The Magician's Ball

C64 only. A slightly obscure commercial game, didn't get much attention back when it was published, which was in 1985.

The game throws you right into the pit. Probably pardonable, let's assume the original game featured some sort of instructions. You can find some blurb on the web: Free the king's daughter from an evil magician.

Designwise the game is pretty horrible. The rooms are generic and don't even try to form something like a game world. The two-word parser is stubborn. The puzzles are not blended into the action. The typography is one big mess, looks a little like noone ever proofread the (commercial!) game.

On the plus side the game has a few surprises up the sleeves. It's just one file so it's limited to 64k of memory. Probably a tape release. It features graphics and music(!), so there's almost no memory left for the game and parser antics, right? Wrong! The map is rather large, you control two characters (although you can't switch at will), and you can command an NPC (a walking tree, of all sorts). The puzzles, as randomly thrown onto the map as they are, are associative and thus not too difficult, yet somewhat rewarding.

Not recommended for people used to sophisticated parsers of the Inform age. If you have witnessed and enjoyed the 8-bit era, or if you have a weird interest in how adventures looked like before the invention of upright walking, you might want to give this one a brief look.