Ratings and Reviews by Canalboy

CJ Coombs Adventure 200 can hold its head high amongst its peers; most of them will have had much more memory to utilise and develop a coherent story even if all that underpins them is "explore a strange land and collect the king's missing treasures."

The 220 odd locations in here seem well connected and believable, and the author manages to wring a fair amount of atmosphere out of the necessarily short room descriptions.

The game is very easy to soft lock as certain objects, once picked up can not be put down again. As there is a fair amount of sneaking past guards involved it is often necessary to leave a tempting item where it is until you stumble upon a scenario where you might need it.

There are some beautiful set piece puzzles contained herein; one involving entering a firedamp filled mine and having to both find a way to start a machine that clears the gas then later turning it on again to thwart a pursuer is worthy of the Phoenix mainframe boys at Cambridge.

Choreographing the correct order in which to tackle the rather difficult puzzles is half the fun here.

The game is stuffed with mazes both great and small. You could argue there are eight although only one is very large. Dropping objects to map them works very well.

Mercifully there is no lamp timer or inventory limit which is refreshing to see in a game from 1982.

Oddly DESCRIBE works to glean more information about an item rather than EXAMINE.

All in all I would thoroughly recommend this tricky but fun treasure hunt. I also came across zero misspellings and grammatical mistakes.

Avoid this game like the plague. One of those complacent "wacky" pieces where aadvarks sleep on washing machines and Octopii carry paintings by Dali. Why not have Christopher Columbus fighting a cucumber or several sea lions reciting T.S. Eliot with spoons on their heads? Given the size of this thing, they may well be in there. You deserve the Queen's award for gallantry if you make it far enough to find out.

The game tries to be funny but isn't; most of the attempts at humour are just weird. For example early in the game you find a half eaten mousse on a kitchen table.

x mousse

....it's only serious contender in the "I stay in the kitchen" stakes was a sausage-on-a-stick present at the Harlesden Glow Worm Regatta, 1982.

There are acres of this kind of free form rubbish. Examining a kettle spews forth a similar torrent of surreal mish mash. Whether the author thinks of himself as Spike Milligan, a member of the Monty Python team or Douglas Adams I'm not sure, but he fails on all fronts. Avant garde humour can be used sparingly and thus with deftness in skilled hands; once you've seen one clockwork shark though you don't need a whole menagerie of surreal beasties.

Beyond the all pervading "designed by a clever wacky student" smugness is a poor parser which frustrates in many locations; at one point in a tunnel you find a computer with a display. A sign proclaims that it requires a number to be typed in. The parser, however, does not understand the verb "type" on its own or any number either.

Type 1 on computer - "Not numeric format."
Type one on computer - Not numeric format."
Type 1 - " I do not understand the word 1."

And again in another room - a Games Room with an octopus who makes you play a game involving the removal of fourteen sweets from a plinth and the loser takes the last one.

Of course to win the game you have to say "Moccasin Beehive." Oh you merry student prankster you.

"Take sweet" - I can't see the sweet.
"Take two sweets" - I can't see the sweet.

Aaaargh - you just told me there are fourteen of the bloody things on the plinth in front of me!

"Put sweet in satchel" elicits an Adrift error "Bad Expression %object1%. Size"

At this point I realised the game was being philanthropic towards me by closing itself down. I really had suffered enough.

Robb Sherwin once observed quite sagely about Zork that the game actively hates its player. That may well be so; in which case Quondam wishes to eviscerate the player, gouge his / her eyes out and wrap one's entrails around one's neck while forcing said player to watch the Father Dowling Mysteries box set plus extras. What we have here is unequivocally the hardest text adventure that I have ever played in my forty years of puzzling. Compared to most of the Phoenix oeuvre it is compact in size but almost every location provides ample scope to die or misuse an item in one's inventory.

This was the third of the fifteen games written on the Phoenix mainframe; it was created in 1980 by Rod Underwood. It appears to have been his only foray into the world of text adventure creation but he indelibly left his mark with this one. The original mainframe version is sadly lost (like Andrew Lipson's Xerb and Alex Shipp and Steve Tinney's Hezarin) and it only survives thanks to a Peter Killworth port to the BBC. We have no way of knowing how much the original version differed from the BBC Acornsoft version but you can be sure it was ball-breakingly hard as well.

I played this game after finally nailing Acheton, Hezarin and Castle of Riddles from the same Cambridge stable and was fairly convinced that no game could be tougher than that holy trinity of mind exploders. I was wrong.

The game itself is the traditional treasure hunt (up to a maximum of 250 points) with an interesting time travel theme, hence the title which is Latin for former. You need to collect all of the treasures available and deposit them somewhere, but finding out where is like attempting to untie the Gordian Knot. Suffice to say that some puzzles should be attended to in the present day and some in the past. And at least one in the past and also in the present. Exactly. This game has more obscure verbs and off the wall object manipulation than any I have come across in forty years of text adventures. I have currently visited 72 locations and have discovered 28 ways to die, many of which almost lapse into parody. There are also many ways to lock yourself out of winning, both obvious or not. Indeed it is possible to make the game unwinnable in your first move!

