@~This is one of JJ's backlog of articles. Sorry for the delay, @~I've almost caught up now! ... Sue PD Adventures An article by James Judge Cue the trumpets, bring out the town crier, ring out the bells, pray to any entities that you may believe in but IT IS TRUE. What? Well, let me talk for a while and you'll know why I am soooooooo jubilant. I always get really angry when glossies review text adventures and any other adventures. As soon as the word 'adventure' is mentioned in one of these glossies, unless it is with great graphics and sound, the reviewers turn their noses up and award the game a piddly amount, say 60%. Both Sue and I have had a little rant about it and some time ago I was on the verge of writing to the Format offices, just to get my point of view known. I promised that if they reviewed an adventure that wasn't truly awful, and gave it a bad rating, they would feel the lash of my tongue. Well, all of this changed this month as I flicked through ST Format, past the review of Magic Boy, Parasol Stars and Pushover and to a page with TOPOLOGIKA'S ADVENTURE scrawled in big bold red across the top of the page. I got defensive once I read that name as I was reviewing three of their games for SynTax and they were all damn good and if they had had a go at them, oooh! My eyes glimmered down the page, past the titles and to the rating boxes. I then fainted, had a heart attack, jumped for joy, clapped had a celebratory drink and formed a letter in my mind all at once (don't try that at home - you may hurt yourself). The worst rating was 82% and the best was 88%. Wow! Just 2% off a Format Gold. This means that the Format offices think that these games are more enjoyable than games like Pushover, Powermonger, Magic Boy and many, many more great games. I was truly flabbergasted. By far the best text adventure that I have come across is The Obscure Naturalist. It is big, beautiful and full of great puzzles and humor - it has been so popular that Peter has started up a fan club with a great newsletter and (from what I've heard) the sequel may well come to our machines sometime in the future. STF reviewed this game in issue 39 and only gave it 76% - then it was the highest scored by any text adventure that I had seen since I started getting the magazines (issue 17). Why was this, I asked myself. ObNat is easily the peer of these Topologika games. Is it because it is Public Domain? Someone hand crafted it himself and then made it a very popular game, even appearing on a cover disk (something I've never heard of for a text adventure). In June last year STF ran an adventure special. They firstly looked at RPGs, giving two colour pages to it and gave it quite a good sounding. Of course they HAD to, Dungeon Master is an RPG and they can't say that that genre is rubbish after awarding DM 95%, Bloodwych 94% and both of the Ishars Format Golds (or close enough). Not to mention games such as Legend (which they called LegendS), Shadowlands, Shadoworlds and Knightmare, all of which did very well in the ratings. They then had a dig at the storylines of the adventures. Oh well, we've accepted that it is rare for commercial games to be original (it's a concept that they only think about once every few years. They tend to look at the latest game, fiddle with the graphics and puzzles, re-write all but the intro of the manual, change a few names and hey-presto!). Then graphical adventures came under their scrutiny. This form of adventure is, in my mind, the most accepted by people who hate adventures. This is normally because all the words that you need are on the screen, you normally have a few arcadey bits and it oozes with humor. Also you don't get lost all that easily. Oh, and solutions appear the very next issue. I don't really like these point and click adventures as they are far too limiting in my mind, with the all encompassing word USE. STF were kind to these as well, saying that they have got a very bright future. On the PC maybe, but the ST - don't think so. Under A Steel Sky (by the same people who did Lure Of The Temptress) and Monkey Island 2 are just two of the many P&C games that will never appear on the ST. Then they had a go at us, the adventurer. We, according to them, fall into three groups: THE STUDENT who gets out of bed at 4pm, listens to Def Leppard and keeps a secret collection of oddly-shaped dice under his bed. Talks to people only when he is drunk. [I agree with the dice, but not to the Def Leppard, drinking and sleeping habits] THE HIPPY who hasn't been able to cope with reality since the Beatles split up, so immerses himself in the parallel universe of adventure gaming instead. [I deny all of that] THE AMATEUR STATISTICIAN who writes train serial numbers in exercise books and performs complex equations with hit points to impress his one friend. Smells of Ralgex. [I've stopped doing the complex equations with HPs as no-one wants to board RPG with me anymore and I have got more than one friend. Two at least] It was then the turn of the space games. Not much to say except that in the page that they devoted to it, they liked it. Then, finally, was two pages covering text adventures, 3D stuff and PD games. Text adventures they said were boring with no pictures. 3D were OK, but not the game they liked and PD adventures are, well, a mixed bunch. They are conservative, OK at the best, terrible at the average and, well, use your imagination for the worst. They said that the cream of the PD crop were games such as DDST, Mystic Well and Grandad 1. The first two are, in my opinion, two terrible examples of a good PD adventure and if Grandad 2 is anything to go by, neither is Grandad 1. In the end, I don't think that these glossies like PD adventures. Firstly they are adventures. Most of them are text adventures as they don't seem to realise that to write a good RPG on a computer is damn difficult because of the amount of things that someone can do - this is hell for the programmer, artist and the playtester and often turns people away from the idea. Graphical adventures are slightly easier to program, but they are not everyone's cup of tea. so, what are you left with? A mixture of the two, true and, of course, our dearly beloved text adventure. So this means that the text adventure will never get a good coverage, will it? They don't have graphics and they are PD (the big downer). If they were commercially produced with good packaging etc. they would get very good reviews (look at the Topologika games) but they are not. Instead they will just be reviewed and discussed in magazines such as SynTax. All good and well if we want to advertise and get the adventuring idea to established adventurers, but not really good enough to encourage more people to take a look at the games. In a way, we are in a vicious circle. The games people such as Peter Hague and Jean Childs will only be seen by a few people, but there would be many more people who would find them enjoyable if they just knew about them. The glossies won't give them much credit because they are either indies or PD, at best a small paragraph tucked away amongst terrible arcade games with a poor review and rating. Without that extra press no-one will know about them and so the author just gets fed up, unless they are highly committed or, by some chance, get enough recognition to carry on. Well, that's my penny's worth. If any of you would like to have a say on what you think of the state of PD adventures are compared to commercial games, write in, discuss, complain, praise - anything. - o -