Producer: Temptation Software
Memory Required: 48K
Retail Price:
Language: BASIC and Machine code
Author: Alan Davis

The Journey is a real-time text adventure with only a few graphics in which your quest is to seek out the legendary White Ship of the Elves and obtain passage to a distant land where your destiny as an adventurer may be fulfilled (don't ask me what this last bit means, I got it straight off the inlay). As you make your way over the lands of the Black Warlock, and beyond, you will meet many creatures. These, apart from the guardians who keep a constant watch over important routes and treasures, lead lives of their own and are free to roam as they wish. They may appear friendly, indifferent or decidedly hostile, and this will depend on how you conduct yourself. Some may have powers you don't possess but will only help once you've won their respect. Similarly, they will only talk to you, perhaps imparting useful information, if they like you.

After about twenty seconds the 'What Now?' prompt is withdrawn briefly from the bottom of the screen while the other characters are given the option of performing some function. To take a breather from the relentless onslaught of real-time, type in any letter in response to the prompt and do not enter. However, if this letter is subsequently inappropriate and you must delete it, the obsessive real-time element leaps straight back in slowing up your next input. So although The Journey is indeed a realtime game, this element is more obtrusive than in, say, The Hobbit, as WAIT, for example, does not speed up time but is simply there as an option to sit out the next twenty seconds, quite literally. This is not such a bad thing as the game has quite a strategy aspect to it and this provides time to think. Where the real-time really does intrude is when the computer insists on taking its turn every twenty seconds no matter what. You can be typing in a command only to find the program isn't accepting it since it is too busy with its own, rather slow and laborious, computations. When you finally get your input in, a delay of four seconds is almost standard.

For the seasoned adventurer the vocabulary shows many anomalies, so reading the inflated instructions, alas, is a necessity. Communicating with the characters is non-standard but easy to come to terms with. 'Say to' is dropped in favour of TELL ELF OPEN DOOR, or TELL ELF TAKE SWORD, which neatly keeps input to a four word maximum. If you should decide to get the dagger from the elf, and if TELL ELF DROP DAGGER is successful you are told that the elf has given you the dagger, yet you must still GET DAGGER.

When verb/noun couplings are used, the verb, sadly, must be typed out in full, so the almost universally friendly EXAM is expanded to EXAMINE. If a character in a nearby location is needed you can CALL him to you but the calls will go unheeded unless you have taken the time to befriend him in the first place. Friendly characters, once called, will prove more useful if you make use of the LIST command where LIST ELF will produce a rundown on what the elf is carrying. I like the command LIST ELF but why LIST instead of INVENTORY when you want to know what you are carrying? There is no sane reason why the letter I should not give your own inventory in every adventure - just like any other industry standard.

Each character in The Journey, including your own, possesses three attributes: intelligence, strength and experience. The command STATUS will give your own current attributes. You can determine the status of other characters by typing STATUS ELF etc. Your attributes will change as the adventure progresses. Solving certain problems may cause your intelligence to increase while eating increases your strength to a maximum which, quite rightly, does not just decrease with time but with combat and exertion. Interestingly, wounds are healed by eating in that you become strong once more. Your effectiveness in combat is governed primarily by the sum total of your attributes compared to those of your opponent, together with a small luck factor. You may engage a character in combat by typing FIGHT THE WARLOCK in which case it will be assumed you wish to fight with your bare hands. Possession of weapons may be used to advantage by typing FIGHT WARLOCK WITH SWORD. All weapons give you an increased advantage but you must guess which weapons are the more powerful. You need not specify a weapon when asking others to fight on your behalf (TELL ELF FIGHT GIANT). If the elf is carrying a weapon he will automatically use it and if he is carrying more than one, he will choose the most powerful. Others may take the initiative and attack you first and if wounded your strength is reduced.

The Journey is an adventure where selecting the most fruitful avenues and taking them at the appropriate times is more important than the linear progression characteristic of many adventures with a long line of problems. After studying the solution two thoughts cross my mind. Firstly, the game is very complicated and has the wherewithal to keep an avid adventurer engrossed for some time. Secondly, unravelling could prove rather difficult if the adventurer must discover for himself which weapons are the most lethal and which characters' friendships offer the most gains. Much work has gone into creating an impressive depth in the game which is very different from the run-of-the-mill adventures and offers a further advance in character interaction. Well worth a look at.

