After a little break we’re back in the saddle, and heading off to Adventure Island.

Adventure Island is a public domain game written by J.B.Cattley and playtested by none other than Ms Millard! This is the second time Dorothy Millard has popped up in this blog and I know it won’t be the last.

As I always like to get a little context and backstory on authors, I tried to find out a little bit about J.B.Cattley. There is a reference in a juggling group back from 1998 – I am making a huge assumption this is the same person, but somebody who used to enjoy writing text adventures on their beloved 8-bit computer is absolutely the sort of person who would end up on a juggling group.

Actually there is also a reference in a rogue like developers group from the same year too so pretty sure this is our guy.

A bit of a digression but I had no idea Google Groups was still going strong – this Commodore one (of which I am a member and have no memory of ever joining) is still really active!

But, the best find of all was an article in Adventure Probe from December 1994, volume 8 issue 12.

I’ll put a link for you to download the PDF at the bottom of this post – I just love magazines/fanzines like these from those days. There was a fantastic global community formed around text adventure games and you really felt part of a scene. Just reading through this issue got me quite emotional!

The pertinent paragraph is written by, once again, Dorothy Millard – how I could go all these years without hearing her name before is beyond me. Anyway, here it is…

OK, on to the game itself.

You start off onboard the QE2 and are none too happy with how things have been going. This type of holiday is obviously not for you! Not to worry, it is but a matter of a few lines of text and you can say goodbye to this vacation as you are thrown overboard, where you have to swim to the eponymous Adventure Island.

Once you have slept off your ordeal you can have a look around and see if you can’t sort this situation out. It soon becomes obvious you’re in a very bad mood. Irritated by the beach, the cliffs, the boredom. Even the parser prompts are a bit snarky ‘Any more Brilliant Ideas?’ it asks you.

Going up and down the beach seems the only options open to you at the moment, but references to the cliffs to the north are obviously supposed to make you think – so experiment here with the objects you have found so far and one will help you on our way.

You will find yourself climbing cliffs, navigating gorges, slooshing through muddy bogs and feeding the local wildlife, before they start eating you! There is even, as Mr Cattley says in the description, a thicket to find, as every adventure game needs a thicket.

This is a fairly logical problem solver of a game, and you should be able to think your way through it apart from a couple of areas where help may be required. The map isn’t too big but you do need to open it up by utilising the things you find. Without that you won’t get very far. Almost everything you find strewn around the island has a use – there is one red herring but I’ll let you find that for yourself. Keeping tabs on the map is essential though as there is a good deal of doubling back.

If you get stuck, HELP brings up a list of verbs which are extremely useful – almost cheating – but without that I don’t see how you would guess the right words to use. The bridge problem in particular doesn’t make much sense to me, and it had to be done in a specific order.

There is actually a subtle clue in the opening text as to what you need to do at the end, and those cleverer than me will work that out. I had to use the help system again!

If you do make it to the end your ‘reward’ is to find yourself in a tourist hotel – your worse nightmare apparently!

Incidentally, Escape from Adventure Hotel mentioned at the end here, doesn’t appear to have ever been written – or at least I can’t find a reference to it anywhere.

The parser for Adventure Island is pretty basic and none too clever, but it’s ok and does the job well enough. It’s also fairly slow but again, acceptable.

I really enjoyed this adventure game, it had a really old school feel to it and I enjoyed it even more because it led me to the wonderful Adventure Probe magazines, which I am now going to read in their entirety! As promised, see the issue in question below. The map I did during my play through is also at the end of the post.

Thanks for reading, and until next time, keep safe out there adventurers!

Adventure in Time and Space is the first text adventure on my list that was written by Dorothy Millard. I’d come across Dorothy’s name before, but I had never really looked into her or her backstory, so let’s start with that before we get onto the game itself.

Dorothy wrote 16 games in all, according to an interview from 1999 I read over at the Solution Archive site, plus a few she ‘fixed up’ for other people. She lived in Australia for many years but was born in England and, like me, started her love of computers with the Commodore 64. Early games were written in BASIC but she also wrote quite a few using The Quill, a system most of you will be familiar with, and one I am really trying to get to get grips with of late.

