Another adventure to satisfy the wanderlust before February is over, just about. We’re still firmly in the ‘A’s and this month’s adventure has no name. Or at least, it is called Adventure Without A Name. Not to be confused, confusingly, with Adventure With No Name, which was a TRS80/BBC type-in adventure by the same author, A.Summer. This is a C64 conversion of that game enhanced by the legend, Dorothy Millard.
Although originally a type in, this game was published by The Guild, a homegrown software label set up by Tony Collins, himself an adventure game author in 1991, who ran the label until the autumn of 1993. As well as self published games, and those from other authors, The Guild built up a large public domain collection, and this game was one of those. We’ll likely come across quite a few of The Guild’s titles during our adventures.
Originating as a type-in this game is obviously written in BASIC and is a pretty small, text only adventure.
So, our buccaneering reputation preceding us, we have been chosen to recover some gold for some prince or other from a dangerous, fierce dragon. The prince needs this gold to fight an evil king, apparently.
We start, as we so often do, at the entrance to a cave.
There is nowhere really to go except into the cave, so we do that. We find ourselves in a passage leading south. Being small, we can’t expect too much from the parser, and although a door is mentioned there is nothing that can be done with it. Even LOOK DOOR tells us nothing. I guess we ignore that for now then.
There is a boat at the bottom of this passage which we can miraculously pick up and carry, but without giving too much away, it is of little use yet.
This is very standard adventuring stuff – with the help of pencil and notepad to map out moves we soon find our way around to the door we saw at the entrance to the cave, picking up the obvious things we come across along the way. The parser, as mentioned above, is very limited – the usual commands don’t work and the game uses LOOK instead of EXAMINE which always jars me, but it is just about usable. It can be frustrating though, especially as it recognises TOSS but not THROW, for example.
So, back to find the dragon (if you found the dragon too soon you’ll realise now the power of the sword!) and the gold. A fairly simple puzzle presents itself to escape back down to the boat storage area and to a more useful boat, before we can get to the prince and give him the gold.
No. No, I don’t want another go.
A quick adventure (15 mins max?) and with the aid of a mapping tool or good old pencil and paper it is extremely easy to solve, the poor parser aside. I would have been happy enough with this as a type-in but if I’d spent any money on this it would be very disappointing. Having said that, I have played worse games 😂
Next time we’ll be playing Adventureland from 1980, released by Adventure International (Thunder Mountain in the USA). Actually, we’ll play the 1984 graphic version of the game.
Until then, try not to get hoisted on your own, or anybody else’s, petard.