Ratings and Reviews by Canalboy

This is a ghost story with an interesting premise, if not a particularly original one (house appears once a year containing a ghostly family murdered by the patriarch). It is unfortunately marred by sloppy coding, with umpteen misspellings and other grammatical howlers, combined with annoyingly idiosyncratic design choices. One look at the files will give you an idea of the "make do and mend" approach the author took. There was a mooted sequel which mercifully never saw the light of day. So there was a happy ending.

The parser is diabolical. For starters all player input must be in upper case; odd as the author's coding isn't. Many objects in a location cannot be referred to, or worse, only referred to by a different name to the one chosen by the author. Hence, a "book" lying on a bed cannot be procured by "get book" but only "get bible." Well, why not call it a bible then? "Take" and "drop" are not recognised and examining some objects also needs a different noun to the one the author primarily chose in the location description. A flagrant example is a "picture" which when examined gives a brief response. However "examine portrait" gives a much longer and important reply. This is unacceptable. I spent five minutes trying to pick up a piece of paper. The author describes lingerie and a maid's uniform with a 36C bra, then calls you a pervert for trying to examine it. You dreamed it up mate, not me. Also annoyingly, you find a sharp set of knives which you can't take "because you might cut yourself." Nanny statism is obviously alive and well here. There is a pot that you can't "get" without any apparent reason. You find a key. "Examine key" tells you that the action is illogical; indeed, the ubiquitous "that sounds pretty illogical to me!" response to perfectly valid input occurs so often that it becomes a tiresome mantra very quickly.. Why not something like, "Yes, the parser is dreadful, isn't it? Sorry about that."

To be fair, some of the location descriptions are rather atmospheric and the story does unfold if you are masochistic enough to keep fighting against the parser. I do find it slightly odd that a maid's ghost (she has been frenziedly stabbed to death) would worry about you treading dirty footprints across the floor of the mansion's study. Presumably even Mrs. Beeton would have brought down the curtain on the necessity for domestic tidiness in the afterlife.

Many of the game's problems are, as in so many works of this ilk, caused by inflexible parsing, poor design choices and the lack of any evidence of beta or play testing. The author had the kernel of an interesting gothic piece here, but there is many a slip 'twixt cup and lip, as the saying goes. Death takes you back to a DOS prompt and there is no "back", "get all" and even "inventory" has to be typed in full. And in upper case, of course. There aren't even that many puzzles in the game, and they tend to be made harder by the game's structure rather than clever creation. As I say, there is an interesting back story, but there are many better examples of this kind of game out there. As it is thirty-four years old now I imagine the chances of a revised and improved edition are, like the mad doctor, dead.

I have always had a soft spot for the "explore a large mansion" type of game; "The Mulldoon Legacy", "McMurphy's Mansion" and "Cranston Manor" are a trinity that spring to mind.

I downloaded the latest version of Mansion then available (version 2) and struck up a player/author email exchange with the creator Derek Barley, who has been very receptive to feedback. The good news is that the latest version (which Derek is shortly to upload to IFDB) is completable and as near to bug free as any game that I have ever played. The plot involves a slimy property developer named Brookes, a Gordon Gecko type character who would presumably consider Wall Street a glorification rather than a satire. Brookes has forged your late aunt's (the erstwhile owner of Gharston Manor, your new home) signature and stolen her back door key to illegally enter your new property, replete with dodgy purchase documents. It is up to you, with more than a little help from your Great Aunt Agatha, to send him packing.

