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           Treasure Island - Zenobi/River Software
                  (Text adventure for ST)

Well, it's that time of the year again. No, not just Christmas,
New Year and all that. It's the time when she, the editor who must
be obeyed, gets me to write a review.  'You usually do', she says,
'so you really ought to do one this year'.

'But they're all too clever', says I, 'you know what I'm like with
these modern programs.' I suppose I'm the antithesis of the true
adventurer.  I must confess that I don't really find adventuring a
relaxing pastime. In fact, adventure games wind me up. They
frustrate me to the point where I'm ready to give the monitor a
good kicking.

'Well here's a nice straight forward text-only game', she says,
'even you should be able to cope with this one. You even know the
story - Treasure Island'.  That sounded reasonable so I agreed to
have a go, Jim lad (oops, sorry!).

I suppose this is more in the nature of a preview rather than a
review, me hearties (pardon me).  The game I played is a prototype
version, which came to SynTax courtesy of John Wilson of Zenobi.
The game is Jack Lockerby's conversion of his own Spectrum game
into the ST format.

In the game, you're Jim Hawkins and you get to play with a famous
cast list which includes Billy Bones (deceased), Blind Pew (who
suffers an early demise), Squire Trelawney, Doctor Livesey, Cap'n
Smollett, Long John Silver and Ben Gunn.

I suppose I ought to start at the beginning - at the Admiral
Benbow inn, where else? After a bit of exploration at the Inn you
come across poor old Billy Bones, still clutching the Black Spot,
and a little bit of extra work gets you the all important map of
Treasure Island.  You have to stash the map in a safe place before
Blind Pew and the rest of the gang come ashore in their longboat.
Pew doesn't last long once Mr Dance and the revenue officers
arrive. In no time at all you've spilled the beans to the Squire
and the Doctor and you're off to Bristol where you're given a
couple of errands to run.  The Black Spot comes in handy here in
the maze of Bristol back-streets because you have to scare off the
footpads and vagabonds who haunt the place (my greetings and
apologies to SynTax's Bristol readers).

In no time at all you're on board the good ship Hispaniola, a
pretty complex construction in its own right, and heading for
Treasure Island.  You learn about the mutiny from the comfort of
the apple barrel, as in the book, and eventually make landfall.
You get to explore the island and eventually come across Ben Gunn.
The island is interesting to explore and contains more than enough
taxing problems.

You will have guessed that by this stage I'd had some serious
assistance (from the Spectrum solution).  The puzzles are pretty
logical and they mostly follow the plot of the original story but
that doesn't make them easy to solve, especially for an adventurer
of my calibre. For example, at one stage, you have to dig four

times to uncover some treasure. Well, I could cope with one dig
but four times is asking too much - I don't think I'd have sorted
that out for myself.

The game, being a prototype, still had some bugs in it, such as
exits missing from some location descriptions and, in one case, a
door which was both open and closed in the same description. No
doubt these bugs will all be exterminated for the final version.
The game seems to follow the Spectrum version pretty closely as
far as I can judge - the Spectrum solution got me this far after
all.

Very little effort was made to describe and develop the characters
in this game but I guess it's not really necessary because most of
us are pretty familiar with them all from the book and/or film.
The characters did seem a bit tame though. For example you might
expect a bit of action at your first meeting with Robert New..., I
mean Long John Silver, but it turns out to be a bit of an
anti-climax, a pleasant, low key affair.

The game clearly couldn't hope to reproduce the whole of the book.
I noticed that the mutiny occurs near the end of the solution of
the game whereas, in the book, the mutiny appears about half way
through so obviously quite a lot has been left out. In the book,
Robert Louis Stevenson brought more catchphrases to the English
language than Bruce Forsyth (shiver me timbers, yo-ho-ho, pieces
of eight, didn't he do well, to name but a few) so I was a bit
disappointed to find that none of them seem to have been included.

Overall I was pretty impressed. Computerising what is arguably one
of the greatest adventure novels in the English language is a
major task and Jack Lockerby has had a real good crack at it. I
enjoyed playing it and, given (a lot) more time, I reckon I could
have got on quite well with it on my own.

A happy new year to my reader.

Regards from Alan M.