, computer files could only have names of up to six letters, and they had to be in caps. ADVENT, believe it or not, is short for adventure.

Since then, numerous people have written their own version of the game, some of them commercial products. This is possible because the program was public domain - ie nobody claimed copyright on it Adventure is yet another version.

That means that, to the seasoned adventure, the plot is as familiar as the Lord's Prayer to a born again Christian. You have to collect the treasures, take them back to the hut where you start. The objective is to collect all the treasures there are in the game and so score maximum points.

I'm assuming that, since this is a copy of ADVENT, the plot continues to be basically the same - I haven't had the time to play through the entire game, nor have I seen a solution. Indeed, there would be nothing wrong with that if it were the same game - it's very challenging, and everybody who claims to be an adventurer should have had a go at it at least once in their lives. But it has also been done so many times: I really don't know if we need another version of it.

Having said that, Adventure Software's version is very attractive the screens are well laid out, the choice of colours is good and makes the text easy to read, and everything seems to be programmed correctly.

Which means that if you haven't got a copy of ADVENT, then I would recommend this one for you - it's as good as any other.

If you have already got a copy, or played it on a mainframe, then I wouldn't bother.