THE MANSION - (Or the Tale of an Adventurous Thief)
     A text adventure by "Wildman" on SynTax PCPD 1279

                    Review by Bev Truter

Omigod! Not *another* ancient text adventure, resurrected from the
80s, re-vamped / copied into TADS, and distributed on the Net. In
this case, MANSION bears a striking resemblance to MISER'S HOUSE,
only there's fewer locations (about 34), fewer and simpler puzzles
to solve, and practically non-existent object descriptions. For
example, the kitchen (why do kitchens always seem to be so
problematical in text adventures?) is described as having a
refrigerator, sink, stove, pots and pans. Try examining any of the
above, and the game responds with I DON'T KNOW THE WORD_____

You start the game on a road outside a mansion, that you intend to
"burglarize". (I thought the verb should be "burgle", but then I'm
not an American.) A few moves further into the game you can open
the mailbox on the porch and read the letter it contains to gain
your first 10 points and discover some details about the author.
He says this game was originally written in BASIC for the C64
about 10 years ago, and that he's reproduced it from memory as
best he could, in TADS. He couldn't recall the original author's
name, and he has added some "enhancements" for the bits he's
forgotten.

MANSION is simply a greed quest of the simplest kind. Collect 7
treasures, perform 3 point-winning actions (reading the letter is
one of them), and you end the game with a score of 100/100. There
might be some point in all this if you were a complete novice to
text-adventuring, or if you yearned for a nostalgic trip back to
the days of *really* bad text adventures; but other than these two
reasons I see no point in playing MANSION, and I'm totally baffled
as to why the author felt compelled to write it. Perhaps as a
programming exercise to see if he could cope with TADS? Perhaps to
give younger game players a glimpse of what the first crop of 80s
text adventures were like? Who knows.

The puzzles in MANSION are excruciatingly simple, most involve
getting past a hostile creature (a snake), unlocking a door (to
the vault), and defeating the empty suits of armour that attack
you (grab the sword hanging in plain view on the wall.) After
solving each "puzzle" you are rewarded by finding the usual
cliched valuable - a green gem, a diamond ring, etc. etc.

The two things I *did* like about MANSION was that at the finish
you are given your score in a list, which details what your
point-winning actions were; and there's a fairly original way of
getting the 10 points for the Ming Vase - one of the treasures.
Other than that I could detect no "enhancements" - locations in
this mansion are poorly described, actions you are required to
perform are often illogical; and to cap it all the puzzles are, at
best, very feeble. There is one decided improvement on the
"putting out the fire" sequence though - in MANSION you can POUR
WATER, while in MISER'S HOUSE you had to POUR BUCKET. Isn't it odd
how one remembers annoying things about games past, as well as
outstandingly novel things?

I played MANSION with the latest version (2.2.6) of TADS, which
runs the game in black & white, unless you choose the TRCOLOR.EXE
option to change the background / text colours into those of your
choice. It might be more fun for you to fiddle about with the
various colour schemes available than to actually play this game.
















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