The Golden Baton

Baf's Guide

More or less your standard minimalist fantasy adventure with a two-word parser - the kind of thing where nearly every object is used exactly once - but with only one treasure to collect and a greater emphasis on monsters than most games of this type. I found one puzzle quite difficult, and the per-room help wasn't adequate for solving it.

-- Carl Muckenhoupt

Page 6
The Golden Baton
The Adventures covered in the last three issues could only be played on a disk based system. I don't want cassette owners feeling left out of the fun of Adventuring, so this issue we'll take a look at a series of Adventures available on cassette. What makes them all the more interesting for most of you is that they are written and produced in the United Kingdom! I'm referring, of course, to Brian Howarth's Mysterious Adventures.

Brian Howarth had been playing Dungeons and Dragons for some years before being introduced to computer Adventures by a TV program called The Adventure Game. When he realised the potential for computer moderated Adventures, he raced out and bought the first computer he could find. Unfortunately, this happened to be a TRS-80, but we can't really hold that against him, as the Atari wasn't available at the time.

Howarth became obsessed with Scott Adams' Adventures before trying to write his own. He started writing an Adventure in BASIC, but concluded that it couldn't be done. We can probably put this down to inexperience, as many others (including Scott Adams himself) have proven him wrong. Nevertheless, he started learning machine language and after six months of excitement and frustration, he finished his first machine language Adventure. It was called The Golden Baton and made its first appearance in the Molimerx catalogue in 1981.
See the full review