Reviews by Canalboy

This is another large and finicky Epic adventure with interminable dull paths and real-time elements; there are a whole host of winding underground tunnels and paths which need careful mapping. The number of redundant locations can't possibly have anything to do with making the game seem more attractive in the advertising of the day when room count was a major selling point. Oh dear me no.

The premise is that you find yourself on a country road next to a well after spinning a strange wheel you found lying in a country lane; to return to civilisation you must find 23 treasures and then...well, it should be fairly obvious.

There are umpteen ways of soft and hard locking yourself out of completion in this game so you must save in almost an anal fashion. Remember the lamp will burn in real time too so no dawdling or al fresco lamp lighting. Some exits are not clued so mapping is essential here; successful completion depends on not wasting precious lamp oil. It is not possible to refill your lamp as I eventually discovered, despite there being a large pool of oil in one location. Lubrication may be a prerequisite elsewhere.

The game has a number of split second timing decisions to make, mostly centering around when and where to interact with the various NPCs in the game as well as some one visit only areas. Discovering which objects to take with you into these areas and the order in which to visit them will inevitably lead to numerous reloads and restarts. The ten item inventory limit may sound ample but there are times when you will need to take that many items with you so there is no scope for getting it wrong.

The EPIC Operating system was co-written by the author together with D.M. Johnson and updated several times; while the parser in this game is not as sophisticated as the one in The Lost Crystal written three years later from the same stable I found it adequate and I didn't have much trouble in expressing my desire, with the exception of one set piece involving a farmer and a bull in a china shop. I came across not a single typo or other shrdlu which is refreshing.

As mentioned above there are a number of both obstructive and helpful NPCs including a policemen, a werewolf, a troll and a tramp who move across certain areas of the game map. As in many of the games from the seminal years there is ample scope for soft and hard locks, sometimes obvious straight away and sometimes not.

Squeezing 218 illustrated rooms into the 32K Beeb won't have been easy this side of Level 9 text compression techniques and overall the game is worth playing for the puzzles which are definitely the game's strong suit.

I played via the B-em emulator version 2.2 as I prefer the native font to the BeebEm program and upped the emulator speed to 300 per cent which gave smooth and fast game play sessions.

Remakes, flippin' remakes. Nicholas Cage in The Wicker Man? Bruce Willis in The Day Of The Jackal? No more questions, m'lud.

1981 was of course still a time when the text adventure was in its infancy. It was just five years since Colossal Cave hit the ARPANET and seven since Peter Langston's Wander lit its flickering light under the bushel of history. This review is based on the original and best version of Cranston Manor.

The games back then tended to be large, difficult and fantasy based and this game is certainly one of the best examples of the time. There is also a nice fricassee of James Bond thrown into the recipe for good measure. This first version was written for the North Star Horizon (a machine released in early 1977) by Larry Ledden and ported to the Atari as a text only game. A version for Dynacomp was written in MBASIC for CP/M in the summer of 1981 as well. A later version was written for Sierra On-Line which sacrificed textual depth, puzzle quality, story enforcement and atmosphere on the altar of the new text/graphical age.

It is unashamedly a "search the grounds and house of a long-dead eccentric and collect sixteen treasures" game but the muddy track of history had few tyre marks back then and the genre still works when done well.

As previously intimated there is a very well done denouement to the game when you penetrate the erstwhile owner's nerve center and the tension is upped as you suddenly play 007 dodging murderous tin soldiers and laser beams. This clever switch certainly kicks you out of your comfort zone after pottering about the mansion fiddling with ropes and desks.

The somewhat primitive two word parser understands about 130 words but I can think of only one place where I struggled to phrase my intentions in a way that didn't seem cuddly to the parser. The descriptions are very well done, often long and evocative making full use of the space afforded by a disk game without lapsing into dime novel territory. I particularly like the layout of the town near the manor which you have to traverse before the main game begins inside the manor - this certainly adds to the immersive feel of being alone in the city. This naturalistic idea was insensitively removed from the later version.

There are rather novel ways of recharging your lantern and the droid which you control (a unique conceit for the time) although I believe these clever innovations are also lacking in the Sierra rehash.

