DESERT ISLAND DISKS

                 Submitted by Neil Shipman

Selecting three adventure games that I would like to have with me
if I was shipwrecked on a desert island was an almost impossible
task. Over the last 20 years I must have played hundreds, from
very simple home-produced text adventures with just a few
locations, objects and puzzles, to the latest multi-CD games from
the big software companies with seemingly endless places to visit,
all depicted in high quality graphics and accompanied by amazing
sound effects and a specially written orchestral score.

And out of all these I come right back to my roots as an
adventurer and place at the top of my list:

Trinity from Infocom.

Those of you who came to adventuring rather later than I did might
never have played a text adventure, let alone an Infocom game.
Well, suffice it to say that Infocom were masters of their art and
you don't know what you've missed. There are four reasons for
choosing this particular title:

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, it tells a story and
engages the player in a fantasy based on the real events
surrounding the development of the atomic bomb. Basically, you
have to escape the missiles raining down at the start of World War
III, dive through a doorway into an alternative world where magic
has a part to play - a bit like Alice Through The Looking Glass -
and where you must solve a number of very different scenarios in
order to turn back time to just before the bomb test at Trinity
site in the New Mexico desert. Only by doing this can you sabotage
the first explosion and alter humanity's future.

Secondly, you can be sure of having a lot of good puzzles to solve
in an Infocom game. Problem solving was the main thing that
attracted me to computer adventures in the first place and the
quantity and innovative quality of those in Trinity have been
enough to keep me going back to this title every few years. Also,
the text is beautifully written and the author, my favourite
Infocom writer, Brian Moriarty, is at his best, interweaving an
amazing fantasy with real historical events.

Thirdly, the original Infocoms all had splendid packaging. Trinity
came complete with, amongst other things, an Illustrated Story of
the Atom Bomb (which would be additional reading material to The
Bible, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and, the one book
which, presumably, castaways are allowed) and a cardboard sundial
which I could use to tell the time of day.

And finally, it was Trinity that introduced me to The Grue! This
character made a point of playing each Infocom game as soon as it
was released and could offer detailed help to wayward adventurers
at the other end of a phone line. I had been stuck for ages in
Trinity and, finally, I gave him a call. I can still remember how
my description of what I had done wrong set him off gurgling with
laughter and had the tears rolling down his cheeks. He didn't just
give me a pointer in the right direction - it was the start of a
friendship that has lasted to this day.

Second choice has to be a game from one of the early masters of
graphic adventures. I've chosen:

Day Of The Tentacle from LucasArts.

Most adventurers will have played at least one LucasArts game.
DOTT was the first one I played which had speech throughout and I
was amazed at just how much this added to the overall enjoyment.

DOTT is comedy adventure at its finest, done in cartoon-style
graphics with a wacky storyline, brilliant characterisations and
top- notch puzzles. Doctor Fred has created two tentacles - a
good, green one and an evil, but slow-witted, purple one. The
trouble begins when purple tentacle drinks some toxic waste, gains
strength, intelligence and arms, and embarks on its plan of world
domination.

You have to play three separate characters - Bernard, Hoagie and
Laverne - each of whom is stranded in a different time period
after an accident in a time-travelling Chron-O-John! Puzzles
include finding sources of power for each time machine and then
passing various useful items between the three of you. And the
time-line means that if you cut down a tree in the past then it
disappears from the environment in the present and future. Very
clever, and made even more so by the fact that some items won't
flush through the Chron-O-John and you have to find other ways of
transporting them 200 years forwards or backwards through time.

I remember the interface as being a delight to use, with icons for
objects and pictures of your colleagues, plus certain keywords for
a range of actions. LucasArts had refined this point and click
system from earlier non-icon games like Maniac Mansion, another
comedy adventure which is included on a computer within DOTT - so,
effectively, you get two games for the price of one.

But it's the precisely judged comedic aspect of DOTT which makes
it one of my Desert Island Disks. The predominantly visual humour
is hilarious, the storyline wonderfully ridiculous, the voice

characterisations perfect and the puzzles taxing enough to
entertain for quite a while.

After two adventures which I have fond memories of and would take
to play again, my third choice would be something I've just had a
brief look at in the past but not felt sufficiently interested in
to spend long on, hence it remains uncompleted - in fact, hardly
begun. This something is:

Lands Of Lore from Virgin/Westwood.

RPGs have never held much fascination for me, but I have been told
that LOL is a good one with which to start appreciating the genre.
Certainly the few hours I have spent on it lead me to that
conclusion and it feels about the right difficulty level for me.

You have to choose one of four champions of King Richard (voice
characterised by Patrick Stewart - which would make me reminisce
about Star Trek and give me another reason to take this game!) to
defeat the wicked hag Scotia and her Dark Army.

There are, apparently, lots of different landscapes through which
you must fight a variety of foes. The area covered by forests,
caverns, mines, swamps, castles and towns is enormous and your
assailants include animals, people and monsters. You can adjust
the difficulty level by making the monsters easy or difficult to
overcome and I'm sure that to begin with it will be the easiest of
the lot that I choose.

Graphics, animation, speech and music are all high quality and,
with what I understand from the reviews is a great storyline, I
think that LOL would complement my previous two choices very well
indeed.

You never know, by the time I'm rescued I may well be a fan of
RPGs after all!

@~Please send in your own entries for this section.

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