COMMENTS

Difficulty: moderate-difficult
Graphics: very few
Presentation: black on white with no use of colour
Input facility: verb/noun except when using TELL
Response: average about 4 seconds

MAKER: Temptation Software
FORMAT: cassette
PRICE: £7.95

Well, here I am minding my own business, see, and up comes this elf - funny little bloke - clever, though. He's got this mate, not too bright, but looks a bit handy, know what I mean? Before you can say Gollum, off we go on a quest or something. I wouldn't mind if there was the odd tavern in sight, but no, mountains, poisonous snakes, trolls and all that. Wish I'd stayed in Essex.

The Journey is an adventure with graphics, ad from the loading time, it's a big one. It's very much in the Hobbit tradition, but owes more to Tolkien's sequel Lord of the Rings. In the company of various other characters, an elf, a wizard and a very surly and suspicious warrior, you have to seek out the White Ship of the elves, and what happens next is anyone's guess.

The program's language handling ability is not as good as The Hobbit, no adverbs and you can't chain commands, but the characters are a lot more talkative - the elf chatters away like mad with rumours of giants and home-spun philosophy. Winning the other characters' friendship is one of the biggest problems and I just couldn't hit it off with that warrior. I didn't even get a chance to buy the guy a pint. But I kept on trying and I'll probably have another go later, so I must be hooked.

ADVENTUROUS JOURNEY

MICRO: Spectrum 48K
PRICE: £7.95
FORMAT: Cassette
SUPPLIER: Temptation Software, 27 Cinque Ports Street, Rye, Sussex

Tony Bridge wends his way through Temptation's The Journey

The Journey is a real-time text adventure with graphics, in which your quest is to seek out the legendary White Ship of the Elves and be carried to a distant land where your true destiny as an adventurer may be fulfilled... Little Newport Street, perhaps?

The author, Alan Davis, has always been interested in character inter-reaction, and this is a strong feature of the program.

The adventure runs in real time, so that, should the player sit doing nothing, the world around will carry on with its affairs; odd characters will wander past as you wonder what to do, and, if you're not quick enough in typing in a command, it's quite possible that these characters will wander off before you can KILL, KICK or ROB them! And as well as other characters having a life of their own, they may be affected by the player - for example, one character may be directed to fight another if the player is too weak or prudent to undertake the task himself: and another character's inventory may be requested.

From all this, it may seem that fighting is all there is to The Journey - not so! Since my piece on this adventure in the Popular Computing Weekly of 1st November, I've revised my opinions somewhat, and realised that the character inter-reaction is of a much higher standard than the usual random "Fred appears and starts wingeing on about spinach". This sort of thing is just window-dressing and not usually of much help, although there are, of course, notable exceptions.

Playing through The Journey is not going to be possible without a lot of help from the other characters. Right from the very start, you must get the inhabitants of this fantasy world on your side. One of the main ways of doing this is to find and hand back to their rightful owners several objects, such as the Wizard's Wand. This will ensure their co-operation in fighting on your behalf. Finding gold coins and making a donation to The Orchard ensures a supply of fruit to eat - otherwise, you have to wait for the Orchard-keeper to come along and open the door, after which the player has one minute to get in and out again. As a final example, the Warrior will become increasingly impressed by your prowess at fighting and can then be used to clobber the more horrible monsters. Beware, though! If you beg his aid too often, he'll walk off in disgust. Combat is pretty important, at least in the first half of The Journey, being accomplished in several rounds, with the monster, we hope, becoming weaker until dead. There is no 'repeat action' function, however, and it is quite a chore to type in something like 'tell Warrior fight Dragon' three or four times.

Another aspect of all this is that characters can be called - the further away they happen to be, of course, the longer they will take to arrive, so it is probably a good idea to journey en masse.