Much of the game is open from the start although there are a few hidden passages and locked doors; my favourite conceits in these kind of games. There is also an inventory limit of eight objects but as the map is fairly quickly traversed this is only a minor irritation and the game isn't top heavy with portable items anyway. The 134 locations seem somehow smaller to me and this is probably a tribute to the logistical planning that went into the map by the author. There are also none of those "traipsing along an identical rocky path for twelve moves" type of wearisome conceits that some software houses of the time demanded in an effort to flab out the size of their games.

I played via the Altirra emulator v 4.21 as the 4.30 version seemed to crash in enhanced text mode.

We've all done it - bumping into someone for the first time in years and barely clocking them but there are still some immutable features that we instantly recognise. And so it is with this half-remembered relic of Crowther's original.

I grabbed the executable for this via DropBox and I was pleasantly surprised. I was expecting a near exact copy of Colossal Cave but instead it is quite an interesting spin-off; yes it has a wellhouse and a grate and other plagiaristic nods to the original but most of the locations and puzzles are original and well done. Surprisingly XYZZY and the rest of the canonical commands aren't recognised.

It does have the traditional very nasty "maze of twisty passages, all alike" which must be thoroughly mapped lest you miss an item. It also has evidence of being unfinished as you can move through a door and be greeted with "Colossal Cavern is under construction in this area. Please return to this location at a later date for interesting Adventures."

You can however still attain 500 out of 500 points.

In common with games this venerable the two word parser can be annoying but at least it understands GET ALL and VERBOSE and you can save multiple games without the game exiting immediately afterwards.

It does ratchet up the difficulty level from Crowther's original but still falls short of the Phoenix games in terms of hardness.

Whembly Castle was shoved in my direction by Jason Dyer via his laudable and fascinating blog in which he intends to tackle every text adventure ever written. He is currently flailing along in the rapids of 1982 and can probably hear the tumultuous roar of 1984 some way up ahead where the currents are really deep and strong.

This particularly large area of whitewater is only playable via a North Star Horizon emulator which itself can be made to run from within DOSBox-X by mounting the relevant directory (in my case D:\Horizon) then typing HORIZON to run the emulator. You then need to select F7, choose RO and then select the .nsi file you should have saved in the Horizon directory {Whembly Castle.nsi}. You should after a few seconds receive the North Star DOS 5.0 prompt. At this stage type GO BASIC and when the prompt READY appears type LOAD CASTLE and the instructions will ask you if you wish to carry on a saved game or start a new one. It is worth speeding up the cycles in DOSBox-X though as it runs very slowly initially; one of the downsides of running an emulator within an emulator.

Once up and running you can explore the region around a lake and a nasty maze which will need dedicated mapping skills because any one direction missed could be the one that houses an item vital for your continuity. At least there is a handy collection of objects near the start which are ideally suited for the purpose of maze mapping.

Once this item has been gleaned you can make progress breaking into a cabin and a shack where oars and fuel are your ticket out of here and onto the mysterious lake and its castle set in the centre.

The castle in itself is a massive one with hundreds of rooms, secret corridors, paintings of Alice In Wonderland and Sir John Whembly there for you to admire and decipher as clues to where the missing sack of gold could be secreted away. Word puzzles, generators and wells all need to be maintained and brought back to life before any obvious deductions can be made. The maze below the well is a whopper consisting of over sixty locations that have to be thoroughly mapped as several items and tools are scattered about and each will be necessary to solve the treasure hunt. My map currently registers nearly 300 locations and I suspect I am nowhere near solving the thing. One nice touch is no inventory limit which makes dropping objects to map the mazes easier to do. And there are privies. Lots and lots of 'em. Maybe the author had a weak bladder but I am reminded of the Not The Nine O' Clock news sketch with Rowan Atkinson choosing a bathroom suite. Look it up on YouTube.

The game is unfortunately somewhat buggy and on my first play through I was unable to enter the boat. When I restarted however I could reach the area with the boat much more quickly and consequently I could enter the boat and make sail into the large lake. I suspect my manifold save game slots on the first assault had somehow corrupted the game file. The game also shows its age in only accepting upper case commands which is a bit of a pain as I fill in my trizbort map in normal upper and lower case so I am constantly having to toggle the caps lock when typing.

For the purist and completist text adventure fan this is a must play. Younger players probably won't like it but such is life.

