HOG #3:  CIA ADVENTURE
                      (Text adventure)
       BASIC version by P. Wohlmut, part of Disk 417
      INFORM version by J.K. Thomas, part of Disk 1158
                 [HOG = Horrible Old Game]

                    Review by Bev Truter

Apart from a few cosmetic differences, both these versions of CIA
are the same. The Inform version has white-on-blue text instead of
grey-on-black; and accepts longer sentences instead of the BASIC
two-word verb/noun input. One glaring difference is that you can
SAVE and RESTORE in the Inform version but not, alas, in the BASIC
version.

Hooray! This game is *not* about a miser, and you don't have to
break into his house / manor and steal all his carefully hoarded
treasures!! (See HOG #1 and HOG #2). And thanks to Dorothy
Millard, you can now win the BASIC version of CIA too. In CIA you
play the part of an intrepid CIA agent, and your mission is to
recover a ruby that was being used in top-secret government
projects as a part in a laser projector. The ruby has been stolen
by a secret spy ring known as CHAOS, which operates undercover
somewhere in the local neighbourhood.

Well, gollygosh, and as luck would have it you just happen to
start the game right outside the very building that houses the
secret headquarters of CHAOS. What a stroke of good fortune. On
entering the building you are immediately tossed out on your ear
by the guard inside, as you were thoughtlessly wearing your CIA
identification badge. (CIA agents wear badges to proclaim their
identity?) If you remove your badge and drop it you can roam
around freely inside the building - obviously the guard is too
thick to recognize you as the same CIA agent who entered a few
moments previously, only this time you have no badge. Stranger
still is the fact that anything you drop outside, from a CIA badge
to valuable scientific equipment, never ever gets stolen - a true
miracle in a large American city!


Apart from 2 guards the entire building, including the President's
office and the Chief of CHAOS's office, is deserted. So all you
have to worry about is finding various objects and clues on how to
enter the secret headquarters of CHAOS, somewhere in the bowels of
the building; and how to dispose of the second guard, who is not
nearly as thick as the first one, and quite rightly shoots you if
you try entering the last few locations. Some of the objects you
need are found in the most unlikely of places; at one point in the
game you receive a clue about looking inside a sculpture, and it
turns out that the modern sculpture standing in the foyer of the
building can be opened, revealing two vital objects. Good grief,
these CHAOS people are fiendishly clever, fancy commissioning a
sculpture which can be opened, simply to hide two very ordinary
household objects. The mind simply boggles at their cunning logic.

Neither version of CIA has a scoring system, so this is a game you
either win (with a congratulatory message about how you've save
the world, blah, blah); or not. Without a SCORE function there's
no way of telling how far you've proceeded in the game, or how
much you've achieved; and to add my two bits' worth to a recent
controversy (on some 'Net sites) over scored/scoreless text games;
yes, I *do* prefer playing a game that's scored, ta very much.

@~Me too - anyone else have a preference? ... Sue

Like most other BASIC games and non-BASIC conversions of them, CIA
is almost irritatingly simplistic to play, lacking all details,
descriptions, realistic NPCs, etc. that make text adventuring more
nail-bitingly realistic today, as seen in more recent homegrown
text adventures. But these elderly BASIC games were produced ten,
twelve or fifteen years ago, when home computers were teensy
little things in terms of memory, and text adventures had to be
miniscule in scope. To be fair, out of the three HOGs I've
reviewed so far, CIA Adventure is slightly more sophisticated in
terms of puzzles (I said *slightly*!) and depth of plot ... well
... I suppose entering a building to retrieve some stolen property
for your government rates slightly higher on the sophistication
scale than merely breaking into someone's house and stealing his
valuables / possessions.

CIA has about 30-odd locations, and is easily winnable in under an
hour, especially if you're playing the Inform version where you
can save a position now and then, in case you make a botch of
things and need another go. So, if you're feeling in the mood for
playing a short and simple old text game, you could do worse than
give CIA a whirl.













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