As you can see from the character names, the land of The Journey is very like a medieval Middle Earth, with lots of juicy locations, objects and puzzles, all of which are greatly enhanced by the character's movement and actions.

The graphics, unfortunately, don't add much, although they are colourful - but they're also pretty slowly-drawn, and it's a pity that there is no 'OFF' option.

The predilection of the author may be seen in the Status table which can be called up at will - your character (and indeed, all the others) possesses three attributes: Intelligence, Strength and Experience, each of which will be affected as play progresses, sometimes decreasing and sometimes increasing. Completion of this adventure is going to take quite some time, so there is a high-speed SAVE and LOAD facility available.

As I said before, other characters will go about their business while you decide what, to do - in practice, the flashing input cursor at the bottom of the screen stays active for about 20 seconds, after which time, control is taken away from the player for a couple of seconds, while all the other creatures of this world are given their turn. This isn't too much of a hardship, though, as all the player has to do is type in one letter, and then can go away and make a cup of tea, secure in the knowledge that the program will wait "4E4" (as Phipps would say) for the ENTER key to be pressed. If you don't want to "fiddle" the game mechanics in this way, just sit back and wait while the program says things like "You twiddle your thumbs." or "You hum a little tune.". The response time, is a little long, so that you will be tapping your fingers quite a lot!

There is a lot of atmosphere in The Journey, with runic codes to be deciphered (EXAMINE everything, as clues to the code are likely to turn up anywhere!) and those cursed characters wandering in and out all the time - and Alan Davis has kindly included, on the cassette inlay, a complete list of the words you'll need (or synonyms thereof) to complete the adventure. So no more wondering how to open a door; if the word isn't in the list, you're on the wrong track anyway. The usual verb-noun combination (get sword) is recognised, but in certain cases the player may type in up to four words, or 32 characters. I would say that this is a good compromise between the inflexibility of a mere two words, and the overkill of 256 characters I hardly ever use sentences like "Take the magic sword and then very carefully kill the Goblin, before running cautiously through the woodland glen and taking the Golden Helmet"!

So, The Journey is a pretty good marriage of a bloody Hack and Slay Quest-adventure and a good puzzleventure. In my original review, I felt that the adventure was a little old-fashioned - well, it does remind me of some older programs, but there is nothing wrong with that. This is Davis' first programming exercise (that I'm aware of) and now that the hard work is out of the way, I look forward to his next release - he tells me that it will use much of the techniques learnt here, with 40 intelligent characters and full 'landscaping graphics'. Sounds good to me!

Temptation Software Ltd.
48K Spectrum

This journey is a Middle-Earth type of adventure, with a somewhat unusual feature; you don't have to discover tricky words in order to explore it. However, there are some complicated problems to be overcome, involving devious use of the various recognised words.

This is one of the new style real-time, interactive adventures. The real-time being of paramount importance, as the characters do have a limited amount of individual choice of action. Also, certain events will periodically occur which you must take advantage of, if you are to succeed.

The objective is to explore the many lands and finally locate the white ship of the Elves. The interactive feature will need to be regularly used, as you will certainly require help from the other characters in order to complete your quest. To obtain this you must first gain their trust; how you achieve this is another of the game's puzzles which must be solved by trial and error tactics.

Limited use of graphics is made, although they do not add much to the game. There are only some 75 locations, but many must be explored before you are finished.

Various clues are carefully scattered throughout the locations, hidden by the use of the a symbolic language. Hence, the early stages consist of explorations to work out this code. Once deciphered the clues will guide your actions during the adventure.

Always examine things thoroughly and use the help of others to defeat your enemies, if possible. If you must attack any of the guardians yourself, make sure you are strong enough and have a suitable weapon to hand. The use of 'real-time' will aid you in this task. How you act determines how the other characters react towards you, so think carefully.

The final solution to this adventure is quite devious and will involve much thought, as well as frequent saving of useful stages of play. As always, careful mapping of all locations is essential.

In conclusion a refreshing adventure because of the well-defined vocabulary. It's nice to know that if you're not getting anywhere, it's not solely due to the fact that you can't think of the right words to use. Hopefully this trend in adventuring will continue in the future, well worth the tape price.