Adventure Diploma - Review

In some ways this could be quite a good game for a novice adventurer, if it weren't for a few shortcomings. For some reason the author (or the wizard on his behalf) insists that you find and deposit the treasures in a fixed order, and has gone to some trouble to ensure that you stick to that rule. For instance, some objects and exits don't appear until the time has come for you to collect the next treasure in order. (In terms of game logic, this is presumably the wizard's work, watching you and altering things as you go.)

The main problem, though, is that the author makes you travel very long distances between the places where you find necessary objects or carry out required actions. This is exacerbated by the fact that nearly every move involves a disk access (and so do many other actions) and as the emulator will be regarding this as a floppy disk, it really slows things down. (On Beebem you get the disk access noise as well, though you can turn that off.) On top of that, there is the fact that you have an inventory limit of 3 items, one of which must be a lamp (you can't drop this anywhere without dying). However, this is not so much a problem as you might think, as no item is ever required for more than one puzzle, so after they are used you can just discard them.

One further thing, which caused me to get stuck, is that there are some items which you need to wear to solve puzzles; later you must take them off, but the author has not provided a sensible verb such as REMOVE - you have to GET the item to stop wearing it.

On balance, not a bad game, but it could have been better with a little more care.

Parser/Vocabulary (Rating: 3/10)

The parser is a simple two-word one, as is pretty usual in games written in Basic. Only the first four letters of verbs, and three of nouns, are recognised. The vocabulary is adequate, apart from the absence of REMOVE (see main review) - but one near-bug is that two objects have the same first three letters, so that referring to one can give a confusing message about the other. Fortunately this is not a fatal bug, as you don't need to do anything directly to either of them.

Atmosphere (Rating: 4/10)

Generally I find that games where only objects mentioned separately from the location description can be manipulated lack atmosphere, but, despite the rather random construction of the various locations (there are too many unexplained one-way exits, leaving you to wonder why having left one location you can't return to it) the atmosphere is rather better than you might expect.

Cruelty (Rating: Polite)

This was a difficult one to decide; there are a good number of ways to die, some of which are hard to justify (eg in one place you can fall down a hole, despite the location description making no mention of it). Also, some puzzles will almost certainly require reference to the hints. These are available in-game, but only the answers are given when a number is typed in (I presume the questions were in the original documentation). If there was a rating in between Polite and Tough I might have used that.

Puzzles (Rating: 4/10)

The puzzles range from easy to rather hard. For example, finding the magic word used to deposit the treasure would be easy once you've found the right room (I failed to do so and hence was stuck until given help), but the clue to the fourth letter of the word is very obscure - fortunately you can use trial and error to get it right. Sometimes the exact combination of actions would be hard to find without hints (such as when late on you need to deal with an impassable wall).

Overall (Rating: 4/10)

Not a bad game, but there are some rough edges (a physical map would be quite hard to draw, and it often took rather too much work to see how to get from one location to another).