Alas, Dorothy’s website appears to be no more, but thankfully there are several early captures on the Wayback Machine, including all of her hand-typed solutions for many, many different adventure games! I am in the process of downloading all of those solutions to help preserve them – another backup can’t hurt!

If you want to read the whole interview you can do so here, but let’s turn our attention to the game itself.

The game, written in 1989, is in 2 parts of several sections each. It takes us to many different places, such as a deserted space station, medieval England, up into the Alps, a far-off planet, and the London suburbs, in our search for the golden key which has been stolen by ‘the evil time warrior’. We are told that in order to find the golden key we must first find the other 6 coloured keys.

We are called The Professor, and the game is about traveling through time and space in our time machine. So yeah, it’s unashamedly Doctor Who 🙂

The game starts in the laboratory and we are already introduced to the professor’s time machine, although we can’t get in it yet. Have a good look around and examine everything here, but it soon becomes fairly obvious we need to leave here and go look outside. Like a lot of text adventures, you have the illusion of choice but really there is nowhere else to go but North to the car park and (I assume) the professor’s nice red car.

Again, examining is key, and once you’ve looked and picked up anything you find, you will make your way down the road, in the car, to a house.

This is a very good text adventure and really showcases, I think, the power of The Quill as an authoring solution. The Quill itself is quite tricky to get to grips with – something I am working on solving currently and I hope to release something into the wild soon!

It’s also very big – too big for me to go through each section and area, and too big really for a map – I did sketch one on paper as I played it through and will, one day, create that properly and include it here. Instead I need to try and review these text adventures in a new format otherwise I will never get through them all – some background info, a few screen shots, a bit of context etc. followed by a magazine style review.

One thing I do want to start including is my other passion, music. I’ll start including what I would be playing in the background in the month and/or year of release.

Thanks for reading, and feedback is welcome on the new format. I suspect it will keep getting tweaked as we go along – there are a LOT of adventures to get through.

Adventure In Time & Space: A large, complex text adventure. This one will take you a while to complete and really get you thinking. It’s an impressive title, and one that showcases The Quill to its full potential. A map is essential but it does get very complicated, especially with the time and location hopping.

Cavern of Riches was one of four adventures on the Adventure Pak release from Keypunch Software. Keypunch was one of the first shareware distributors and ran from 1985 to 1993, also releasing commercial games during that time. They did other ‘Paks’ (Fantasy Pak, Challenger Pack, etc) and yes, sometimes they were ‘Paks’ and sometimes they were ‘Packs’! 

Cavern of Riches started life as a PET game in 1980 written by John O’Hare.

I guess this should come under ‘C’ really, but it is listed as Adventure 1 – Cavern of Riches in the GB64 catalogue, which was its original title on the PET I believe, so comes under ‘A’ in my self-imposed rules. The others, I think, are listed properly under their titles so I will come to them at some stage down the line.

So Cavern of Riches starts off on a dusty path in a clearing and tells us you can see an ‘old cabin’. The aim of the adventure is to find 12 treasures, all with a ‘*’ in their name so we know they are treasures, of course (such as *trident*). We know little else at this stage, but we do know there is a cabin so it seems logical we should go inside and take a look around.

Here we learn that this cabin is where we are to deposit our treasures once we have found them, and there are a couple of useful objects here for us to pick up too.

On leaving the cabin and wandering around you’ll quickly come to a typical dungeon-like maze in a Forest – one of the ones where it matters very little which direction you moved in. You basically don’t move, unless you go in the correct direction that is. These sorts of mazes drove me mad as a kid trying to map them out, as you’re never quite sure if you’ve moved or stood still!

From here on in full spoiler alert. 

Once you find the first and easiest treasure, the Trident, you’ll enter this maze-like Forest and as long as you stick to going West you’ll end up where you need to be. At the end of the road is a building containing several items, one of which is an empty bottle to be filled with something no doubt. This is the first simple puzzle and it should be clear by now where some water is to fill our bottle up.

