Ditch Day Drifter - SynTax PD 177 Michael J. Roberts / High Energy Software (TADS Text adventure on ST (1 Meg required) and PC) Reviewed (ST version) by Neil Shipman As soon as I saw the first screen of Ditch Day Drifter I thought, "Wow! This looks just like an Infocom adventure." The black on white 80 column text and inverse status line, the introductory paragraph then the copyright details and description of the starting location, were all reminiscent of the beginning of a game from the masters themselves. From the information contained in the DOC files on the disk it looked as if the parser was quite sophisticated too - more of that later - but what would the adventure be like to play? Ditch Day is the day on which seniors at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena bar their doors with various devices or "stacks" and underclassmen (like you) attempt to crack the puzzles they pose in order to gain entry. The stack on the senior's door across from your room takes the form of a treasure hunt and sets you off searching for strange items like The Great Seal of the Omega, Mr. Happy Gear, a Million Random Digits and a DarbCard. Outside your accommodation the quad gives access to a number of campus buildings - health center, bookstore, behavior lab, security office and many more - and you are free to explore nearly 30 locations before being called upon to solve any problems. By this time you will have amassed so much information from the descriptions of the large number of items to be found that you will have no trouble working out how to get past the guard into the Great Underground Excavation. Making your way through the steam tunnels down in the GUE you will soon encounter Lloyd the Friendly Insurance Robot, a delightful character who assesses your requirements and offers you the perfect policy: >Lloyd,hi "Hello," Lloyd responds cheerfully. Lloyd watches you expectantly, hoping you will buy the insurance policy. >give dollar (to Lloyd) Lloyd graciously accepts the payment, and hands you a copy of your policy. "You might wonder how we keep costs so low," Lloyd says. "It's simple: we're highly automated, which keeps labor costs low; I run the whole company, which keeps the bureaucratic overhead low; and, most importantly, I follow you everywhere you go for the duration of the policy, ensuring that you're paid on the spot should anything happen, which means we don't have to waste money investigating claims!" Lloyd hums one of his favorite insurance songs. He proves to be as good as his word, and his comments and actions as he follows you around are most amusing. Perhaps not quite as lovable as Floyd in Planetfall but he's a great guy none the less. Below ground there is an odd mix of characters, objects, locations and puzzles. Can you deal with the enormous, green, leathery- skinned creature covered with translucent slime which blocks your way? How do you crack the safe in the vault of the GUE bank? Where will the railcar take you to if you can stop it from overheating? And what is the best way of negotiating the Psycho-Magnetic Maze? As you succeed in overcoming these various obstacles you will acquire the items you are looking for and be able to drop them in the door's slot to break the stack. Inside is your reward and you have just one more thing to do before it's "up, up and away" and a none too subtle lead in to the second TADS adventure. The storyline reminded me of A Dudley Dilemma, the AGT competition winner in which you had to gather together the items necessary for your graduation ceremony. In developing the TADS utility, though, Michael J. Roberts has obviously been influenced by the works of Infocom and the adventure does, indeed, play just like one of their games. The whole database loads in at the start so there is no annoying disk access to slow things down and you can type ahead without any trouble. The parser recognises the first 6 letters of words and caters for multiple objects, multiple commands on a line, character interaction and the usual abbreviations; e.g. GET MEMOS. X THEM, POLICY AND FUNNEL THEN PUT ALL EXCEPT FISH IN BASKET. Z THEN LLOYD, FOLLOW ME is an actual series of commands understood by the program. OOPS will enable you to correct a misspelled word: e.g. >x memo Which memo do you mean, the security memo, or the health memo? >healtg I don't know the word "healtg". >oops health From: Director of the Health Center To: All Health Center Personnel Subject: ToxiCola toxicity SCRIPT is rather unusual. Instead of printing a hard copy of your adventure this command starts writing everything to a disk file. So far everything will be familiar to fans of Infocom. However, there are three things which I think make TADS ever better! Firstly, X ALL is understood; secondly, recall and editing of earlier commands is possible using the cursor keys, backspace and delete, and, thirdly, a Review mode allows you to go back and look at text which has scrolled off the screen. Review mode is entered by pressing F1. You can then page up and down a screenful at a time using F9 and F10 or a line at a time using the cursor keys. The number of screenfuls available depends on how much text there is in each one but typically more than 20 can be reviewed. Pressing F1 again returns you to the game. This can be quite useful if you haven't bothered to make a map and you want to check on how you got to where you are! In addition to the compiled data file there is also an uncompiled one on the disk so that you can see what TADS looks like from the writer's point of view. This file is heavily documented and looks fairly straightforward even to someone like me who knows very little about programming. TADS is shareware and you will need to send $25 to High Energy Software in order to get the complete Author's Manual. However, if you are a text adventure author unhappy with the current crop of adventure writing utilities and you want to produce an Infocom lookalike then TADS could be just what you're looking for. Ditch Day Drifter does have its shortcomings as an adventure. The storyline is not particularly strong and many of the puzzles are very easy with the object(s) required for their solution being too close by. It is, though, a good demonstration of what can be achieved with TADS which is, from the player's point of view at least, a truly excellent system I found impossible to fault.