Droolig and the King's Gold - Jon Dixon/AGT
           (Text adventure for ST on SynTax PD 440)

                Reviewed by John R. Barnsley

This recent adventure was written by Jon Dixon and is based,
according to the author, on an old Electron game. The story goes
that there was a kind old King who had lots of wealth and
distributed it freely amongst the poor.  However, a mean old
dwarfie-person by the name of Droolig decided to make the King's
life a misery and spirit away all the treasures. But it didn't go
exactly to plan and, due to the fact that Droolig was interrupted
in mid-spell by a castle guard, both the treasure and Droolig were
whisked off to an unknown destination and he was unable to return.
Your mission is to locate and dispose of Droolig and return the
treasures to their rightful place with the kind old King who,
incidentally, is currently destitute but still has his beautiful
daughter available for any successful adventurer.

The first thing to remember is not to enter the Throne Room
empty-handed as the King will look upon this as an admission of
failure on your part and you will pay the ultimate price for this.
Exploring the dungeons will uncover all you need to progress (plus
a few 'red herrings') but players should bear in mind that not
all, if any, available exits are mentioned in the location
description - try 'em all.

Two small mazes will need to be navigated but they are quite easy
and there are enough surplus objects around to help you map them.
A quick way out of both mazes is available and you should use
these as there is nothing to be gained by visiting every location
in this game - in fact, there is no score facility whatsoever! You
start with zero and complete the game with zero!!

There does seem to be a fair amount of unnecessary locations and
objects - such as the island where a lost parrot will follow you
for reasons best known to itself, and a charred scroll which we
can assume was once a fireball spell, but to call this a decent
adventure would be a bit of an overstatement - and I'm being kind!
No, my biggest gripe about this and many other AGT adventures is
the unreliable SAVE facility. Would it not be helpful to look at
incorporating a RAMSAVE facility? Even more annoying is the sudden
death event that throws you back to the Desktop - much nicer to
see "You have died, blah, blah....would you like to play again?
Y/N"....or the like.

So, having said that, this particular AGT adventure can be rated
as mediocre and, while not all players will be happy with the many
spelling and punctuation errors, it is finishable and as it is not
too difficult it could be an ideal game for beginners, provided
the basic rules of adventuring are followed.