Excuse Me, Do You Have the Time?
                   Written by Jean Childs

                   Reviewed by Bev Truter

Jean's conversion of her game EXCUSE into TADS is a resounding
success. I never played the original (written for the Atari, I
think?), but this TADS version is gripping stuff indeed - a sort
of Famous Five-ish (no, make that Famous Four-ish) time travelling
saga that ranges over 6 different countries and periods of time.
If you're the sort of person who dislikes space sagas and sci-fi
adventures, fear not; there are more adventure and puzzles in this
game than technological paraphernalia, and your means of transport
is the delightfully simple-to-operate Barkodhi Mk 1 time-travel
machine, cunningly designed to look like......

For those of you who haven't loaded EXCUSE yet and looked at the
introduction, you play the role of leader of a group of 4 friends
who out of curiosity break into a mad scientist's dilapidated old
house. The old codger catches you, of course, and as an
alternative to calling in the police, he suggests you could help
him test out his new time-travelling invention. He is about to
leave in the latest model - the Barkodhi Mk2, and would like the
four of you to follow in the older Mk1. To prove that you have
been to 5 different areas and times, he wants you to bring back as
proof five objects representing Beauty, Knowledge, Bravery,
Achievement and Friendship. Despite some minor glitches in the
Barkodhi Mk1 you decide to help him test his new invention, to
your three friends' horror.

Your three friends (Tom, Dick and Harry) can be interacted with
and asked questions. This idea works well, and is a novel way of
getting hints if stuck. They follow you everywhere throughout the
game, and if you dawdle around too much they have a wide range of
banter and remarks to encourage you / irritate you with. You find
a yellow disk in the rucksack you are given by Yon Barkodhi after
agreeing to help him, and this operates his time-travel "machine",
taking you to a Pacific Island in the year 1765. In each time/area
you must find another coloured disk as well as one of the 5
objects, so basically EXCUSE is a treasure hunt type of game.

Jean avoids all the pitfalls that can make text adventures
annoying to play. There are no mazes, no levers-and-buttons to
fiddle about with, and best of all no mindless killing and
violence.  It's not that I object to violence in a game, it's the
"mindless" that infuriates me. For example, if you find a
gun/pistol/rifle in a game, you just know that further on there's
something that you requires you to type "kill xxx with yyy". Along
with mazes, I think the kill- xxx-with-yyy syndrome is well past
its use-by date; so thankfully neither appear in EXCUSE. And I'm
not "damning with faint praise" either by citing lack of negatives
in EXCUSE - I *loved* playing this game, and will probably replay
it again at some point in the future - not something I do very
often with text adventures.

On the spelling and grammar front everything is spot-on, which in
itself doesn't necessarily make a good game. Jean goes much
further than just getting the words right, she has written a
remarkably interesting game to play. Locations are so vividly
described that you feel as though you have been literally
transported in the Barkodhi to the different countries and times.
Jean must have done an astounding amount of reading to get all the
peripheral background information so detailed - either that, or
she's a human walking encyclopaedia!

At about 150 locations in size EXCUSE is a long, enjoyable game to
play. After playing plenty of Spectrum(e) games, it was a pleasant
change to get my teeth into something a bit more challenging than
the average 30-locations Speccy job. I'm not knocking ye old
Speccy games, but let's face it, TADS and Inform games have the
potential to be much bigger and better. EXCUSE more than fulfils
that potential, and demonstrates what can be done with TADS in the
hands of a competent programmer.

Excellent writing skills, good plot, interesting puzzles and
great atmosphere make EXCUSE the best text adventure I've played
this year. EXCUSE is freeware, and was distributed with SynTax
#60, so if you haven't started playing it yet why not have a peek
at it?

Oh, if *only* there were more text adventures like this to enjoy.
Congratulations Jean, and can we hope there are more TADS games in
the pipeline???
















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