DINKUM (v 2.14) -  by Gary Allen (Jr.)
          A text adventure on SynTax disk PCPD 990

                    Review by Bev Truter

Well, G'Day mate, all you SynTax readers out there sling another
prawn on the barbie, down another can of XXXX, and listen to my
review of this aggressively Australian adventure - with a title
like "Dinkum", you could hardly expect anything else, now could
you? The initial above ground locations in this tale of
treasure-seeking and derring-do are relentlessly, determinedly
Australian in flavour; and although the author appears to be
Australian (he lives in Queensland), he mucks up the spelling of
both `kangaroo' and `witchetty grub' in the introduction and first
few rooms in the game. Oh dear. But wait, hang on half a mo...Yes!
He gets `taipan' and `kookaburra' right! (Good on yer, mate!)

Basically you have to discover for yourself the aim of this game
as you play your way through it - at the beginning you are told
only that Dinkum is an Australian adventure game, where you'll
search for treasure in the Australian Outback. After wandering
around for a while through randomly-changing scenery you'll
eventually stumble across the old Acme gold mine and premises (if
you head roughly east-ish). Now mined out and deserted, the gold
mine has some dilapidated office buildings to the north, a mine
lift to the south, and a network of tunnels and old shafts
underground.

In the office buildings you'll discover a safe, now empty, and a
map of one of the three levels of the mine still accessible by the
mine lift. A note tells you that you'll have to return with any
treasures you discover in the mine and deposit them in the safe
for points; and that it is vital to collect gleeps and store them
in gleep tanks somewhere in the mines so they can reproduce. (No,
I don't know what gleeps are either). The ability to collect and
cultivate gleeps is essential to win the game.

So it's off on another trot through 3 levels of underground
tunnels, slaughter any monsters with the appropriate weapon, find
some gleeps and store them in the gleep tank, collect the
treasures and totter back to the office to deposit them in the
safe. Funny thing though, the first treasure I found was an
emerald, where I'd assumed the obvious valuables to be found in a
gold mine would be...err, let me take a wild guess here...various
objects made from gold. Ah well, ours not to question why, ours
but to do and die...and die....and die. By this stage you'll
probably be gritting your teeth viciously, and willing to do
(almost) anything for the usual SAVE command instead of the fiddly
data recorder. Oops. I've got a bit ahead of myself here, but read
on to discover the function of the data recorder in Dinkum.

Dinkum is accompanied by no less than five README files, most of
them dealing with the mysteries and troubles of programming;
patches; upgrades; getting the source code for McIntosh, and other
such technical thinggies. In one of these files Gary (Jr.)
explains why the lack of a SAVE command in Dinkum is deliberate,
and rants on for a while in very dogmatic fashion: "...The two
main reasons why people play a text adventure is either to be an
active participant in an action/fantasy story, or to experience
communicating through natural language to a computer...both these
aspects are defeated by using a save command." What piffle. The
lack of a save command simply makes any large adventure, text or
otherwise, unplayable. Especially since Dinkum is dynamic, which
is the author's quaint way of saying the game changes each time
you play it - objects and monsters may alter their locations, and
the locations themselves appear to have randomly-changing
connections between them, meaning that going north from A might
get you to B, but going south from B can take you to A, C, or D.
<Groan>. This all makes Dinkum hell to map and difficult to play,
but all is not lost.

The author must have realized that with no SAVE feature he might
be stuck with a game everyone lost interest in after the twentieth
restart, so he's had a change of heart and provided the choice of
playing Dinkum by typing "Dinkum -s". This puts a device called a
data recorder at the beginning of the game, complete with simple
instructions on how to use it. With this data recorder you can
`record' your moves and commands in the game, then `replay' them
at any crucial point if you feel the need to RESTORE. The
information you `record' is stored as an ASCII file, which can
then be edited if you wish - for example, you might want to edit
out your own death with a word processor before 'replaying' a game
from the data recorder. This makes a reasonable but unwieldy
substitute for the normal SAVE command, but if you use this option
it's impossible to win/finish the game. But what the heck, I
reckon Dinkum is well-nigh impossible to finish anyway, so who
cares?

The opening screen of Dinkum displays the message "Would you like
some initial help?" Typing YES gives you very brief instructions
on how to play, starting with the phrase "G'Day, Mate! Welcome to
Dinkum." <Cringe, squirm, blush>. Thereafter you are thrown into
the game, in a clearing, and woe betide you if you wander too far
southwest (lost in a gum tree forest and you'll have to restart).
Or wander too far west (lost in a tall grassy area and get bitten
by a snake...die agonizing death...restart). Or wander too far
south (lost in a desert...quit...restart). What a fun game to
play!!!


A few other gripes about the gameplay are that EXAMINE and LOOK
have no abbreviations at all, INVENT is the shortest abbreviation
for INVENTORY, and examining most objects in the game gives the
response "there is nothing more I can describe about it." Gary
Allen (Jr.) might well be a whizz at programming in C, but
forgetting about abbreviations for frequently-used words is
criminal sloppiness. There is no status line in Dinkum, but you
can type in SCORE for your score and various comments (generally
insulting) on how you are faring.

Dinkum has some good location descriptions, particularly in the
above-ground areas, but I found the excessive `Australian content'
a bit grating on the old nerves even before the 29th restart from
scratch; yes, it took me about that long to discover the "Dinkum
-s" option with the data recorder. The underground tunnels of the
Acme mine were a bit of a disappointment though - plenty of
locations described thus: "You are in a tunnel running west." "You
are in a north-south tunnel." Mind you, I suppose there's not too
much one can do with underground tunnels in the way of riveting
descriptions; a tunnel is a tunnel is a tunnel. The quality of
writing is, ummm, adequate; descriptions of places and
objects...errmm, average; and overall it was just that - not too
bad a game, but not inspiringly brilliant either. It just seemed
to lack that extra oomph that makes a game compulsive to play.

Reading the various README files gives the impression that Gary
Allen has gone to a lot of trouble to rewrite and re-programme the
game many times; getting rid of various bugs, improving the
coding, and adding yet more Australian content. So he has my
admiration for all the effort he's put into Dinkum over the years,
but really, the Giant Radioactive Wombat lurking in level 49 of
the Acme mines was just too much for me. After a fortnight's play,
no mapping <sob> and frequent deaths I think I'll retire
gracefully from this particular text adventure.

ENJOYMENT      3.5/10
ATMOSPHERE     3.5/10
DIFFICULTY       8/10 (due entirely to the lack of a SAVE command)
FINAL COMMENT    This just isn't my can of Foster's, fair dinkum.
                              - o -