Mordon's Quest from Australian developers Melbourne House was co-written by John Jones-Steele of Level 9 authorship fame in 1985. I won't remind the Antipodeans that England won the Ashes back that year. Oh dear I just did.

Written in Assembler and released for a wide range of micros back in the filofax era this text only game will seem cruel and gigantic to modern tastes (it is possible to render the game unwinnable but these instances should be axiomatic at the time). It does however stand up as one of the best examples of its era. Spanning 161 well-written and evocative locations the two-pronged objectives are to assemble the seven parts of an Eternity Machine (bravery/heroism) and to amass twelve treasures (greed/acquisitiveness). It pays to read the descriptions very carefully as not all exits are mentioned outright. Make sure your map is carefully drawn too as it will be needed to solve one particular puzzle early in the game and there are several puzzles that are turn critical; some nice chaining conundrums also span several locations.

The display is nicely presented on the Fuse emulator at least, given some of the horrible fonts that were game defaults on the Spectrum for one. Responses are very fast due to the nature of the coding.

Your journey starts in a frustrating fog shrouded house with many locked doors that can't be opened and the opening puzzle (together with the last one) would seem to me to be the hardest - the latter in particular (in the Catacombs) requires the use of a verb that I have never utilised previously in a text adventure. The "king of the jungle" riddle is clever in its construction but somewhat of a non sequitur. A brace of puzzles also involve unclued hanging around; this is made more flagrant as the game will often chastise you for tarrying in most places. The EXAMINE command is present but I only managed to find one place where it produced anything other than "you see nothing special" which makes its existence pretty redundant. Inventory limits are seven and mercifully there are no timers involved.

Once through the mists your trip takes you from jungle to ruined city, from underwater gardens to ancient Rome and on to a future world full of cryogenics, unstable reactors and droids. Julius Caesar, a medieval jester and a nervous octopus as well as Spiderman make their guest appearances along the route.

The separate sections of the game are reachable via a time machine which is cleverly interwoven into the story and there is also a transport system for moving booty and machine parts around which saves a lot of leg work although it is possible to retrace your steps manually if you have missed anything along the route.

The game also has a wonderful sense of humour; just try smoking the cigar or examining the ashes. The adventure developer's room is also very funny.

A planned sequel putatively entitled Bostafer's Revenge was mooted but never came to fruition.

This is a large and as far as I am aware also an obscure science fiction game which I played within DOSBox-X.

I nearly didn't bother to continue after unscrewing the lid as there are three elementary spelling mistakes on the introductory page; if you can't scrub up at the initial interview stage are you going to be a suitable employee of my time?

Leaving typographical howlers behind the game develops an intriguing premise - you stumble upon a glowing cylinder and a strange dead humanoid at the edge of the forest. Entering leads into a typical spaceship setting, steel corridors, airlocks, glowing buttons and touch panels worthy of any 1970s science fiction series. Equipment manipulation (you panic and destroy your route back home by pressing an incorrect button) eventually reveals that the spaceship was on an eight destination mission through the solar system to seek out new lives and to boldly go where no TADS runtime error 612 has ever gone before. There are of course shades here of Graham Nelson's Jigsaw as the cylinder acts as the central hub for your quixotic travels.

Each destination must be visited and information learned before you can begin to consider how to handle your final homecoming and there are interesting social comments about the human condition interspersed with the futuristic overarch of the story.

Few items and objects can't be examined and the responses are both interesting and often badly spelled. UNDO, TAKE ALL and X are all understood. Occasional run time errors are annoying but there is some clever coding to deal with different scenarios at the same location and changed states together with better than average NPC interaction. There a lot of mechanical and physics/chemistry posers here amongst the more traditional text adventure puzzles.

Save often as death is often sudden and unexpected.It can be made unwinnable and there are instadeaths a plenty, however what can you expect when you blunder aboard a spaceship and randomly tamper with incomprehensible equipment? The Luddite in you will be bound to render the equipment useless and kill you more than once.

A Scottish fly lands on your nose.....a Scottish bug lands on your left ear....and your right ear....and your chin....and your adam's apple....and well, you get the general idea.

