The Legend Lives - David Baggett - Adventions (Freeware TADS text adventure) - SynTax Disk 936 PC /1132 ST Reviewed by Neil Shipman I have to confess that I am one of that breed of adventurers who, to paraphrase James Judge, "Worshipped Colossal Cave, erected a shrine to Infocom (In Frobs We Trust!), performed strange rituals in the name of Level 9 and, later on, came over all clammy at the mere mention of TADS or the Unnkulian world." So it was with a great sense of anticipation that I transferred the copy of Dave Baggett's latest Unnkulian tale from the floppy on which Sue had sent it to the hard disk of my beautiful lime green Zippikraft Data Liquidizer 1024/A with built-in optical disk drive, detachable keyboard, high-resolution HoloScanning monitor and AkNet transceiver. Oops! I got carried away there! Whilst I might like to be able to afford "the fastest computing hardware in the galaxy" I am, sadly, still relegated to playing adventures on my trusty 486DX66 (and with the latest software seeming to require at least a P120 with 16MB RAM and quad-speed CD- ROM, text adventures are just about the only type of interactive fiction that I can run without getting 'out of memory' messages or system crashes!). Anyway, it was a Zippicraft that my alter ego, Gavin Kelly, a student at Akmi Yooniversity, was using on that fateful day when he discovered the virus planted deep in the bowels of AkNet. Until then he had thought that the Unnkulians were a myth but, while searching the ancient literary archives of the galaxy, he stumbled upon the "single black grain of sand in the immense digital beach that is AkNet" which indicated that truth was indeed stranger than fiction, the mythical race had existed, and the message emblazoned on the screen that "the Unnkulians shall rule again!" meant serious trouble was ahead. If the virus was left to do its work it would mean that the Unnkulian menace would penetrate, by way of AkNet, to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, throwing the Republic into chaos and disorder. The prospect of the Unnkulians enforcing their own harsh rule suddenly seemed horribly close. But how could the virus be stopped? Could Gavin save the galaxy from the tyranny of Unnkulian domination? Could a student living in a simple pod on the planet Frost use his knowledge of the Unnkulians to defeat them? Not, I discovered, without considerable help from a number of people along the way. Strange but friendly creatures from other races like the Hoppian and Foonian seed salesmen; Timon Sketch, the leader of a rock band called "The Hoi- Polloi"; the enigmatic Watchmaker who lorded it over New Hell; ace technofreaks Jax O Pax and his sidekick Mare; and an Artificial Intelligence called Justin Case all had their part to play. But what are the two things that come to mind when someone mentions the Unnkulian Unventures to you? Duhdha, of course, and eggs - specifically fried eggs which are, as you know, the staple diet of all followers of the path of enlightenment. And without either of these I couldn't get very far! The adventure took me planet hopping across the galaxy by way of the very latest matter mover technology. Just dial in the coordinates of where you want to go, step into the mover and, a few molecule-searing milliseconds later, rematerialise at your destination. This was made easy by using my autodialer which kept a record of all the places I'd been, so that I only had to type one number on the dialer rather than setting all three dials on each matter mover. Coordinates were sometimes provided in full (for example, the address of Barfee Seed Central was Burnt Sienna 8549, 4392, 8392) or based on given variations from standard colorspace (for example, Terminal Velocity was Hot Pink +0, -52, -5). Good job I found that color chart else I'd still have been stuck on Frost or Barfee! Dave Baggett knows the TADS utility like the back of his hand and the programming of The Legend Lives is nearly flawless. He makes full use of TADS version 2.2.0.5 with a number of clever programming routines. One of these was the ability to play part of Unnkulian Unventure III. I slipped the disk in the drive, switched on the Kompact Komputer, typed in the appropriate number from the menu screen, and was suddenly standing by the tyre swing that hangs from the tree on the west side of the river running through Dawg Rock. Being able to play a game within a game like this reminded me of playing Maniac Mansion in Day Of The Tentacle. However MM was included by LucasArts just for fun. In The Legend Lives I had to play part of the way through UU III in order to get a crucial item. Transferring objects between the intra-gameworld of UU III and that of TLL was handled very cleverly. The latest version of TADS also allows coloured text, and highlighting in red throughout the adventure helped draw my attention to things like footnotes which might otherwise have gone unnoticed. The footnotes (which can be accessed by typing footnote x) comment on various aspects of the gameworld like the Charon effect which wrinkles the tapestry of stars in the night sky of New Hell; the merits of owning a SoundSquasher synthesizer; a quote by AI guru Marvin Minsky on machine intelligence; Foonian