The Nuclear Submarine Adventure - author Stephen Neighorn
       (Text adventure for PC, part of SynTax PD 53)

                  Reviewed By James Judge

A text adventure from Stephen's collection, Adventureware.  The
action (hehe) takes place in a nuclear submarine that has been
called back into service due to the growing Communist threat and
it needs to be tested to make sure everything works fine.

You are a member of the skeleton crew which has been assigned to
test the sub under emergency conditions. Unfortunately most of the
skeleton crew seems to have disappeared (not mentioned in the
intro) and so it seems as if you're on your todd, running around
the sub trying to fix everything that doesn't work, which is
EVERYTHING.  Lockers and doors won't open, all the radios are
either dead or broken, the generator is knackered so the sub's
running off battery (!?) and the nuclear dojamiflip is on the
verge of a melt down, very comforting.

As we are now aboard a sea going (but definitely not worthy)
vessel we forget about norths and souths and turn to fores and
afts.

The screen display is like another game in the collection, Crime
Adventure. The screen is split into two parts, the top with three
headings for room descriptions, objects and exits while the bottom
half is for your commands and the computer's responses. After each
move the top half and a third of the bottom half is redrawn line
by line which makes the game run extremely slowly. Another thing
which slows the game down is a 'PEEEEP' after everything you do,
right or wrong.

The sub is extremely large and, like all of his other games, is
devoid of hard and difficult puzzles which are normally the main
bit of an adventure game.  The puzzles that are present are mainly
fixing certain items with something else so that means you are
basically exploring the sub to find items to fix other things with
it.

The EXAMINE command is absent in this game so you must use the
LOOK command, LOOKing at certain objects.  This would be fine but,
if you examine most objects you just get the name back as a
description e.g.

        > Look empty (I'm looking at an empty torpedo tube)
        - The tube is empty.

Fine.

Although the game was made in '85 you're not going to tell me that
back in those day people couldn't think up worthwhile puzzles, are
you? I've played quite a few adventures which look better, play
better and are better all round that are from around the same
period on the old Spectrum 48K!

Another flop from Stephen, just like the rest of the collection,
really.

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