There are no geckoes but there is a cute green frog, a red admiral butterfly and a large bee to be found in the grounds of the Hall, as well as a series of ornamental pools, a hedge maze and a brick building, which Derek informs me bears no deliberate relation to Crowther's original. Inside the property there are many rooms to explore and slowly the story develops as you solve each new problem. Derek's love of nature is obvious as you explore the house and grounds. This is a charming old school type adventure with modern user-friendly features. Mansion's descriptions are very evocative without being overdone, for instance The Fountain Pool: "This is the highest of a series of pools, constructed so that each will flow into the next. Willow trees lean over the edge of the pool, and large boulders add a rugged, wild look. The house can be reached to the north and west, and the lower pools are arrayed down the hill to the south. A thick growth of shrubs to the east makes it almost, but perhaps not entirely, impossible to move that way. The fountain pool is completely full of muddy, stagnant water." The slightly spooky feel of the game is handled with subtlety and thus with deftness. Near the beginning of the game, probably before you have even entered the mansion proper, there is a "definite chill in the air" in one location which is a subtle harbinger of what awaits you inside. The large eucalyptus which has smashed its way through the glass roof of one building is apparently based on a real-life scenario inside one of the large greenhouses that Derek's aunt owned.

The parser usually understands different verbs and noun synonyms and I was rarely stumped for want of phrasing something correctly. Being written in Inform, there are the standard GET and DROP ALL, BACK and FULL SCORE commands available. The odious Brookes is well described as well; his character delineation creates a strong incentive (at least it did for me) to send him on his way and to keep playing through to the end. The strong impression of a large, rambling house in the country has stayed with me post completion, which is a far from common occurrence in my case. There are also some amusing off-the-wall responses to failed attempts (check out the moose head in the Games Room, for instance).

In conclusion, this is an old school game with all of the trappings that Millennials have come to claim as their right. There are no tiresome hunger, thirst and lamp timers, no hard or soft locks and no deaths. There are some very clever puzzles here, as I have already intimated. Long, chaining problems seem to be something of an anachronism in the modern game world, but Mansion employs the oft overlooked technique very well. There are shades of Dr. Jonathan Partington and Andy Phillips (without the gore in the latter's case!) in some of the set pieces contained herein. High praise indeed. This is a medium sized, rather difficult and very well written text adventure with an interesting, overarching back story and some satisfying puzzles. I hope we will hear more from Derek in the future.

The Enchanted Cottage comes from the most creative and well-crafted section of the prolific Jack Lockerby's text adventure Curriculum Vitae. Some of the later games (Islands of Sinbad, Zen Quest in particular) lack coherence and originality. This is perhaps not surprising; innovation can be tough when you have authored more than thirty games.

I originally struck out on the Spectrum version, but came across a bug very near the start involving the giant. This can be solved without using the appropriate spell and focus, so I decided to switch to the Commodore 64 version in the hope of a better experience. Aside from a couple of minor bugs this version is cleaner; it is also a rather larger game and a handful of the puzzles from the Spectrum version are expanded and polished in a more satisfactory way.

The back story involves you, a mediocre would be sorcerer have continually failed your exams and have been warned that your next test wil be your last chance. If you manage to open the green door in the building of the title (this has three locks) you can get your star spangled wizard's cloak out of mothballs and order your wand from eBay. Fail and it's labouring under the auspices of a zero hours contract in a Jeff Bezos warehouse. What greater incentive to succeed could an ambitious neophyte require? Armed with a spell book containing seven game changers (there are six in the Spectrum version) you set off from base (the cottage acts as a hub) and upon solving an easy opening puzzle you have to peregrinate wildly between three regions in search of the bronze, silver and gold keys to complete your quest. In the Spectrum version you are Niki, a presumably epicene, Kim Kimberly type character whereas in the Commodore 64 version you are nameless. Maybe Niki threw a sickie.

The Commodore versions of Jack's games amounted to less than ten per cent of total sales, so it is admirable that he persisted in creating versions of his games aside from the Quilled Spectrum creations. Especially given the state of the Spectrum version of this one.

The game improves on the usual utilitarian Quill parser of the Spectrum by dint of the PAW. The first five letters of a word are recognised and there is no TAKE ALL or BACK. The majority of scenery descriptions can be referred to and the parser does a reasonable job in accommodating synonyms. One problem I hit upon is the fact that LOOK IN, SEARCH and EXAMINE seem to play musical chairs when attempting to discern the hidden properties of objects. One object right at the end of the game will only disclose its contents uisng the EXAMINE command; the other two more appropriate options find nothing. The verb LOOK is, as per the PAW's usual functionality replaced by REDESCRIBE or R, except in one particular location where you do have to LOOK. This is a bit questionable as a fair puzzle.

