Sir Ramic Hobbs and the High Level Gorilla - Gil Williamson (AGT Text adventure available on SynTax PD Disk 75) Reviewed by Neil Shipman "Being of sound mind I, Sir Ramic Hobbs agree to retrieve Princess Anne de Pea from the evil grasp of the High Level Gorilla , now resident at the top of The Midden. "Signed, Sir Ramic Hobbs." So runs the text of an agreement you've made on Octember 32nd in the Kingdom of Trasch Khan, builder of the Dome where you've just had such a good time. It's read to you by the disembodied voice of Wizard Prang - the bits in capital letters are his comments! At the start of the adventure you wake up in a smelly cave about halfway up The Midden with your mead supply expired. You were meant to bring a ransom with you but you left it behind, so you're going to have to go back to the Dome. Occupying the cave with you is a rather untidy owl known as Bloodcurdling Owl (or BO for short) who will accompany you on your exploits and whom you can ask about various things. Sometimes he'll be helpful but, more often than not, he doesn't know much more than you do. You can safely wander around half a dozen locations to get the feel of the game, see where the Dome is (a long way away) and smile at some of the descriptions. If you're to make any further progress, though, you'll need to figure out how to get past one of the Midden's inhabitants. I'm not giving anything away when I tell you this involves a Chinese steam locomotive with, appropriately, instructions in Chinese. Of course, you can't read Chinese! Further on you'll meet Sir Fritz Tenshun waiting to take his pet snake to the Vet's where you'll get an idea of how you're going to get back to the Dome. You'll also find a method of transport here and, by using this, you'll quickly meet an Abdominal Snowman and the High Level Gorilla himself. (If the author can help it, no name is left un-punned, especially at the end. But, perhaps I ought to say at this juncture that it was only when looking at the adventure for the third time that I realised what the title meant! I must be getting slower on the uptake as the years go on but, in extenuation, I plead that our cooker hasn't got 'em!) There are over 60 locations, plenty of entertaining descriptive text, amusing responses and lots of well thought out puzzles. If you get stuck then Wizard Prang is always in the background with advice - just hit HELP - and BO may have something interesting to say on the subject. (I particularly liked his discourse on the mating habits of wire coathangers!) I noticed a number of bugs, but none of these was serious and didn't prevent me from finishing. What I did find annoying, however, was the fact that when I got killed I was returned to the desktop and had to boot the adventure again. It would have been more sensible to resurrect you to your starting point as is done in all the other AGT adventures I've played. And don't get caught in the dark! If you do then the ONLY thing possible is to Quit!! Sir Ramic Hobbs and the HLG has a vocabulary of about 400 words and, if you've seen an AGT adventure before, you'll know that the parser can cope with complex inputs. Especially useful are the pre-programmed function keys for the most often-used commands and the ability to input the main directions with the cursor keys. All AGT adventures tend to look the same because most authors restrict themselves to using the default colours of cyan, yellow and black for the text, input and background respectively. For those of you who haven't got the AGT Source Code Disk - or, if you have, haven't read through the documentation - you might like to know that it is possible to customise the screen presentation to suit yourself. Simply type COLORS A B C (where A is the text colour, B the input and C the background). As well as CYAN, YELLOW and BLACK you can use RED, WHITE, GREEN, BLUE and LIGHTGRAY. COLORS MONO will give white text and input on a black background and COLORS DEFAULT will return you to cyan, yellow and black. One more tip for those of you with a double-sided drive: transfer the files from the SynTax PD disk to a double-sided one. You'll then have plenty of room for a number of saved positions and you shouldn't experience any problems with saving and restoring. Some AGT adventures can be a bit iffy about saving/restoring to and from a disk other than the game disk. And, finally, back to Sir Ramic. This is a fairly simple adventure which had me occupied for a few days and, while I didn't split my sides laughing, it did raise a chuckle or two. If you like comedy adventures then this one is certainly worth taking a look at.