All the tropes of early games are here, including massive turn critical mazes and outrageous puns. It's just that in this game, like the giant spiders on the web maze, they come at you in swarms filling just about every location. As if these obstacles didn't make your task difficult enough, the game uses some objects in totally unexpected ways. I found myself desperately trying all kinds of obscure commands to boldly go where no parser has gone before and some of them actually worked. Having played around five hundred text adventures in my time I have successfully used three verbs in this game that I have never used before and I guarantee that you have never utilised a mirror or a harp in the ways necessary in this game. When stuck try anything and it may just work. The knight, the fanged customs official, the Spanish Inquisition (I wasn't expecting that) a man-eating vegetable being and the dragon are all puzzles that require endless experimentation to overcome and the solutions to each are unique in the text adventure canon as far as I know. There are a couple of apparently illogical answers to puzzles as well; one in the apothecary's shop makes no sense to me even though I solved it; I'd tried everything else and found the answer by default. Another oddity is that some objects are deliberately described in a misleading way. One in particular has two different descriptions depending from which direction you came when you found it for the first time. Approach it from the wrong way (which isn't clear) and you have soft locked the game without realising it. Unfair? You bet.

Aside from the incredible toughness of the game and the necessity to perform actions in an exact order you can even die typing save or attempting to use an object. The desert affords you all of two moves before you die of thirst, in fact when you drink water the game responds with "your thirst is removed" then avers "you are thirsty" in the same move. Boy that is one dry desert. There is also an unmappable area of trackless forest in which you must thrash about until finally emerging into familiar territory.

Playing via the BeebEm emulator at least allows you to save without it costing you a move as it did in the original. As I have spent a lot of time racing around a spider's web with the residents only one move behind me this at least has made things slightly easier than it was for those masochistic souls playing on their BBC micros back in the day.

It has the standard T/SAL two word parser and no examine command plus an inventory limit of eight objects. I have come across two items that have multiple uses thus far so discard nothing that you find. Some treasures double up as tools for solving puzzles and all are suffixed by an exclamation mark in the manner of the day. There is an inventory limit of eight objects so you will need to work out how to manipulate the in-game system for leaving items and picking them up later at a different location. Some areas of the game are closed off after your initial visit so you'll need to carefully consider which items you haul around with you in any given area. I have so far discovered 36 takeable items.

This game is described with classic understatement as being for advanced players. That is rather like describing World War 2 as a spot of fistycuffs.

An update: I have now finally completed the game and can quite honestly say that this is the most difficult text adventure game that I have ever played. I make it 35 ways to die in 79 locations. It has the most obscure verbs, the most tortuous inventory manipulation and the most soft and hard locks as well.

All this aside I would recommend it for die hard purists like myself as it has enough clever puzzles to satisfy the most avid dissectologist.

A mere forty years after it was released and the prize was claimed (a wonderfully anal Ring of Power and a rather more materialistic sum of money to buy BBC computer products) I too have claimed the Ring of Power and returned it to the wizard.

To be more exact, Castle of Riddles was written by Peter Killworth of Cambridge University Oceanography and Philosopher's Quest fame as the first text adventure competition game; this started something of a trend. Released in February 1983 via Acornsoft although written in 1982 this is regarded as a real toughie of the old skool and so it is.

The plot, such as it is, involves you, a down-on-your-luck adventurer, returning the above mentioned ring to a wizard after it was stolen by an evil warlock. Any treasures you find on your wanderings can be kept for your own avaricious ends up to a maximum of 250 points.

Although compact in size to fit into the 32K memory constraints of the BBC microcomputer the game requires much careful pencil and paper planning and the ability to cope with frustration levels racheted up to 11 on the "bugger it I've screwed up" amplifier.

There are three main areas to the game which are all reached via shimmering curtains of light (Bank of Zork anyone?) and can all only be entered once so the choreography of play is extremely strict. One area contains a well and the three bears minus Goldilocks although there is a hilarious picture of her, another contains a nasty jet-black maze and a shooting gallery and the third a tricky corridor of doom. Choose the wrong entrance and you have softlocked the game potentially very early on. Only much repeated play will reveal the correct order to tackle the regions in. There is also a very nasty trick around the metal rod which has two essential uses. Unfortunately to solve the first one of them involves using it in a way that loses it permanently which makes the second use of the rod impossible. The only way to get around this is to solve the first rod-related puzzle, make a note of your findings and restart. All should then become clear. Obstacles like this would never of course be encountered in modern adventures but back then they were as accepted as norms; patience was as valuable a commodity as deduction.

In Killworth's traditional manner the majority of the puzzles are difficult but logical; one of them involves looking at two ostensibly similar objects but being able to glean a subtle difference between them; there are several beautiful chaining puzzles which require exact timing and unsurprisingly two innovative mazes neither of which can be solved by merely dropping objects. The solutions to the mangled cushion and antique clock problems are two of my all-time favourites.

There is naturally a lamp timer although this can be recharged once and isn't as tight as in some games of this vintage and an inventory limit which is generous enough not to be too much of an issue. Moving in the dark is nearly always fatal. The only NPCs encountered are of the potentially fatal variety so shoot first metaphorically speaking and ask questions afterwards.

The parser is of the old two word variety but in all honesty is quite sufficient for game play and naturally no examine command, something that I know Killworth felt strongly passionate about. Descriptions are of medium length generally and all in upper case white on black. I played via the excellent Beebem emulator which enables you to double the original speed of the game.

All in all a nice wallow in cerebral nostalgia.