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| Adventure All-Time Greats | ||
| Published in the Apr 1992 YS76 issue | ||
Adventureland Axe Of Kolt Bored Of The Rings Colossal Adventure Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde Eureka Hampstead Lords Of Time Mordon's Quest Snowball Soho Sex Quest Subsunk The Fourth Protocol The Golden Baton The Hobbit The Pawn The Sorcerer Of Claymorgue Castle Tower Of Despair Valkyrie 17 Velnor's Lair | ||
Aching eyeballs ahoy! To find
the 15 greatest adventures
ever, I sorted through well over
1000 adventure articles and
reviews, taking note of what
adventure reviewers have said
over the last 10 years. Then
applying a bit of common
sense, a dash of chart-busting
adventures and a hint of my
own personal prefs, I came up
with the following...
1) The Hobbit Melbourne House What can one say about this game that hasn't already been said? One of the first Spectrum adventures to feature decent graphics, one of the first to feature intelligent characters, each seemingly with a life of their own. One of the first 'licensed' games, and a chart topper to boot, this was based closely on JRR Tolkien's novel of the same name. Bugs in the program were legendary and often filled whole adventure columns. Definitely one of my favourite games of all time, and if you combine that with the mentions it's received over the years, its inclusion at number 42 in the all time YS Speccy game top 100 list, and its impact on the adventure scene it deserves its number one spot. Justified and ancient! 2) Adventureland Scott Adams/Adventure International Say the word 'Chiggers' to any old-timer and Adventureland will spring into their minds. It was my introduction to adventuring. It had all the required fantasy ingredients: a magic axe, treasure, a magic carpet, an underground world, a bubbling larva lake and trees. The game that hooked thousands and thousands of adventurers. 3) Colossal Adventure Level 9 Truly colossal. This is the best re-working of the Crowther and Woods mainframe classic, and it helped put adventures on the map. There were hundreds of locations to visit, scores of problems to solve and simply reams of superlative text to read. How Level 9 managed to pack so much into 48k is beyond me. 4) Lords Of Time Level 9 A time travel adventure from the undisputed masters of quality games: Level 9. Strangely enough this was written by Sue Gazzard and not the usual Level 9 crew. A trip into a grandfather clock leads you to discover various time zones that can be journeyed to at will. Some of the best problems ever programmed pop up throughout the game. Well paced and superbly designed. 5) Tower of Despair Games Workshop Part one of this two part game was tremendously powerful. You could tell things were going to be quite serious when you came across an innkeeper lying amidst the wreckage of a bar room with a broken back. Demons, death, and mayhem were rife. Atmospheric location descriptions and a fully illustrated manual that complemented the text superbly. 6) Mordon's Quest Melbourne House A vastly underrated game that sort of snuck onto the adventure scene. Solid (redesigned 40 column) text, a ton of probs, a plot featuring seven lords of time, seven parts of a life controlling machine, a pygmy, man-eating plants and time travel. What more could one possibly want? 7) The Sorcerer Of Claymorgue Castle Scott Adams/Adventure International This one's Scott's 13th adventure and the parser was creaking a bit by this time, though his ability to come up with really unusual problems was still there. All you had to do was find 13 stars of power which were hidden somewhere in Claymorgue Castle by Vileroth, an evil wizard, who had stolen them from Solon, a good wizard. You play Beanwick and you have to retrieve the stars. Packed with devious problems and twists and turns. 8) The Fourth Protocol Electronic Pencil/Hutchinson Publishing Freddy Forsythe's acclaimed novel about counterespionage turned out to be a great adventure. The game was played using icons and a pointer to deploy spies, search documents, delve into confidential computer files and crack codes. Three missions to complete with quite a bit of strategy involved, but plenty of adventure in there too. 9) The Golden Baton Brian Howarth/Digital Fantasia Brian Howarth was a kind of British equivalent to Scott Adams. The Digital Fantasia label boasted loads of titles ranging from hack 'n' slash to time travel. The Golden Baton had everything going for it - decent problems, nice (if slow to draw) graphics, slugs and salt (if I remember correctly) and... er, a Golden Baton! 