Location descriptions are generally staccato but Jack's games have always had puzzles as the meat in the sandwich. Do not expect cloyingly atmospheric, Hardyesque evocations of three magical lands as you won't get them. This game is more Reader's Digest puzzle section than The Return of the Native. Unlike for instance Brian Cotton's spell casting games, the incorrect use of a spell does not soft lock you from victory. If you are casting a spell or using a focused object in the wrong place, the game will simply tell you. In this version the correct casting of a spell causes its focus to vanish and free up an item in your inventory. This is handy, as there is no container in the latter game to port your accumulated impedementa around in. There are no daemons or lamp timers although it is possible to get yourself killed in several ways. I can't recall any sudden death demises, however.

As ever with Jack's immersive worlds, the puzzles are the point. They are all logical and a couple of them are truly inspired; the pebble puzzle and the poser which centres around avoiding a ferocious dog are particularly clever, bearing all of the author's usual trademarks of deviousness and off the wall, common or garden object manipulation. One spell revolves around an excruciating pun. The ending is a nice subversion on the "protagonist earns their wings and walks off with the loot" denouement that I was expecting.

In summation, I would put this offering in the top five of Jack's thirty-five game career; it is medium sized and of medium difficulty and would be an excellent introduction to his imaginative game worlds. Just avoid the Spectrum version. I would presume that the Atari ST STAC version is a well-behaved sibling too.

Into The Mystic is another well-crafted game from the fecund mind of the prolific Jack Lockerby. Like most of his games it was Quilled for the Commodore 64; he remained loyal to this platform despite Spectrum sales of his games outnumbering Commodore 64 purchases by a ratio of ten to one. Fortunately it is not bugged in a game-breaking way as some ports of his games are.

The back story invests you, a somewhat naive but brave everyman, with investigating the disappearance of magic from your land. That Merlin knows a sucker when he sees one. You begin your meanderings to the south of an Orc encampment, bivouacing for the night.

This game bears all the trademarks of a Jack Lockerby adventure: mainly tough but logical puzzles; a medium sized game map; many devious but realistically constructed puzzles; and soft and hard locks a plenty. Magic force fields and gas-filled courtyards are among the problems to be dealt with here. And robbers don't like leprosy! Who does?

One striking element is the most atrocious spelling I have ever come across in a text adventure. You will be hard pushed to find a single location description that doesn't have one howler at the very minimum. The standard makes Guardian columnists look positively anal in terms of spell checking. The Spectrum version is much tidier but differs in terms of objects and of course no "undo" or "take all" but there are often synonyms available for items and a few verbs that you rarely, if ever find elsewhere in text adventures. Fortunately a full verb list is given you at the beginning of the game and this should give you a nudge towards solving some of the more obscure puzzles, for instance what to do with the oil in the moat and the purpose of the toads in the fountain.

