DONKEY ISLAND final release.
by
Ed Cleveland
37 Oakhill Road
Liverpool
Merseyside
L13 5UE
England
Hello once again graphic adventure fans!
Donkey Island is ...wait for it.. a graphic adventure for the
Atari STfm, STe, Falcon and probably TT too. It requires at least
1 meg of RAM to run, and will not work on monochrome monitors. If
you're running it on a Falcon start it from ST Low or Medium Rez
otherwise the desktop colours will be corrupted- don't blame me,
it's all Ataris' fault.
The plot of the game is that you are looking for the lost ST
adventure game "Donkey Island". This was the sequel to the classic
"Dog Island". "Donkey Island" appeared on BC and Ameoba computers
but not on the good old Arati ST. Your mission is to travel to the
software house that created these games and try and find out why
it never appeared. Then, if you can find it, you must try and get
a copy of "Donkey Island" back to your flat.
Or at least that was the original idea....
Due to a combination of the general moribund state of what's left
of the Atari scene and me getting bored with thinking up stupid
jokes for the game, Donkey Island was never finished. I stopped
work on it a few months ago. What this is then, is the shareware
demo of the finished game with a new title screen added on. It is
fully functioning, but this is all you're getting, so ignore any
references you may find to the "FULL GAME" whilst playing it- it's
never going to appear.
How to play:
You press the keypad and arrow keys and look at the screen of
course!
When you start the game you'll see a bloke with a big nose and
some glasses. This is Fred, who you will be controlling throughout
the game. Press the cursor keys to move Fred around. The control
system is very logical and you should get the hang of it quite
quickly. To pick up the book to the right of Fred, walk so you are
standing next to it and press Take ("1" on the keypad) to pick it
up. You are now holding it, and you should see a text description
of it in the inventory box at the botton right of the screen.
If you want to talk to someone, try and walk into them, this will
start a converstion. The yellow faces on screen represent
Positive, Negative and Questioning responses.
To combine objects, make sure the first object is selected then
press Combine, select another object and press combine again. If
you press Combine by mistake the first time, then pressing any
other key used in the game apart from "+" or "-" will cancel it.
You'll know when you've finished the game when Fred says "Now I
know where Egosoft is!". Note that most of the puzzles are
designed to be pretty easy, with two trickier ones at the end. It
was supposed to be an introduction, after all.
If you really want to know why I never finished it, it's because
I got fed up with the damn thing! There is after all, no point in
me slogging my guts out for no reward whatsoever. Also a graphic
adventure is not very interesting to program, if you're writing an
arcade game called "Leon The Magical Elf" for instance, when
you've programmed a new feature you can have fun playing the game,
but with Donkey Island, I know exactly what's going to happen at
every step, when I play it. As well as this, there is a ridiculous
amount of artwork to draw.
Mr. Pink of the Reservoir Gods says I'll be disappointing a lot of
people by not finishing Donkey Island, but as only 3 people wrote
to me expressing encouragement, I'm not going to lose too much
sleep over this.
So this game is now Downloadware. If you like it, then send me a
disk of downloads from the Internet. I'm particulary interested in
classic console/computer/coin-op emulation and retrogaming, don't
send me any Spectrum stuff as I've got loads of that already.
In return I will smile slightly.
Ed Cleveland, 25th September 1997
PS. Anybody got anything technical on NES emulation, by the way?