10) The Pawn Magnetic Scrolls/Rainbird Mike Gerrard said: "This is the first adventure that'll give Speccy owners a hint of what it's like to play an Infocom game." And he was right! It came complete with a novella and a rich heritage. Originally appearing on Sinclair's QL, it soon became legendary in the adventure field. Set in the land of Kerovnia it was a simple tale of sword and sorcery, myth and monsters. Masses of problems to solve, heaps of brilliant text: a masterpiece. 11) Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde The Essential Myth / Zenobi Software Undoubtedly you'll have heard the name of Jekyll and Hyde before, but have you played the game? All the famous elements were there, from creating a potion to transform the meek Dr Jekyll into the despicably sinister Mr Hyde, through to Hyde walking the foggy London streets in search of twisted pleasures... very atmospheric. (Still available from Zenobi Software on 3" disk, 128k tape and 48k tape versions) (Ahem. Plug, plug! Ed) 12) Velnor's Lair Quicksilva A pretty basic game (literally) that somehow managed to hook a hell of a lot of people. More wizards to battle, more fantasy objects to collect and use, more treasure to steal. You could use a bit of magic to help you in your quest which was to simply find and destroy the wizard Velnor. 13) Valkyrie 17 The Ram Jam Corporation/Palace Virgin Gold The Red kipper flies at midnight! The fourth Reich, Nazi 'sleepers', secret weapons, mysterious messages, taped conversations - all of those were to be found in Valkyrie 17. Pretty graphics accompanied the excellent text descriptions and messages. The game came complete with metal badge, multi-page dossier and ansaphone messages recorded on the tape too. Unusual and fulfilling. 14) Bored Of The Rings Fergus McNeill "The Jester" proved time and again that all you needed to do in order to sell a game was to take a popular myth, legend, novel or film and spoof it to high heaven. Et voila - instant fame and success. Bored poked good-natured fun at the epic The Lord Of The Rings, and became a deserved smash hit, catapulting Fergus's homegrown software house Delta 4 into the big time. The first Tolkien burlesque, and also the funniest and best. Subtle gags, belly laughs and a tricky game to boot. What more could you ask for? 15) Axe Of Kolt FSF Adventures A modern day classic 'sword and sorcery' epic. You play the part of an out of work musclebound mercenary who has to do all manner of heroic, and not so heroic deeds, to make ends meet. I've got a feeling that had 'Kolt' appeared around five or six years ago then the author, Larry Horsfield, would have been very famous indeed. Well, those were the goodies of yesteryear that appealed to me and many other adventurers. Other really splendiferous titles included: Robin of Sherwood (The Touchstones of Rhianon), Tir Na Nog, Mountains of Ket, Halls Of The Things, Retarded Creatures and Caverns, Agatha's Folly, Questprobe 1 (The Hulk), Espionage Island, Four Minutes to Midnight, etc, etc. Those were the goodies - here are five of the not-so-goodies. Feel free to cringe if you remember buying them. 1) Soho Sex Quest Possibly the most outrageous adventure of all time. The title says it all really. Er. Not that I ever played it of course. Ahem! (Blush!) 2) Hampstead Leever & Jones/Melbourne House I know this game was a massive hit, but what the hey! I'll fly in the face of fashion and say that this ten-quid, text only Quill'd effort was dire. The follow up, Terrormolinos, was quite good though. 3) Snowball Level 9 Despite having 7000 locations. They were largely made up of transpex tubes and elevators to and from levels of a five mile long spaceship! One of the only really not-so-hot titles by Level 9. It's true, even the very best slip up every now and then! 4) Eureka Domark £25.000 was up for grabs for the first person to solve this game. Crap graphics, crap gameplay. Crap atmosphere: combined with the hardest problems I've ever seen meant that whoever won the dosh bloomin' well earned it! 5) Subsunk Firebird A submarine sunk adventure with one main theme: escape! One of the first budget games from Firebird. This one must have sold thousands of copies. I think it was possibly the worst of all the games that were around at the time.
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