Once that’s done follow the road back to our ‘old building’ where you can find the trapdoor and enter the underground cavern. Now we’re talking! This is already the best text adventure by far I have played from the list, it’s fun, and I already have a true sense of the buildings and the forest with really quite minimal descriptions. That’s the skill of the adventure writer, I guess, and a good lesson to learn.

One thing to remember is you can only carry so much stuff, so tactical dropping and taking of objects is required.

Exploring underground and picking up treasures as you find them, you’ll come to a Deep Chasm where seemingly you can not proceed. But have wand will travel! Once you find your way over the chasm there is more magic to learn. Words that when said out loud will reveal treasures! Where you say these words is not clear at all, so you’ll need to experiment. 

After some more exploring it becomes obvious what the water is for, and the bird you have been mysteriously carrying around too! Both are used to open up more areas of the underground caverns where more treasures can be found. You’ll eventually find a harp and harps are made to be played, so like the magic words, experiment on where to play the harp. If you find the right place you’ll come across another treasure, the plaque, which also contains a cryptic clue so make sure you read it.

There is a lot of exploring and a map is essential here – see below for my full map! I make this sound like a quick and easy game, but I have deliberately left out a lot of detail as I do recommend you play this through, and you’ll enjoy working out the exact order to do things and the rooms to say the magic words in. On that note, you’ll find soon enough that you are stuffed so full of treasure that you’ll need to dump some off back at base. Thankfully, one of the magic words we discovered transports us straight there from a certain location and transports us back again when ready. A nice touch.

Depending on what order you locate the treasures you’ll need to zoom back and forth between the underground cavern and the old cabin. There is no location-based score here, you just earn points for each treasure dropped back in the right place, so it’s very possible to score the maximum 120 points to beat the game. So once you drop the final treasure just say ‘score’ and you’ll be congratulated and classed as an expert no less.

I really enjoyed Cavern of Riches and it totally reminded me of playing these games when I was younger. Armed with snacks, fizzy pop, paper and a pencil to draw the map, this was a true, old-school 80s text adventure. Change the fizzy pop to a bottle of wine and the pencil and paper to an online map creation tool, and nothing much else has changed. 

The puzzles are all logical and solvable, nothing is a red herring so if you come across an object you will have to use it somewhere and it is nearly always obvious where that is, or what you need to find. What is less obvious is where you say the magic words. That, as far as I can tell, is only apparent through trial and error. I wouldn’t say that was a frustration as such, but it did increase the time it took me to complete the game. As mentioned above, the world we explore is created wonderfully, with very little wasted text. I think the length of the game helps to conjure up the universe we play in – quick and small games don’t really give the player time to immerse themselves into the story, but Cavern shows that minimal text and saving that precious memory for the story really works. It’s a balancing act.

I got the file from GB64 and the full database ISO images, but it is available elsewhere too. Be warned that some C64 versions have a scoring bug, but mine did not, so if you can do use the one on GB64.

I’m looking forward to playing the rest of this Adventure Pak now but have to say, the bar has been set pretty high with Cavern of Riches.

Another competition game and another short one, packed into 4k of code. This adventure was submitted to Reset 64 Magazine’s ‘Craptastic’ 4kb Game Competition in 2018 (where it achieved 18th place overall) but it was written earlier, although never completed, for a competition run by the late Paul Panks over on Lemon64. Endurion finished the game almost a decade later and dedicated it to Paul.

This is not the first adventure I have played that starts off in a pitch-black room with no obvious exits or objects. However, it might be the first where I can’t move in any direction or see anything that might help. I am truly stuck in a dark room surrounded by walls.

Anyway, eventually, I pass the first test and I have light!

Now I get very confused and am at a loss for a little while until I try a few things, but at last, I pass the second test and can actually move to another location. In fact, I move into a labyrinth of corridors, some with sockets, one with a code lock, and it is here a map comes in very handy as it is easy to get lost.

A bit of trial and error and several moves and I pass the third test and escape the room!

Endurion has managed to create a real sense of achievement in a very small game and you need to work out what to do with very little information. I have to say this one, so far, has been the most fun and I felt I earned my escape.