I have always liked the "search a mansion to claim your inheritance" style of text adventure encompassing the whole gamut from Hollywood Hijinx to The Mulldoon Legacy and I had meant to try this DOS and C64 effort for some time. This well-trodden premise has you hunting for twelve gold bars and consequently triggering the end game to claim your $10,000,000 dollar inheritance.

I wish now that I had essayed the C64 version as the DOS effort (played via DOSBox-X) elicits a number of bugs, both harmless and game crashing.

There are no self-inflicted fatal mistakes in the game (beyond the bugs) as any potentially life ending moves merely earn a rebuke regarding your lack of adroitness and a continuation from your current position with your inventory still in your possession. The game ending faux pas are all in the coding, dear boy. It is worth paying attention however to the text dumps during your many quasi demises as clues can be hidden therein.

I arrived at the mysterious Durham Airport in Scotland (erm, Durham isn't in Scotland and doesn't have an airport but we'll gloss over that) and was greeted by the butler. I also encountered a winsome french maid called Gisele who promised to meet me afterwards but never did. At the beginning of the game you are asked if you are a laddie or a lassie; I imagine if you choose lassie then the unreliable french maid is replaced by an unreliable valet or similar. Perhaps he/she planned to abscond with the mcmurphy.dat file, the incorrectly reported absence of which causes the game to crash on a random basis. Some exits also loop to wrong locations and mystifyingly the command "TURN CUBE" occasionally elicits, "There is no bathroom in the mansion," or the even more Daliesque, "Everything has now turned yellow."

Other bugs do however crash the game.

Dorothy Millard's solution doesn't work for the puzzle in the kitchen although whether this is another bug or not I am unsure.

I gave up in the end as too many of the little critters made the game unplayable but if the untried Commodore 64 trope plays more smoothly then the DOS version (it could hardly do otherwise) then the game is worth a play as there is a very good game in here trying to get out, albeit one clad in khaki shorts, pith helmet and clutching a can of insect repellent. Some of the puzzle solutions are very clever and the descriptions are rather evocative.

You know you are in trouble with a game when you find "a bottle of weedkiller" and on attempting the inevitable TAKE BOTTLE the game parses: "There is no bottle of gin here!"

If you enter a building right at the start of the game and fail to type SEARCH the bottle of weedkiller (it is on a high shelf) doesn't exist. Yup, if you fail to search for items in a building and destroy the room around it (which you need to do to get the weedkiller off the high shelf) then they don't exist and you have soft locked the game without knowing it. And after your act of Luddism you can leave and re-enter the shed which doesn't exist any more; of course the graphics show it as still virgo intacta. Conditional flags are obviously lacking here.

A creature in a room (e.g. a dead balrog) isn't there if you EXAMINE it. A rickety wooden bridge cannot be examined (there is no rope bridge here) as it applies to the wrong bridge.

The game is studded with so-called scatalogical humour but if you use the same words yourself you are rebuked for your language. A gate cannot be climbed, opened or interacted with in any way. All of this can be suffered in the first handful of rooms.

This "game" was written in POOR. Sorry, PAW.

The Only Possible Prom Dress was for my part a long-awaited sequel to Not Just An Ordinary Ballerina and showcases the author's admirable refusal to run with the modern interactive fiction herd. If you thought that long, puzzle-heavy parser games with subordinated plots were a thing of the past think again. While there's Jim Aikin there's hope for us old-timers.

I'd played Ballerina a decade ago and even then games of this type had of course become rarae aves. By the time of this sequel they had become as rare as right wing governments and pubs that take cash.

The diaphanous plot revolves around your efforts to buy your daughter Sam a dress for the senior prom as her kid brother has (deliberately or not) spilled ink on the designated apparel. A perfect excuse for another visit to the somewhat creepy and almost deserted Stufftown, Jim's ode to the excesses of consumerism. George Orwell once described advertising as "the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket" and the author obviously shares these sentiments; I was reminded of Cronenberg's Starliner Towers as I wandered around this futuristic dystopia. The whole scruffy, pigeon-violated edifice of Stufftown is crammed full of shops, twenty-nine of them to be precise, selling everything from surreal-shaped birdbaths to microscopes; they are nearly all deserted as a local lacrosse game has made the people of Stufftown forget about commercialism for a day at least. Rubbish is strewn in passageways, stairways are broken, maintenance equipment is rusty and forlorn. The NPCs you meet along the way and with whom you will have to interact to win are as decrepit as the building in which they work - Betsy the chain smoking girl from the beauty salon has fingernails bitten to the quick and has obviously just been dumped by her boyfriend; the corpulent clairvoyant spends her days knitting; the art gallery owner is chock full of existential angst and stares fixedly at the floor. The two owners of this corporate monstrosity sit in their glass-desked ivory tower on the top floor and dream of the future and virtual tours of their world where money is spent on cutting edge technology and not on disinfectant or hammer and nails.

