Ratings and Reviews by Canalboy

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.