The descriptions could never be described as cloyingly atmospheric, but neither are they "You are in a field. Exits are North, East and West." Jack's games have always been more about puzzles and goals than acres of text, well-written or otherwise. One typical description from within the abandoned Great Hall: "This is the Great Hall that once rang to the sounds of knights and their damsels. Now it is bare except for a tapestry that lines the eastern wall. Stone steps lead up to a gallery." It's not pulling up any trees but then it's not Scott Adams strangulation either. As for NPCs they tend to be passive; the talking dragon, however is a nice touch and the Dark Woods conjure up a fair bit of menace; until you work out how to travel through them in safety that is. There isn't really much humour to the game; Jack wasn't interested in being a J.J. Guest or an Admiral Jota. I think the user-friendliness of the game could best be decribed as nasty rather than cruel; if you are foolish enough to travel through bandit country without a means of avoiding them then you can probably guess what fate awaits you; likewise there is a puzzle late on where you have to choose one of three objects and, if you think carefully about an unsolved puzzle when you reach this stage the correct choice should hopefully come to you. West Ham supporters may have an advantage here! There are two exceptions to the hard but fair rule though; one involves attempting to enter a building and being given no clues as to why you can't; I think a door which should have been in the description was either omitted from the Commodore 64 port or was missed out in the original Spectrum version as well; not having played the latter to conclusion I can't say for sure. You will recognise this oversight when you stumble across it. All I will say is, leave it and approach it from somewhere else. The second unfair scenario involves the opening of a wooden door which is on the far side of an ADVENT tribute maze. I managed to open it but any solution involving the frequency of a French radio station is just too obscure to be fair. Think Abba and 1975 here. One nice feature of this version is no inventory limit (the Spectrum version has a sack) and your light source is inexhaustible too.

Make sure you search and examine absolutely everywhere in this game as there are many hidden objects, more than in almost any other game that I can think of. By contrast the solutions to the Orc problem and passing through the force field are both masterpieces. Some objects have multiple uses too and any game which riffs off Lewis Carroll must be lauded.

Towards the end of his text adventure writing career Jack produced a couple of duds but he was at the height of his powers with this one.

Now this is a classy piece of work. In my experience there are not a lot of excellent games written solely for the Atari 8-bit machines; this effort bucks that trend. My first problem was getting the game to run, as three separate versions of Altirra solidly refused to play ball; some digging revealed that bank switching may prove successful (I decided to stay with Barclays however) without actually telling one how, so I tried Xformer 10 and it worked straight off the bat. The Amulet was Peter Lister's only published work, as the two planned sequels ran into the evolutionary micro buffer of the late eighties/early nineties; a shame as at the end of the game the next stage of your journey is intriguingly fleshed out before you. There will, however be a lot of head scratching and keyboard pounding to be done before you reach the denouement. This is a text/graphics effort so if you are like me you will hie to type 'T' and turn the graphics off. You don't need to be a Rhodes scholar to work out how to turn the graphics back on again.

Take a few minutes to read the back story (available on the mocagh web site) as it will flesh out your goal and provide the odd clue along the way. As your quest will be long and arduous, any leg up should be gratefully accepted. To cut a short story shorter you are tasked with tracking down the five charms which will enable you to find a missing amulet and bring back magic to the lands in which you find yourself. These objects are cleverly secreted away and it will likely take you a good while to find them all.

The parser isn't great to be honest; it is limited to one or two words and some scenery cannot be examined. On the other hand, if a meta object is recognised by the parser you can be sure it is relevant to the game, thus acting as an indirect filter. The machine language used to code it ensures good response times without sending the keyboard haywire so there should be no need to ratchet up the emulator speed. Take all is there but no "back one space" and one puzzle in particular (directional since you didn't request it) had me stuck for ages before I realised you can move in a non-intuitive direction in here, which opened up some more of the game map. The location descriptions are generally good, making full use of the extra memory the Atari had over most of its competitors at the time; evocative over utilitarian for the most part. I found a mere handful of misspellings, which given the abundance of text is better than most other offerings from this era that I have played. The sense of a developing storyline and of working towards your goal is well handled here. Certain actions you undertake serve as triggers in moving the story along rather than just presenting you with a series of puzzles to be randomly tackled. This certainly helps to choreograph your actions and reduces the time spent on aimless meandering around the map. The presence of a fellow adventurer hell bent on the same quest as yourself is an interesting and unusual component which adds to the sense of a kinetic story. You will need to work together in certain places to progress to the end. There is also a hermit who appears at certain points in the narrative to offer advice. A sense of past and future are juxtaposed in the game's layout; the past is represented by a neglected mill which you will have to bring to life and an old boatyard that is barely discernible as such any more. The future is suggested by the fir forest containing many inchoate specimens at various stages of immaturity. There is also a realistic desert which needs careful mapping and an unusual means of transporting yourself across a lake which should shake the jaded oarsmen amongst you out of your nautical comfort zone. Each section segues into other sections in a realistic manner geographically. The mill is powered by the nearby dam for instance. It may be a fantasy quest but there are no magical grottoes next door to modern museums in this one.