Woven into this depressingly naturalistic milieu are a number of supernatural elements. These are used sparingly and thus with deftness. A homeless man sees pixies flying around his head; an annoying purple dinosaur follows you around and two experimental protagonists must be brought back to life to complete your mission by dint of recipe collecting. As you progress the difficulty level of the problems facing you increases and the story naturally progresses as problems are solved. It is not, however the kind of game where you are stuck on one problem and thus unable to progress; often solving one will help with a problem that you have put on the back burner.

You can choose to play the game with hints on or off and I chose the latter. The former feeds you clues on your mobile phone when you reach certain points in the narrative and FULL SCORE will show your progress out of two hundred and fifty and itemise the obstacles you have overcome, much like Curses.

The problems themselves constitute a mixture of traditional tropes. There are doors and portable items to be unlocked, anagrams and mathematical posers, hidden passages to be revealed, machines to be brought to working order or vandalised, stores to be broken into and other characters to be cajoled/bribed/unmasked. Favours are very much bought with favours.

There are seventy-four portable items and all have at least one use. There are no tiresome inventory limits or daemons and the game will automatically jettison items that you no longer need if you pass a certain central location in the game which is a thoughtful and none to easy to program feature. Some items have multiple uses. There are mazes in the game, however all are outside the drop items to map variety, a subtle nod towards IF modernism.

It is pretty difficult to put the game into an unwinnable position although two particular puzzles do present this opportunity. Save, save and save again. I found the parser to be more than adequate and it will try to auto correct and interpret your typing errors. I came across almost no typos and very few other bugs, although one involving a locked gate stands out. This is not game breaking however.

In summary this is a well coded, well written puzzle-based diversion; if you are endowed with patience and like old style games with modern IF conveniences you will enjoy this. Just prepare to put aside a lot of spare time and read location descriptions very carefully.

Hermit's Secret was the second of six games written by the science fiction author Dian Crayn (she had several pseudonyms) in 1982 and 1983. They are all of a piece, that is large, puzzle based treasure hunts replete with mazes (a couple of them nasty with random exits) and timed end sequences. As I have always been a fan of old style games these are right up my street, or down my grating if you prefer. The grating reference is apt as all of the games have more than a bottom note of Willie Crowther and Don Woods. Each has its equivalent of the pirate and the axe throwing dwarves and in this game they are an over-stressed salesman, a hooded assassin and an obsequious elf. Keep on the move and you should be okay. There is even an homage to the dragon killing method in the 1976 game in here as is the last lousy point. There are also a number of magic words in the game that transport you instantaneously across its broad canvas and into some secret rooms which are not reachable by conventional means.

Dian's descriptions are mostly well-done and of medium length although the two word parser could have been improved by allowing more location items to be interacted with - "examine" is not included. There is a coding oddity in that the table for the push command appears to be empty. This does not prevent the game from being completed but does affect a later game, Granny's Place from being wrapped up. I also make no apologies in spoiling one particular puzzle which had me flummoxed for ages, namely digging in the mud hole only works if you are holding the pig. It should be predicated upon whether or not you are holding the shovel but there is a dodgy conditional flag here; likewise when attempting to cross the chasm with the pig. I realised it must be possible to dig at the mud hole as the parser hints as much when you essay the action sans porker.

In all there are 22 of the Hermit's treasures to be located and stored in an unlikely place across over 200 locations; these are split roughly between two thirds below ground and one third the other side of the topsoil.

There is a lamp timer at work but the number of moves permitted is so large that this should not be a problem - if it is, a battery vending machine can be located guess where? Yup that's right, thank you Don Woods.

I played via DOSBox-X which is my go to program for playing these old DOS games. I find it gives a better save game experience and a cleaner more customisable display.