Adventure Trail

IMAGINE...

When it comes to adventures, memory is the limiting factor but, if you think that if extra memory should become available it should be used in creating even more locations to visit, then you clearly haven’t played as many lifeless, unimaginative adventures as I have.

Graphics adventures have proven the more commercial yet too many are burdened by mediocre or downright useless pictures that add little to what would otherwise be another lacklustre text game. Graphics should not replace vivid, imaginative text.

Many text-only adventures concentrate on getting as many locations as possible into the 48K of the Spectrum and some even brag of such efforts as if this alone were any indication of the quality of a game. Inevitably, there results a loss in quality of location descriptions or even the problems themselves.

The microdrive seemed at first a good opportunity to provide the memory for both the imaginative text and good graphics. Strange that no one has produced a microdrive adventure and I know of none being developed. It is true that such an adventure would be more expensive but perhaps adventures, some of which are a bit pricey in any case, might accommodate the extra cost.

If and when the microdrive adventure does arrive I hope the extra room is used, not to double the length of the adventure, but to improve the vocabulary, descriptions, graphics and friendliness. Now let’s think, you might combine the graphic quality of The Hulk with the rich text of Level 9 — some adventure!