The Amulet is a very tough game in places but I can only think of one puzzle which I would describe as unfair - the oasis traversal. The lamp is refreshingly eternal once turned on and there is a generous inventory limit. There are no hunger or thirst demons and no sudden death moments; if you have locked yourself out of victory it is generally apparent at the time. If you take a lit lamp underwater, for instance then you can probably guess the result. I can think of one softlock in the game revolving around the game's teleportation system, but once you have been snared here you should hit on the correct course of action fairly quickly. You are occasionally given a metaphorical leg up towards a solution. The description of the cloak is one such example, and the cloth another. One puzzle should not be solved in the obvious way and the resulting area you reach from its solution can be arrived at using another more subtle method. (Spoiler - click to show)It is one hell of a good puzzle (hint.) Random combat is fortunately missing. Moving in the dark is fatal except in one designated area. I am not sure why this section should be non-deadly and all the other dark areas not, but be prepared to avoid the two unlit locations near the beginning for a while. The posers in The Amulet are generally very good, with a few hardy perennials mixed in. The solution to the slippery ramp in the old drain system is very clever (a gold star if you solve this one) and there is a two part solution to sharpening the axe. The five artefacts of your mission are all cunningly hidden away; you will have earned your discovery of these and there are a couple of short maze areas which won't have you rolling your eyes for too long. The major maze has a novel means of navigation. There is one section of the game which casts a knowing wink towards Zork's Royal Puzzle and I blundered through this a bit I suspect. There are a few NPCs to be bribed, cajoled or scared, from a demon to a hungry ape. Towards the end there are some magic spells to be analysed and utilised (or ignored!)

In summary this is a large, well-coded fantasy quest with a good back story that should have been produced half a decade earlier, looking at it from a purely business angle. It is thus a shame that the planned sequels never materialised.

It is said by relevant equine historians that all racehorses can be traced back to three original 'foundation' stallions; early text adventures have an even more gin-clear ancestry; ADVENT and Zork. This game's author, Paul Fellows stumbled upon the former at college and produced a game with a brick building at the start, axe throwing dwarfs and even a Hall Of The Mountain King. Like Willie Crowther he never produced another game but one was enough to cause many a furrowed brow in the bedrooms of the first BBC Microcomputer users back in the early eighties. Just collect twenty-one treasures and take them to the Sphinx somewhere in the desert to err....well, the result and reason is never really made clear. Never let it be said that plot overshadowed puzzle in those far-off days. Just do it will you?

It is scarcely a jaw-dropping revelation that you will face a meagre two word parser, several mazes, nasty creatures who will confront you with terrors even greater than tickets to the latest Milli Vanilli concert and an inventory limit. Aside from the few al fresco locations at the start, the game is played under perpetual darkness, although your light source is everlasting if you know how. So no endless treks for pools of oil, vending machines or calcium carbide crystals at least. I'm not sure that Mr. Crowther would approve though. 800 points and a subsequent over-sensitivity to bright light will prove your man or womanhood should you end triumphant.

The parser is somewhat thin gruel and the memory constrictions of the day forced the descriptions to be somewhat terse and lacking in much frippery. Electron players had it even worse. Nothing which isn't vital to the story can be referred to (the mirror image of Chekhov's Gun) which of course can be a help at narrowing down possible puzzle keys in some instances. No room for flabby descriptions means no room for atmosphere at such a restricting level. Surrealism runs riot however as giant bunnies exist next to bank vaults and a gardener's store abuts a hall of spirits. You get the general idea.