As I say, a map is vital…

A fun game, limited in ways that having to keep it to 4k would do, but the parser is actually fine and while room descriptions are kept to a minimum that just adds to the sense of mystery. 

You can find and play the game here.

According to CSDb, Endurion has released a load of games and graphics utilities between 2007 and 2020, some of which look like text adventures, so more Endurion to come I think. Incidentally, Paul Panks appears to have been pretty prolific too, and there are a lot of games credited to him in the database, so it will be interesting to play these as and when they make the list.

What’s next I hear you ask? Well, the next two games are unpublished but are included in the GB64 database, so I’ll play through them both. The first will be The 64-Scene-Adventure, and that will be followed by AAS Masters. Yes, people, we’re into the A’s !

First of all, you’ll notice this isn’t 1990 by SpectreSoft – the game simply can not be found and it is highly likely it was never released. So we move on…

Here we have another short game written in the Inform 6 system by Admiral Jota in 2001. This time it was submitted to the Speed-IF 17 competition. I’m playing release 1 of the game. In fact, Admiral Jotter organised Speed-IF 17!

The premise for Speed-IF 17: Your game will be set on one or several floors of a thirty-story building in Manhattan. At the beginning of the game, it’s ten in the evening on December 31, 2002. On every floor, the New Year’s bash is going on — the people in their high-rise apartments, the rented-out function halls, even the office workers stuck here late. Fireworks are scheduled to begin over the water promptly at midnight. Unfortunately, the building will be taken over by terrorists at eleven-thirty — they’ve infiltrated the maintenance staff and have been surreptitiously placing bombs in various locations throughout the building during the past few months, all set to go off at different times later that evening if their demands aren’t met.

So, the title 2604 refers to an apartment number here, not, as I thought initially, a year! We are told right at the beginning that we are to meet up with a Mr Reginald Halvers at a New Year’s Eve party where we hope to provide him with a prototype microchip worth a lot of money on the black market.

Off we go then. We start in the 26th floor lobby and can immediately see signs pointing the way to various room numbers. We already know (or at least it should be obvious) that we need room 2604, so now we know we need to go East from here. Nothing too tricky so far! But probably best to see what we’re carrying and check this microchip out.

Ah! So after inspecting the papers it seems we are playing as Reginald Halvers – that wasn’t too clear at the start. Better check the envelope out.

The game leads us to room 2604 quite quickly, and it is here we see people milling around, drinking, enjoying food, all the stuff you’d expect at a party. There is a lot in the descriptions of these rooms set as pure backdrop, and most are red herrings – so be careful not to spend too much time looking at stuff that isn’t required. You may not know what is relevant, of course, on your first play.

Our target is soon found and the envelope can be handed over and your payment collected. Job done, and our score is increased by one whole point!

Well, job not quite done of course. The usual exploration and logic solving is required now in order to escape the hotel with our prize, and it isn’t easy. Everything you need to escape is provided, and you will need to examine a few more things on your way out of 2604 and back again, but it took me quite a few play-throughs to do it in 39 moves and score my very healthy 2 points!

Time is of the essence here, and if you spend too long looking at things you don’t need to look at, or doing things in the wrong order which requires you to travel back and forth along the corridor, time (moves) will run out and you will lose the game. Oh, and you’ll die.

All in all 2604 was a fun game – much more of a puzzle than previous games, and much nicer to play for many reasons. The parser is typical Inform 6 and the atmosphere and gameplay are certainly entertaining.

Map here, behind a spoiler as it gives quite a bit away.

Spoiler

Given the game was speed coded in 2 hours, and there was a scenario that had to be followed, I think this shows that Admiral Jota has an adventurer’s brain!

It’s not clear if the Admiral himself ported 2604 to the Commodore 64, but he has done several more adventure games (see the link in the opening paragraph) and I am hoping some of them at least made it across, so this may well not be the last we see of him on this blog. And going by the quality of this short adventure, I hope our paths meet again.

2604 is included in the GB64 database v 18.