Dragonslayer - E L (Ev) Cheney on SynTax PD 146 & 244
           (Text AGT adventure for ST and PC)

Oh Scourge of a thousand women's tents!  Oh slayer of Monsters!
Oh thief of Allah's treasures!  You have finally been brought to
the Sultan's justice. Surrounded by a crowd of your betters you
have been brought to the Palace of the Sultan to receive your
judgement.  No escape shall you have, nor shall the evil Sultan do
more than punish you justly for your crimes. Except to Kill you
with the death of the 56 rooms.  Go now and receive your reward.

This is the introduction to Dragonslayer, exactly as it appears in
the game except that I took the liberty of adding a final full
stop. You begin the game outside the Sultan's Palace, carrying
nothing but with a scroll lying by your feet and a bell cord
hanging nearby. Picking up the scroll and pulling the cord, you
enter the Palace. It's time to read the scroll, which gives some
cryptic hints to completing the adventure. There's a large marble
stone in the next location. In it is an intriguing cut which goes
deep into the stone. Try as you might, you will find yourself
unable to do anything with the stone or the cut. So you can either
continue further into the Palace, where you'll meet an evil wizard
whose one aim is to turn you into stone, a eunuch who blocks the
entrance to the harem and the Dungeon Master who, not
unsurprisingly, guards a series of dungeons, complete with a
prisoner and various instruments of torture or you can investigate
the water-filled caverns below the buildings.

Though I am basically a great fan of the AGT games, there's no
getting away from the fact that they are generally poorly
playtested and/or spellchecked. Dragonslayer is no exception with
odd capital letters shoved in for no apparent reason, poor
punctuation and several spelling errors and typos such as "dary
gray water" which I guess should be "dark", "fraustrated",
"dissapeared" and "manicles" to mention just a few.  The game is
also relatively unimaginative apart from the harem scene where E L
Cheney gets into his stride. For Dragonslayer is R-rated ie adult
only but though the harem scene is fairly graphic, it didn't
offend me, I just found it rather pathetic.

When I completed the game, I found I was some points short - not
unusual in an AGT game since scoring in those often depends on
carrying certain objects at the end and sometimes, due to poor
programming, it's impossible to carry them all! Having lost
interest in the game by now, I had a dig through the database and
found a sword mentioned. Further exploration showed that the sword
is meant to be a "sword in the stone" ... yes, the same marble
stone that had the cut in it. The author had forgotten to OPEN the
stone so that the sword was visible. Changing one line in the
database and recompiling the adventure gave a final version that
was correct and is now replacing the original in the SynTax PD
list.  It also solved the mystery of a dark room that I'd been
unable to find a light source for. The sword was the light source
and this room in fact contained a series of paintings, each of
which had a clue to finishing the game.

Nice one, Ev!
                                                  Sue