ADVENTURELAND
(Adventure International, 1984)
Where better to start this A To Z Of (Mis)Adventure than with a game whose title and publisher couldn’t sound more adventurous if they tried? Scott Adams, as well as creating Dilbert and sounding like a Star Trek captain, wrote a large number of adventures when they were a rare thing, then asked Brian Howarth of Digital Fantasia to convert them en masse to the Spectrum. As such they all have a distinctive look, feel and smell, with the same font, colourful graphics and parser (for better or worse). This was the first, let’s see how many adventuring tropes it may have spawned…
The cover promises dragons, specifically a big one somewhat unnecessarily holding an axe and a murderous looking baby one who looks like Beavis. The back of the box goes to extreme lengths to impress on you that adventure games are not actually Space Invaders or Pac-Man, so you can stop all that childish nonsense right now! This is for grown-ups who like nothing better than solving fiendish puzzles and swearing impotently at the screen when they repeatedly fail to solve fiendish puzzles. And if you don’t like that sort of thing, you’d better leave this room right this minute, young man! Anyway, the plot is straightforward – wander round a magical land (i.e. we can throw anything we like in it and it can simply be explained by the word ‘magic’) and collect treasures, 13 in total unluckily. Simple bimples.
At first this game seemed quite hard, mainly because there were no location descriptions, just quite attractive pictures. Maybe this was how adventuring was done in the early days… It did make things tricky though, especially if there isn’t that much in the picture, and with no available directions to boot. But then at length realisation dawned. By pressing ENTER you can toggle between EITHER pictures OR text. Suddenly all was clear, and many more options opened up. I actually think this is a great way to do things as well - check out the pretty pics first off, then go round familiar locations via the text option, and flick back to graphics to view anywhere new you find. This means you don’t end up with half a screen of graphics as the text rolls up from the bottom constantly, and you can get around quicker as well, although the pictures do generate immediately even so. So first impressions are very good actually, top marks to the Adams/Howarth combo there. Location descriptions are fairly brief and to the point, which again is no bad thing and helps to simplify matters.
And now a list of small victories I achieved early on. This is spoiler-heavy by the way, so maybe don’t read this paragraph at all just to be on the safe side… I managed to garner 5 or 6 treasures without cheating yet. I followed a spider’s advice and chopped down its tree (strange but true). I managed to prevent getting eaten by chiggers (yes, chiggers, not Cheggers) by covering myself in mud regularly, and you should see my skin now, it’s beautiful! So I at least made a dent in the game early doors, which doesn't always happen.
Conversely here are the bits which foxed me. This isn’t spoilery really because I’m not going to give the corresponding solutions. ‘Cos I don’t know them. There’s a dragon which apparently can be woken in 3 different ways, but all it’s ever done is kill me when I’m carrying some smelly slime. There’s a statue in a pond which I can’t pick up as it’s too heavy, even when I’ve dropped the rest of my inventory. And there's a bit where I really want to blow up a brick wall as otherwise my lamp runs out of fuel and I'm stuck melting in a not-so-larvly lava-ey underground cavern.
Before I resort to cheating and finding a walkthrough, or a backwards Derek Brewster type hint or two, how much of the game was I able to explore up to this point? As I can’t abide adventures which eff you up right from the word go, are you listening Rigel’s Revenge??!! Erm, actually I think I managed to find around 20 or so locations on my travels which isn’t bad, so the game is quite open from the get-go thankfully. It’s always nice to be able to wander around for a while, even if you aren’t accomplishing anything useful. There’s an occasionally helpful HELP facility too, always a bonus.
Okay, now I’m stuck, walkthrough time! Scott Adams himself helpfully put together a helpful document using numbers to assist stuck gamers, almost as though he knew his game was impossible otherwise. As a kind of apology I suppose. Nah, let’s not be misanthropic, it’s reet handy if a bit of a chore in itself to form a complete sentence from the numbers. I figured out how to blow up a wall and how to upset a bear, but still couldn’t get my heavy statue out of the pond even so. Ah well, that’s adventuring in Adventureland for you, no-one said it would be easy.
And now some random things that amused me. The game starts by advising you “I will be your puppet in this SAGA” (weird). And also “I’ve worked over a year on this program so please don’t copy or accept a pirate copy” (nice try Brian, it’s not gonna work). Then “a voice boooooms out: Welcome to Adventure No. 1: Adventureland” (watch the fourth wall get smashed to bits before your very eyes). Sometimes you’ll get “I must be stupid but I just don’t understand what you mean” which is terribly polite of it. Finally, when trying to traverse an underground maze, if you take a wrong turn you end up in the memory chip of a computer, complete with a picture of it of course. Ouch, my poor brain.
A quick "What The Papers Said" section seems appropriate, it's always a larf. Crash, in the guise of the perma-anoraked Brewster, quite liked it, awarding it 7 scrolls out of 10, but disliked its simplicity and thought the graphics were "nothing special". Aye aye Brewster, I've played Kentilla and... well... Onto Unclear Confuser and they liked it more, giving it 4 of their stars "even if its style and storyline are now a bit dated." Try playing it in 2024, mate! Finally, the oft browsed but rarely bought Computer & Video Games gave it the full brown nose treatment, with an imbecilic 10/10, probably because the reviewer claimed Scott Adams himself bought a copy of the game for him at the PCW show. Nothing like unbiased commentary is there?
So what do I reckon was good and bad in Adventureland? Good points include the attractive set-up of the screen with its readily on/offable graphics, which themselves are colourful and generally good quality for an old game. It’s enjoyable to play and you can make some reasonable progress even if you are as bad at adventures as me. And the HELP command does sometimes prove helpful, which as mentioned previously hardly ever happens in any game.
As for bad points, it’s an adventure, so vocabulary. However here vocab issues are not too frequent, although at one point you really do have to YELL, and yet are not allowed to SHOUT. That one’s a bit sloppy, but overall the verbal range ain’t bad for such an ancient and venerable quest. Obviously I didn’t complete it, but I’d imagine a more seasoned adventurer would lap this one up. Now if you don't mind, I have to go to the bathroom and remove these pesky chiggers before they suck the lifeblood out of me.
VERDICT: 8 out of 10 CHIGGERS
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