A selection of PD Adventures - Marion Taylor

1. ENCHANTED REALM by John Ure

A  traditional adventure in which your task is to save the  world 
(again).  You begin in your house in a village.  A threat of evil 
fills  the air and the Dark Lord is stirring in his volcano  home 
to the north.

Collect a lamp,  examine a trunk,  find a sword in it and off  we 
go.  Thinking that perhaps it wasn't too good an idea to go North 
for  now,  I went South to a Forest,  collected various bits  and 
figured  out what the first problem was.  Found the Forest map  a 
bit confusing and also the Swamp one.  Still,  I think I got most 
locations.  

Nicely  laid out with a low res version for TV and a  medium  one 
for monitors.  No spelling mistakes, although I haven't played it 
all. Verb/noun commands and some HELP written in the game.


The  author  says this was a trial to see if he could do  it  and 
offers Enchanted Realm II with many more problems and locations.

RATING: Worth a look.


2. CITY OUT OF BOUNDS by El Bozo

Groan  .....  blue  text on a black background -  that's  a  good 
start!   Described  as  an  interactive  science-fiction  fantasy 
adventure, you begin (sigh) in your living room.

East  to your bathroom with a toothbrush and a razor on a  shelf. 
First  problem  - yards of "I don't know this word ......"  as  I 
tried to use the toothbrush and razor. At this point, I gave up - 
couldn't take any more of the blue on black.


3. ONCE A KING by D.Lavery and M.Griffiths

This  time you are a King and you begin the game in  your  Throne 
Room (makes a change, I suppose). Picking up your Crown and going 
South takes you to your bedroom where there's a tasteful pool  of 
vomit on the floor.  (Is this the game Tony Bridge said was  good 
the other month, in PCW?)

I wondered round for a while,  but the input response "Hurry  up. 
Tell  me what to do.  Someone wants to use the TV"  very  quickly 
became  irritating and I found the humour a bit juvenile and  the 
responses  given  when you try to do something the  game  doesn't 
recognise  are of the insulting type e.g.  Stop behaving  like  a 
retarded potato.

No obvious spelling mistakes.  Perhaps I'm being a bit hard on it 
because of the humour and the responses.  It isn't obvious how to 
get out of the Castle, but there's a clue in the README file.

RATING: might be OK if you can take the humour.

4. INVASION by R.Henderson

You are Dr William Dexter, biologist and adventurer. It all began 
one night in September in a remote part of the Amazon.  A massive 
explosion  awakens you and you decide  to  investigate.  Trekking 
through  the forest you discover a crashed alien probe manned  by 
Xolsck,  a philosopher. He tells you Earth will be invaded by his 
race by the middle of October. Xolsck disagrees with this and has 
come to warn Earth.

In  his dying moments,  Xolsck transports you to his Shuttle  and 
tells you to go to the Mothership and destroy it.

Invasion  is set mostly on the Starship.  Over 100 rooms and  300 
long  descriptions.  Written  using STAC,  it  has  RAMSAVE/LOAD, 
VOCAB, OOPS, TEXT or GRAPHICS mode.

You  begin  the game on the shuttle.  Inserting a  disc  you  are 
carrying into the ship's library gives you a message from Xolsck. 
He  tells you that the ship will dock shortly and that  you  must 
become a duplicate of Xolsck.

He tells you how you can accomplish this.  You will have to  dock 
the ship on the Mothership and having successfully done that, all 
that  is  left  to do is either to prevent  the  invasion  or  to 
destroy the Mothership (presumably without destroying yourself in 
the  process.)  Xolsck finishes speaking,  the  disc  ejects  and 
crumbles to dust and you're on your own!

RATING:  Looks good but it doesn't seem possible to get very  far 
         in it.
                                       Marion Taylor

ENCHANTED REALM (with Sherlock and Beyond the Tesseract)
          : on SynTax PD disk 10 at œ2.50
CITY OUT OF BOUNDS and ONCE A KING (with Colossal Cave)
          : on SynTax PD disk 9 at œ2.50 
INVASION: on SynTax PD disk 7 at œ2.50