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               Dead or Alive...?  -  Chaos Software
                      (STAC Text adventure)

                    Previewed by Neil Shipman

Despite - or perhaps because of - the trend of the major software 
houses towards producing graphic adventures, I have recently 
detected a resurgence of interest in the good old text adventure 
from a number of other sources. Over the last year I must have 
played at least one such offering a month from both established 
and aspiring independent writers and the latest to come my way was 
from the hitherto unheard of (at least by me) Kev Davis, self-
styled "incomprehensibly grandiloquent doyen" of Chaos Software.

The scenario of Dead or Alive...? is to be found in a separate 
program on the disk along with a few instructions. These include 
some of the more unusual commands like Who Is, Message and Panic 
and examples of how clever the parser is in coping with inputs 
like "Put head in microwave, juggle fish and say wop to the maniac 
in the passing bush of kippers". Weird! There's also another 
program which will play an eerie tune to accompany the adventure 
ad infinitum if you can stand it - I couldn't! Anyway, back to 
setting the scene in DoA.

Taking a short cut home through the rain in Malton you find a shop 
you've never noticed before. The owner shows you a strange crystal 
which renders you unconscious and when you come to the shop has 
disappeared. Worse still, you can't remember where you live, so 
you head for the pub only to find that it's been boarded up. As 
you collapse again the face of the shopkeeper appears and utters, 
"Midnight," and you don't awake until a passing car splashes you 
with water.

At the start of the adventure you only have your wallet containing 
a photograph and œ10, but a quick search around the 14 immediately 
accessible locations will turn up some interesting items. The 
owner of the 24-hour "Chipporama" is worth talking to as some of 
the things he tells you may be useful later on. You can also buy 
some chips and have a go on the one-armed bandit.

You can't enter the Tube station, but solving a couple of simple 
puzzles will allow you into Malton park where you can head west to 
your...er... death! Don't worry though, you're only a bit short in 
the flesh and blood department and it's in your skeletal form that 
most of the adventure is played as you try to get even with your 
assassin.

The first few problems involve leaving your tomb in the cellar of 
an old house, finding a suitable disguise to cover your bare bones 
so that you can wander around without attracting attention, and 
getting past the rottweiler chained to the gate. You'll then be 
able to hop on the Tube and travel to other parts of Malton.

To get back to the part of town where you were killed you have to 
figure out how to turn the power on so that the automatic doors at 
that station will work. This involves a nice series of not too 
difficult puzzles and, by the time you've solved them and worked 
your way to the police station, you'll have had a very good 

opportunity of appreciating the great deal of work that's gone 
into producing this adventure.

If I tell you that Kev Davis is a fan of adventures like 
Hitchhiker's, authors such as Douglas Adams (of course) and Terry 
Pratchett, and TV programmes like Red Dwarf, Vic Reeves Big Night 
Out and Absolutely, not to mention anything and everything done by 
the Monty Python team - indeed, the game is dedicated to the 
memory of Graham Chapman - you'll realise that DoA is definitely 
not a serious adventure!

Location descriptions are generally three or four lines long and 
responses are a good length too. The language used in some places 
can look rather strange at first - "notifiable" pavement, 
"tedious" fishpond and roads which "trundled" - but you appreciate 
the funny side of this when you come across doors which "fib" 
rather than just lie to the north and west! Indeed, the whole 
style of DoA is so tongue-in-cheek that Kev Davis must look a bit 
like Popeye chomping gobstoppers.

I enjoy adventures where the author has anticipated many of the 
things you might try to do and has provided appropriate responses. 
This is certainly the case in DoA and most of them are funny, 
quite a few making me laugh out loud. I especially liked eating 
and drinking, smashing a nuclear-powered torch (after being told 
not to), examining sewage in an alleyway, persisting on getting 
out of an invisible exit and walking around with a traffic cone on 
my head! You won't be stuck for words because there's a vocabulary 
list of nearly 100 commands and many of the nouns have synonyms.

Examine everything because you will usually get a description. If 
you unearth an object you will automatically pick it up unless 
your hands are full. Reading all the signs and graffiti as well as 
the papers and cards is worthwhile too. Sometimes you'll find a 
footnote mentioned which you can then look at for further interest 
and amusement. There is a great deal of extraneous information too 
in the form of adverts and messages.

The easy-to-read display is 80-column white text on a black 
background with footnotes etc being shown in green capitals. You 

can swap to 40-column if you want or even try different colours 
(including "psychedelic" and "vomit-inducing")! The Chaos Software 
logo is attractive and the programmer demonstrates his skill with 
redesigned characters to the extent of having an acute accent on 
cliche and a properly subscripted 2 in the formula for water.

DoA is a huge adventure. By the time I'd got as far as I could in 
the preview version (which was about 75% complete) I'd visited 
over 150 locations and found more than 60 objects to manipulate. 
Amongst other things I'd operated a robot in a nuclear research 
plant, travelled on a ferry, survived a shipwreck and ended up at 
the bottom of a cliff in Iceland. I look forward to seeing what's 
at the top.

As I made progress I was awarded not just with points but also 
with ever-changing crazy titles ranging from "futile shandy 
drinker", through "someone who knows where his (or indeed her) 
towel is" to "hoopiest frood this side of Ursa Minor"!

I was a little put off to begin with by the "over the top" style 
of DoA, especially when I encountered a bug on about my third 
move. Then I realised that it was a deliberate one poking fun at 
other STAC programmers whose games are prone to crashing! In fact 
DoA has been extremely well programmed and playtested and although 
I noticed a few  mistakes in spelling and punctuation as well as a 
couple of "buglets" these were far fewer in this preview version 
than I have seen in many finished adventures.

Humour is difficult to get just right for the simple reason that 
not everyone finds the same things funny. To start with I found 
some of things about DoA rather idiotic but, after a while, I 
entered into the spirit of the game and ended up revelling in its 
sheer silliness. If you enjoy a good laugh then look no further 
than Dead or Alive...?