architecture; the colonisation of the planet Kuwl by zealous Duhdhists and so on. Presentation is the standard grey text on a black background but the location/score/moves bar at the top of the screen is red with white text. An early footnote states that "All Akmi products and their characteristic spellings are trademarks of Akmi Galaktikorp. Akmi -- proud sponsors of the pan-galactic Cheez Games!" One of the identifying factors of any Unnkulian adventure is, of course, the wonderful phonetic spelling. Hence we have things like the can of Akmi Soopur Wundur Gro (Por on a dahb and watch yur plantz gro layk nevur befor! Garanteed sayf by Akmi Resurch Labz. Werks grate on petz to!); the akmid imprinted with "In Cheez We Trust. Kee Plastybus Akum; and the Akmi Slysor Dysor which uses patented Akmi Fuz-E Artyfishal Nooral Intellujince to determine the most appropriate action for the item you insert. Naturally, Akmi products have their traditionally garish mauve and orange colours - remember the salesman in his brightly coloured polyester suit in Unnkulian One-Half: The Salesman Triumphant? The game has a difficulty rating of "legendary" and there were a couple of puzzles in it that I was unable to solve without help. One of these was due to a bug relating to the random number generator in TADS itself. Apparently this does not always work when playing from a saved position. Both Dave Baggett and Mike Roberts (the developer of TADS) have looked at this on a number of occasions but, as far as I know, it has not been resolved. In The Legend Lives this meant that the Research Foundation Ship which was supposed to arrive somewhere between 1 and 10 moves in the Barfee Flower Warehouse, never appeared. However, once the author had told me about this I was able to restart and go to Barfee early on before I saved the game and the ship appeared just as he'd said it would. The other puzzle concerned a mosaic on the floor at the entrance to Terminal Velolcity, the favourite hang-out for the galaxy's best computer jocks. Without the adaptive hint system provided in the adventure I should still be struggling to decipher its meaning! The game is full of 'in jokes' and references to other computer text adventures. I especially liked the book which I found in my true love Ada's pod: an autographed copy of "The Horror of Rylvania, and Other Ghost Stories" by, it looks like, D.O. Louty (terrible handwriting!) and the plastic plover's egg with tiny letters along a seam saying, "C&W Model Y2. Plugh Mfg. Co." One strange item called an 'ary ung' had particular properties which reminded me of the unangling cream in Infocom's Leather Goddesses of Phobos (the text adventure not the trashy LGOP2) and I used this on a number of occasions to good effect. One of the best machines in the game was a Transmogrifyer which changed a whole range of useless objects into two or three vital ones. It was good fun popping something in it, setting the dials and pressing the button, not knowing what was going to materialise! The more observant among you will have noticed that in The Legend Lives, which is set 500 years on from the days of the Valley Kings, Acme has (presumably on the advice of some PR firm) revised its trademark to the higher-tec Akmi. This actually sits quite easily with the feel of the game which is much more science fiction than fantasy. Call it paranoia if you like but, as I worked my way through the adventure, I could feel the overbearing threat from Akmi who had control of the AkNet and had spread their tendrils far and wide to affect everyone and everything. The Legend Lives works, at one level, as an interesting and challenging adventure with some cracking puzzles, fluid writing and great dollops of humour. On a more serious note, however, it is a comment by the author (who is a Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory ) on the way in which technology affects our lives and how our future could be jeopardised through the misuse of science. At the end, the two questions uppermost in my mind were, "What happens as multinational software companies become more and more powerful and increasingly pervasive through the Internet?" and, "How long will it be before artificially intelligent machines are considered to have consciousness?" (Answers on a postcard please to the philosophy department of Frobozz University!) So to sum up: The Legend Lives is free, it's fun, it's challenging, it makes you laugh and it makes you think. If you haven't played it you can't really call yourself a fan of the Unnkulian Unventure series. Duhdha be praised! Availability: All Adventions games can be downloaded from the Internet, including demo versions of their commercial products, from the FTP site "ftp.gmd.de" in Bonn, Germany. Once there, look in if-archive/games/adventions. Be sure to transfer files in binary mode by typing "binary" at the FTP prompt. And finally: For a long time there has been talk of a space-based Unnkulian Unventure tentatively called Ulien: In Space No-one Can Smell The Cheez. The latest info from Dave Baggett is that this is unlikely to be available this year, but then you never know. . . The solution will be in the next issue. ------------------- In Frobs We Trust ! ------------------- - o -