NIGHT OF THE VAMPIRE BUNNIES
                     Part of Disk 1158
     Original QBASIC text game by Jason Dyer, ported to
                  Inform by Patrick Kellum

                    Review by Bev Truter

BUNNIES was apparently a very early text adventure written by the
(then) 10-year old Jason Dyer. This is a word-for-word transfer of
the original plot and text into Inform, and I'm left wondering
"why?" As a 10-year old's first foray into writing a text
adventure it was a pretty good effort, way back in the
mid-eighties. But from the viewpoint of someone in the late
nineties, this is a very feeble game indeed, and I have no idea
why anyone would want to port it verbatim into Inform, with hardly
an improvement in sight. Oh well, it did provide me with about 25
minutes of entertainment, there were 2 quite innovative puzzles in
it, even by today's standards; and the 6-location maze was short
enough and easy enough for even the most hardened maze-hater to
solve without resorting to the in-built HELP section.

You're thrown abruptly into the game at the deep end, with only
the following introduction to help you work out where you are, and
what you have to do. Although remembering the title of this game
would probably be a strong clue as to what you're looking for. The
introduction runs along these lines: "The voice still echoes in
your head 'Remember...if the bunny is not dead by midnight, the
countryside will be ruled by evil.' You shiver as you think of the
people dead in the street with bite marks on their necks. Cattle
dead by the hundreds. The stories of a rampaging vampire bunny.  A
chill runs up your spine. Lastly, you remember the strangeness of
the graveyard the last time you saw it...the misty fog...and now
you're in the graveyard, alone, armed only with your apple and
your trusty quill pen."

As it happens, neither your trusty apple nor your old quill pen
(or was it the other way around?) are of the slightest use; and
the clue written on a scrap of paper in one of the nearby
locations is hardly much better. Roaming about the graveyard you
discover a closed coffin, a dark hole guarded by a skeleton, an
old well, and an ominous-looking river. After disposing of the
skeleton you'll be able to roam around the underground maze until
you finally reach the vampire bunny <gasp>. There's a rather
clever way to dispose of him/her/it, and then when you find a way
out of the graveyard, you reach the end of the game. And that's
about all there is to this little 27-location effort.

Although spelling and grammar are adequate, the programming of the
noun "water" seems to have caused all the usual flurry of
problems. For example, although you are told in one of the hints
to POUR WATER, this input doesn't work. Nor does THROW WATER or
THROW BUCKET. Sigh. In desperation I resorted to the very unwieldy
POUR BUCKET, which did the trick. I have stumbled across exactly
the same "watery" problems in other BASIC text games - obviously
water in all its forms is tricky to deal with, especially in an
elderly BASIC text game. But why Patrick Kellum didn't tidy up
this bit of programming in the Inform version remains a mystery,
particularly since the Inform-style pop-up menu of hints contains
the correct phrase POUR WATER.

Not a particularly "good" game, nor an interesting one; but what
the heck, Jason was only 10, after all. And I can recall at least
3....no, make that 4...recent Inform and TADS games written by
adults that were far worse than BUNNIES. So go ahead and play
this, if you want a short, sharp burst of nostalgia.














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