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.

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In Frobs We Trust !
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