Yes! Another one from Yorkshire's foremost...!
From Little Acorns...
By Simon Brown
(C) Budgie UK Licenseware 1990
The Story of the Game
A day like any other in the next dimension; a couple of dwarfish
louts digging up the road just outside your hovel, Neighbours
with a cast of aboriginal pixies into it's seven thousanth
episode on the old tri-D, and your best mate and utter imbecile
Alvin about to turn up for your traditional weekend drinking,
fighting, falling over and being violently sick at the Goblin and
Snotrag down the road.
A sigh, Alvin is late. This brings a warm glow of happiness to
your otherwise unlovely face. How and why Alvin got to be your
best mate is a matter for long and delicate deliberation,
probably while banging your head violently against a brick wall.
Even the best thing his mother could find to say about him was,
"Well, at least he doesn't take drugs... a lot...". Most people
prefer a shorter and considerably more colourful description.
It's not that Alvin is boring, offensive, ugly, clumsy, and a
terrible dancer... Actually, that is the problem. Alvin truly is
boring, offensive, ugly etc. Not like you. Not at all.
Alvin arrives. A new cardigan, Alvin? Possibly from that fine
pervayor of fashion clothing, Marks and Spencers? Not for the
first time you wonder why you bother. Still, he is your best
mate, and after a few glasses (sorry - tankards) of lukewarm beer
you could almost like the guy.
You set off through the fairyland countryside, Alvin sucking
hopelessly at an overly-large and probably illegal pipe, emitting
ghastly clouds of blue smoke that causes birds to fly into trees
and squirrels to titter foolishly at each other.
It's a fine day, though, the sun warm in the sky, the wind
gently ruffling your sandy brown hair. Bunnies cavort in the
meadows all around, tiny wee elves sunning themselves next to
their mushroom homes. The place is highly nauseating, in fact,
enough to make a grown man weep and reach for his shotgun. That's
life in the next dimension... crocks of gold, quests for
treasure, dwarfs, swords, mystical twisting tunnels, plenty of
beer, naturally, the whole works. Alvin rides a clapped out A-reg
scooter called Bonnie (after Langford) which is quite odd. you
watch Neighbours on a three-dimensional visual display unit,
which could also be thought of as odd, given the abundance of
dwarves and singing about gold. Still, continuity was never a
requisite for these fantasy lands of danger and adventurer. Oh,
by the way, that's what you and Alvin do for a living.
Professional adventurer. Text only Infocom adventures a
speciality. Degrading, isn't it?
As always, you and Alvin arrive at the Goblin and Snotrag at
opening and are standing on the dirty front step when the
landlady opens it. She is new here, and is obviously impressed by
your adventurer's attire, all black leather and concealed handy
keys.
"Are you boys the police?" she gasps.
"No mam," replies Alvin, "we're adventurers."
The Blues Brothers was on tri-D only last week, you recall.
Kicking Alvin out of the way, you stride into the cool depths of
the tavern. Cut out of a small grassy hillock, the Goblin and
Snotrag is a high-class establishment. If someone beat the living
shit out of you and nicked your wallet here, you knew they'd do
it with taste and discretion. And leave you enough for your taxi
fare home, natrellement. As the French say.
You seat yourself on a stool and Alvin arrives bearing drinks.
"Your very good health, my fine friend," you completely and
utterly fail to say. Instead, you down the drink, belch loudly,
and turn to stare pointedly in the other direction.
"You know what..." ventures Alvin.
You ignore him and contemplate murder.
"I've heard there's a new quest going around. Loads of money.
Goverment work. Narmean?" he continues unperterbed.
Strangely, you have heard exactly the same thing. A whisper on
the grapevine, adventurer's underground, that sort of thing. From
what you can gather, the country's on it's knees, figuratively,
like. No money, economy ruined from concentrating on enchanted
swords rather than nickel plated grommits, that sort of thing.
Basically, with inflation at 26 percent and unemployment in
everyone but goblin eviction servers at an all time high, the
place has gone to hell in an overly-laden shit cart. And not
before time. You'd been predicting the downfall of the
government and the takeover by the elves, dwarfs and pixies
revolutionary communist party for years. You felt rather pleased
to be right, even if the probable outcome is having your throat
slit by a three foot high anarchist.
"Anyway, right, the job right, you know, of returning the
country to sanity and a decent economic footing, well, right,
we've got it."
You turn to stare at the idiot in amazement.
"What did you say?" you splutter.
"Well, I heard it would be well easy right," Alvin tells you,
"so I went to see a mate, and he took me to meet the chancellor.
Of the whole damned country! I explained our credentials and
previous successes in questing. We got the job straight away!
Loads of money in it for us. Easy as nothing. Just gotta collect
a whole load of valuable loot, gold, silver, gems, the usual crap,
and take it to the chancellor. Nothing to it."
Could this be the big one? After all this time? The quest for
the lost grapefruit of Scarborough was your biggest sucess to
date (and it had gone off). This could put you on a sound financial
basis for life!
"How? When?" you manage to say.
"Oh around now," says Alvin at his most casually vague, "Just
like, collect up a few treasures and that, and wander east a bit
to find the chancellor. Next weekend's free for me, what do you
reckon?"
Now load the game and complete the quest, you lucky thing you.
How to Play
Simplicity itself. All done with the mouse, but for a few text
inputs where the game will prompt you. The screen is divided into
a few boxes: top left is a tiny number which is your score, top
right another tiny number tells you how many goes you've had. A
big box displays currant location pictures; this changes very
infrequently and has to load new pictures from disk. Under this
is all the text - descriptions, replies, inputs, everything. On
the right, at the top are little pretty icons which allow you to
move north, east, west etc. by clicking on them. Under this is a
scrolling list of commands available, which can be scrolled up
and down by clicking on the two icons next to them with up and
down arrows on them.
The mouse pointer can be two things: an open hand or a pointing
one. The POINTING hand means the game is eager and waiting for
your cunning fingers to enter a new command, ie click on a
direction icon or a command from the scrolling menu. The OPEN
hand means it is patiently waiting for you to press a mouse
button and scroll up more text for you to read.
To do something clever and exciting, like for instance TAKE a
BEER MUG: The text description will tell you that the beer mug is
present in the location you are in. Go now to the command list. If
the word TAKE cannot be seen, scroll upwards until it can (it is
at the top of the list). Click on the word and the display will
cleverly change to a graphical list of the objects in the location
you are in which can be TAKEN. Click on the beer mug icon. You
will now have hopefully taken it.
Other commands are very similar. Some things may evoke a rude
or sarcastic response from the game. ENTERING ALVIN is just one
of these. Some are just downright foolish, like EATING the BAR
TABLE. Just play around and experiment and you should get
the hang of things quite quickly.
That really is about it. Try and be very inquisitive and
have a good EXAMINE at everything. You shouldn't die very
often and the game will usually have a good go at you if you
try to do anything really silly but the general rule is: if
something seems like a good idea, then go ahead and do it.
All you can get is dead. A cheat mode is available. An
exclamation mark will do the job most times. Hope you enjoy
it.