Believe it or not, this game is based on THAT famous mainframe original. To the author ' s credit, this game has a third more locations, a completely new 30 location introduction, and is 100% machine code with over 50% compression of the memory used up to house the text (whew!). Further, the vocabulary is developed enough to take on board the sophisticated GET ALL and DROP ALL commands, and location descriptions can be FULL or BRIEF. All the major problems have been reworked, and a great many of the old locations have improved and expanded text. Add to this a new 'end game' and you in to wonder why the game didn't cut any remaining links and call itself by a totally new name!

It is Summer. You are a lowly farmhand on ditch-digging duty while everyone else is gathering the harvest. Suddenly you uncover a buried casket. Inside you find some keys, a map and the mildewy remains of a book. It is the journal of an uncelebrated, but clearly successful explorer.

Apart from the opening, much of this adventure is the same as Colossal. I've left the best of this adventure to last. What makes any adventure special is the amount of real effort put into making the gameplay more interesting, and in this adventure much thought has been brought to bear on old adventuring ways. Most interesting is the way in which the game has tackled the much-maligned problem of object carrying. Clothes may be REMOVED or WORN, objects are weighted (eg a nugget counts as two weights), and to add a degree of realism, pockets have been added to the clothes whereby PUT KEYS sees the keys, or any other pocket-sized item, safely in your pocket. I must admit I couldn't work out how to get the keys back out of the pocket without dropping them - a most inelegant solution, but no doubt this is only a minor omission from the instructions. Other refinements include a GET ALL which doesn't work in the dark, FULL and BRIEF location descriptions, full versions creating a new location as this is a feature to get the adventurer quickly used to the terrain, and five instant RAM SAVES, which come in very useful.

Adventure is the most unoriginal name of the whole bunch, and on the face of it another version of Colossal is the last thing we want. Adventure Software, 21 Ditchling Rise, Brighton BN1 4BO.

Difficulty: playable
Graphics: none at all
Presentation: very readable redesigned character set, and that's about it
Input facility: verb/noun
Response: fast