Alice In Wonderland by Robin Johnson
            (Text adventure for PC on Disk 476)

                  Reviewed by Jean Childs

This adventure is based on Lewis Carroll's novel and it helps to
know the story as a lot of the puzzles are true to the original.
The game is Shareware and the registration fee is $10. During the
game you can alter your size, just like in the story, by eating or
drinking substances. Your size will affect your ability to carry
items and also your chances of survival.

You get points for places visited, charity points, power points
and ingenuity points. Winning consists of finding a particular
object and returning home with it. There is no maximum score but
200 is considered good, and you can get less and still win. You
can obtain hints during the game, but points are deducted each
time you ask.  There were a couple of things I particularly liked
about this game.  One was the ability to "read book", providing
you were carrying the book. The response to this input was a short
passage from Lewis Carroll's novel relevant to the current
location. The other thing I liked about it was the way the
player's inventory was handled.  Typing "inventory" or "I"
resulted in a small box appearing on the screen which listed what
you were carrying, what you had in your pocket and also your
current size.

There is a box at the top of the screen which displays the
player's score, showing how many of each type of point has been
won. It seems a shame that this is the only information available
without asking for it. The current location would have helped as,
when the description of the location has scrolled off the screen,
it's a nuisance to have to type "look" if you have forgotten where
you are.  The room descriptions are short and do not give all the
exits available. It tells you that "you are on an east-west path",
but doesn't tell you that you can go north and south. This would
be acceptable if it wasn't for the fact that you could go south
and find a new location, or that you could go south and end up in
the river.  You can't examine anything. It accepts the word
"examine" but tells you each time that "everything is pretty much
as it appears". At each location anything of importance is written
in a different colour, so the descriptions of the rooms are not
hiding anything.  The program crashed no less than three times,
which is pretty amazing considering this is an updated version.
When you die, you have to reload the program.

The parser is not good. Let me give you an example:- There you are
face to face with a Gryphon, who tells you that he can take you
somewhere. I tried "climb on gryphon" (no), "jump on gryphon"
(no), so I threw away five points and asked for a hint. The
information I was given said "he has a good strong back". Oh,
right!  I tried "climb on back" (no), "jump on back" (no), "climb
on gryphon's back (no). It was quite simply "ride gryphon".

At one place I found the queen, so I tried "talk to queen", which
resulted in my being arrested. Held by guards, the screen prompt
changed from "what now?" to "what shall we do?". I tried
everything that I could think of, to which the response was always
"do what?  what shall we do?". I couldn't restore, look, use my
inventory or even quit. I had to reset the computer. Obviously it
was one of those one answer and one answer only situations. Having
reloaded the game I went back to see the queen. Another hint told
me to try a game of croquet, so I picked up a bat (a flamingo) and
hit the ball (a hedgehog). The hedgehog flew through the air and
hit the queen who instantly had me arrested. "What shall we do?",
to which my response was "die". "Do what? What shall we do?" That
was the last I saw of it. If you can put up with all that then you
will probably enjoy the game.

I can't and didn't.