Peter Gerrard, the author, starts out by defining adventures and how they started, then delves into the background of the original Crowther and Woods' Colossal Cave, and Scott Adams, the self crowned king of the genre. Further details follow about the settings of various types of adventure, then on to the business of writing them yourself using Locomotive BASIC. This well-written section appears to assume no prior knowledge, but explains carefully how to program the various input checking routines, the string slicing, and the setting up of the data statements which will hold the meat of the setting. At the same time, the development of your adventure concept is discussed, and the idea of design using a map is introduced, together with some nifty info on constructing mazes — no wonder I'm hopeless at finding my way! Following this are the listings and maps for three adventures using the structure taught, together with a blow by blow account of how they work. Finally, the listings are shown complete if you want to bash them in all in one go. These are the three adventures on the tape which is available separately from the publishers... and they ain't easy, even if you can have a sneaky look at the map! Peter has some interesting things to say about graphics in adventures, and I tend to agree with him. Text is best... provided that it's well written. Perhaps the most impressive thing about the tape is the speed of Locomotive BASIC; it really does go like a train! D.M. , Home Computing Weekly
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