Cranston Manor

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.