Letters

@~Any letters or e-mails received on an adventuring-related topic
@~may be reprinted in here unless marked 'not for publication'.
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@~Only a short letters section this time. First part of a letter
@~from:
Phil Darke, Camberley

I remember talking to you a while ago about Blue Ice. You may well
have seen it already but there is now available on the Internet a
more comprehensive walkthrough by a lady called Bonnie Collins. I
have included it on the enclosed disk in case you haven't seen it.

@~It's in the Hints section ... Sue

It still isn't a complete solve, though, and interestingly when I
phoned Psygnosis' helpline they were very tight-lipped and said
they were unable to give game hints as the prize has not yet been
claimed. When I asked what prize, they told me there is a prize
offered for the first person to complete the game, although they
wouldn't (or maybe couldn't) tell me what the prize is. There is
also no mention in the game documentation of this prize.

@~I assume that when (if?) you complete the game, the final screen
@~tells you to contact Psygnosis because you may have won a prize,
@~but how odd that it isn't documented in the packaging. I
@~mentioned it to Jenny Perry, who had been playing it, and she
@~said she didn't know anything about a prize either. I thought I
@~would reprint this part of Phil's letter so those of you who
@~have given up on the game can give it another go if you
@~want to try to be first ... Sue
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@~And now one from
Nick Edmunds, Worcester

Having recently been in a position where, while playing an
elementary text adventure, I met difficulty in finding the
necessary verb to carry out a simple task, I then found myself
pondering the fine line between: the problem of finding the right
wordage when you know what to do and being infuriated by
inflexible verb commands.  Ironically enough I have also been
struggling to think of a way of describing this phenomenon:
limited verb functionality, command parser inflexibility - but I
just can't seem to find the words. Maybe it's just me?

Most adventure game writing systems provide the potential for
minimising the frustration factor by making the command line more
versatile, eg. The TADS command 'Synonym', but to what extent do
we want our games to become totally responsive?

Isn't much of the point with these games that you often have to
get into the mind of the writer.  Who among us can deny the
pleasure of finding the correct combination after many hours of
torment and then kicking ones self around the room in penance for
our own stupidity.  Also, although to a much lesser extent, one
has to be careful about making games too bulky - a text adventure
should run adequately on a minimum spec. machine.  Yes, the
current marketing trend is for huge bloat-ware products requiring
psychotic processor speeds and mountains of RAM, but Text
Adventures aren't the current marketing trend and we should be
aware of alienating others on the grounds of possession
specification ( Oh God, I think I've just invented another 'ism'
and I'm beginning to rant, so I'd better stop now ).

@~As I mentioned in the intro to Nick's solution to Acorn Court in
@~this issue, it's interesting to see that even in a very small
@~game like that, enough synonyms were provided to make Nick and
@~William's solutions read quite differently. I prefer more
@~synonyms rather than fewer, simply because to me the fun is in
@~working out what to do, not playing 'hunt the word'. Any other
@~comments? ...  Sue

@~And that's the lot!




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