Reviews by Canalboy

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 begoinning 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.

Castle Warlock was the third of five games written by the admirable Ken Bond; it is one of the best examples of the castle/dungeon romp genre that I have come across. The plot (such as it is) has you on a horny handed expedition to loot the castle of the evil wizard Danzil and make it home in time for tea. Put the kettle on mother. Tragedy unfortunately strikes your expedition before the pot is on the trivet as your guide shuffles off this mortal coil during a storm and you are left to fend for yourself. A lengthy odyssey awaits you and a blissfully graphics free one to boot.

The PAW parser was much feted at the time and Ken makes full use of its envelope pushing potential here. TAKE ALL is available although there is no OOPS or BACK. All descriptions are at their lengthiest from the get go, so no toggling VERBOSE, BRIEF etc. is required. EXAMINE and SEARCH are both on the menu although utilisation produces the same result. The handling of multiple keys never caused me a problem as it has in the past for instance. Look after the disambiguation and the rest will follow. PAW has enabled the author to pen longer and more evocative decriptions and while they are not up to a Meretzky or Austin standard the atmosphere engendered is still above par.

There are numerous sudden death scenarios and it is also extremely easy to hard and soft lock the game; it should be obvious in each case soon after the specific faux pas however. Learning through suffering was of course a great part of early text adventures and perfectly okay by me. If you dislike that kind of game you would do well to avoid any Ken Bond production. As hitherto mentioned the lamp timer is extremely generous and there no other daemons to worry about. There are some old fashioned and some rather original posers in here; more than one requires some lateral thinking. I particularly liked the iron chest and paint problems.

There are a few bugs but these are cosmetic; several changes in room object statuses do not change when they should; conditional flags are obviously not being reset in these instances but there are not many of them and none are game breaking. Spelling and grammar are top notch throughout.

To summarise whilst this traditional fantasy effort is not up to Infocom or Level 9 standards it is a better then average sword and sandal romp. Just save a lot.

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.

On the whole I enjoyed this game; I like Dian's games in general but this one ratchets up the story and the atmosphere as you progress while containing some very devious puzzles. It has a much better back story than Dian's Castle Elsinore for instance which was written just afterwards.

There is a steep augmentation in puzzle difficulty towards the end and you have to pay particular attention to character motivation and the back history of your (and others) erstwhile existence to logically solve the last section. There is a jaw dropping moment when you enter a certain location and find out who you are. Dian's skills as an author stand her in good stead here over the 170 odd locations in the game; it is not easy melding a treasure hunt with a Phantom Of The Opera style story but this is one of the better hybrids that I have played.

On the down side there are a few bugs including my bug bear of a non-described ordinal exit and a creature that can be slain but upon returning to the scene of the battle is dead yet still alive (no, not like Leonard Cohen). The knife wielding maniacs become tiresome after their third or fifth appearance as well. I also encountered a couple of parser struggles but in a game this size and with only a two word parser this is excusable and I found the right synonym after a few attempts in both instances. There are a number of magic words and transportation locations to save on lamp time which is generously dished out at 1000 moves. And in keeping with its reverential nods to Crowther and Woods there is a last lousy point which makes more sense than in the original. Just be on your toes or you'll miss the boat.

The inventory limit is predicated on weight not number of objects which is of course more realistic but the short cuts to the more far flung reaches of the game mean that it is never too onerous a task to pick up an object dropped earlier through overload. There is the game's equivalent of the thieving pirate but you have to let him steal from you at least once to glean all the treasures.

Add a couple of small but navigable mazes and this should keep you busy for a good few days.

Cave of Blunders, sorry Wonders was written by Campbell Wild as a demonstration game for his new text adventure creation system Adrift in 1999. As an advertisement, it does for the creation of text adventures what the Titanic did for the sales of holidays on cruise ships.

There are many bugs both lurking and stinging you in the face here. An underwater section can be drained yet reappears as undrained thanks to no conditional flags being set. A bottle can be filled once but never again, despite there being ample quantities of filler left lying around. One section of the game disappears if you enter it and perform a certain action, for no apparent reason. The description of the area is replaced by the letter "x." Hmmmm. Taking a particular object requires "pluck" and does not recognise "pick" or "take" yet another similar object does not respond to "pluck." You get the general idea.

All this is a shame as without the huge amount of bugs (the game can still be finished but it is a pain) a nice medium sized treasure hunt would exist here. The puzzles are often clever and quite tough and there are several ways to soft lock the game if you make a wrong choice.

There are a few static NPCs and one wonderfully dreadful pun which would be quite happy in Quondam.

The two word parser will give you a real battle of "guess the verb" although many objects can be referred to. Very few synonyms are allowed so exact wording is required. The maximum score is 1000 points although I only managed to attain 970 but still found the treasure-filled cave, the object of my quest. The room descriptions are perfunctorily adequate without being memorable. The parser is too picky and very few alternative verbs are catered for which of course creates frustration. As if writing a set sized newspaper column three or four sentences cover most descriptions so it falls far short of a mystical atmosphere; utilitarian reference book rather than mystical novel. There are also plenty of ways to lock yourself out of victory and quite a few illogicalities too. The actual puzzles themselves are the reason to play the game; discovering multiple means of transportation and deciphering maps are done rather cleverly.

All in all if you would like to see what the Adrift environment has to offer try a Larry Horsman game instead.

I have not played many Apple II text adventures but having downloaded the AppleWin emulator recently I thought that I would chance my arm.

Windmere Estate is a traditional find the treasures and store them somewhere two word parser game which appears to be getting tougher the further I hack into it.

The diaphanous premise is that pirates stored their manifold booty in and around the grounds of the estate and you have the chance as usual to emulate Croesus by finding it all.

I initially had some parser issues as oddly entering certain objects in a room requires the syntax "open x" e.g. "open closet" will take you into said item. Examine doesn't work, neither do verbose or take all.

To start with the puzzles seemed childishly simple. Hmmm there are some rats in here and some rat poison nearby. Now what could possibly work? However, as I have penetrated the deeper recesses of the estate the difficulty quotient has inclined considerably. There is a closed vault door, a seemingly inaccessible dumbwaiter (Curses anyone?) and an organ upon which I can produce a cacophonous din but to no avail. One particular problem is caused by a parser infelicity however and I have no qualms in telling you that the portrait needs to be referred to as a picture. Nuff said.

As tradition dictates there are a number of secret passages and hidden rooms which gradually make traversing the large map (I have currently identified 93 rooms) easier.

I have so far accumulated 23 treasures but this only amounts to 230 out of the maximum attainable score of 415 so I still have some way to go.

There is a HINT option which nudged me towards the painting / picture solution but generally speaking you are on your own as this seems to work in very few locations.

You can at least recharge your flashlight at a certain location an infinite amount of times and there are no hunger or thirst daemons. Moving in the dark is usually fatal through injury or at the teeth of a vampire bat. Multiple deaths abound but there are few soft locks so far.

This is worth a look if you are an old school fan and don't mind drawing a map and watching your points tally slowly increment.

Stop Press - I would like to apologise to the author Dennis N Strong for my previous observation regarding the rat poison; the problem is actually more devious than I had hitherto believed.