Zork: A Troll's Eye View (or The Troll Room)
      (Text adventure for the PC - part of Disk 1214)

                  Reviewed by Neil Shipman

What would it be like to be the troll in Zork? Pretty boring
standing around all day waiting for an unsuspecting adventurer to
come along so that you could kill them, eh? And oh how boring it
is!

One location, a few commands, short descriptions and uninspiring
responses to your limited actions leave you thinking, 'Why did I
ever bother to look at this?"  You can't get out of the Troll Room
in which your character has volunteered for guard duty and all you
can do is wait for an adventurer to appear so that you can hit
them with your bloody axe. Kill eleven adventurers and you've
survived your first day - and reached the end of the game!

Can you really call an exercise that simply requires you to repeat

WAIT FOR ADVENTURER, KILL ADVENTURER a game? I think not. It's
more a test of how persistent you are or, perhaps, how stupid!

The author, Dylan O'Donnell, describes it as 'A study of the
relative paradigms of moral identity in classic and modern IF,
intended to throw sidelights on the motivation of the player and
of NPCs and their relative role in plot construction and
development.' Worthy of Pseuds Corner in Private Eye is that
description, but at least he does go on to say that he really
wrote the game as a coding exercise which he released publicly
because someone might get a laugh out of the concept. Frankly, he
does himself no favours at all by letting us see this rubbish and,
if he is at all serious about writing text adventures which might
meet with any acclaim, he would have been well advised to have
spent a good deal longer developing his limited skills. I
recognise that we all have to start somewhere, but it's not
necessarily a good idea for your future public to be shown just
how basic those first few faltering steps can be.


On the plus side, there aren't any noticeable bugs, and Dylan's
spelling is up to scratch, so I wouldn't give it a big fat zero.
But I couldn't possibly score this higher than 1 out of 10 and,
basically, the message is, 'Don't bother!

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In Frobs We Trust!
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