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.

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.