Another sacred tradition from those days was inherent unfairness. As usual you can screw up practically everywhere. One visit only areas only become recognisable as such after you have left them without doing everything that you should have and of course there are several "drop items to map them" mazes studded throughout the landscape. The final interminable maze may have you quitting through sheer exhaustion. Not since Peter O'Toole rode his blue eyes through a seemingly endless David Lean desert in Lawrence Of Arabia has one man or woman suffered on the sand so much as the player nearing the end of this. Director, cut. You can add the mystifying lack of a saved game facility (see Haunt and Russell Wallace's Cave Adventure) to the list of player vexations. In a work of this size and difficulty having to restart over and over again is inexcusable and must have put many people off back in the pre-emulator days. At least there are no daemons and a strangely generous inventory limit.

Most of the puzzles were hackneyed as far back as 1982. The Jonah puzzle is very similar to the one in Peter Killworth's Brand X from 1979, as is the mouse puzzle. A magic word is overused (it appears to be an ACME universal magic word) and some puzzles can be solved simply by holding the right object in the right place, always an unsatisfactory method by my reckoning. In summation the game is as much neuralgia as nostalgia and seemingly bug (if not Bugs) free although an older tape based version used to crash on the second traversal past the goblins in the Hall Of The Mountain King. See the Stardot forum for more information.

This spy caper from the early nineties has an interesting premise but is let down badly by non-intuitive puzzle solutions, an exasperatingly intractable CAC, sorry GAC parser and arthritically slow response times even with the occasional graphics switched off (type "graphics" or "text" to toggle.)

The premise is that you have awoken in a dimly lit cellar armed with nothing but a lit candle (which amazingly never goes out whatever you do or however long you take to do it) and a vague recollection of being a superspy on your biggest assignment ever. Upon making your exit from the cellar you find yourself in a snow-laden town with only a handful of locations to initially visit. This is the kind of game where you solve puzzles one by one rather than being able to pick and mix; as a result it is very easy to get bogged down when the latest non sequitur problem stumps you and believe me there are lots of them. The ending was quite amusing but I don't think I'll be playing another William Quinn game for a while. It is more Basildon Bond than James Bond. The parser is also limited in scope and the endless "You Can't" responses to perfectly valid commands quickly become tedious. There are precious few if any synonyms available; to give one inexcusable example of the sloppy coding, you find an overcoat but the game doesn't understand the word "overcoat" only "coat." There are other similar examples.

The terse descriptions and several NPCs that you can't talk to do not help to create any kind of taut, espionage-like atmosphere and the forty odd locations are all described in a utilitarian fashion. I kept with it as there was at least some kind of story developing but it doesn't really amount to much in the end. The crude and sporadic pictures bring nothing to the party neither. Add the static, taciturn NPCs and the resulting mix is anything but heady. The low inventory limit is exacerbated by the slow speed of the game. TAKE ALL, OOPS and any kind of verbal interaction with the other characters that you meet are missing, which you would think would be a bit of a problem to a superspy. Each puzzle is like a fence in a horse race; fail to solve it and you're going nowhere. Even more annoying is the balloon which cannot be referred to after it has been inflated and if you attempt to use a certain container more than once you cannot ever drop it again so it just gums up your inventory for the rest of the game. Many legitimate actions won't work except in one carefully designated location which makes you think you're barking up the wrong tree with your attempted solution and a lot of the puzzle solutions don't make sense. The solutions to problems like gaining access to the cinema (why can you go in past the ticket booth without a ticket but not past a tramp walking about?) avoiding being killed when going to sleep and creating the right scenario to be able to watch the film all make no sense to me. The strange tree problem, the eight sided cabinet (whose existence is never explained) the sleep problem and the film problem are similarly surreal in the solution and I ended up solving problems by brute forcing them. A car jack won't work anywhere logically so I just wandered around the map trying it on every meta object until it worked on something incongruous; this isn't a very fulfilling way of playing these games. The rocketbelt would have been more fun if it had worked in more than one area. I can't in all honesty recommend this; if you want to play a decent spy caper try the Rick Hanson trilogy by Robico.