Fourmost Adventures is a four-game cassette with an adventure theme. The four adventures which make up the cassette have been chosen and recommended by Tony Bridge, the adventure writer for Popular Computing Weekly.

Microman was originally released as a single, and reviewed by Paul Coppins in November (70%), so it will not be separately reviewed here.

This is not a true adventure, more a role-playing dungeons and dragons type game, in which you must search for treasure in one of six available quests, gaining experience as you go.

The game reminded me of The Valley, which appeared in Computing Today back in 1982, as a Basic listing for the Commodore Pet, and was subsequently converted for a variety of other machines.

There are plenty of options in the game, ranging from which race of creature to be, to choosing weapons, spells and armour.

The display consists of a small figure (you) manipulated through a small graphics area showing your immediate vicinity. The idea, of course, is to allow you only to see that which would be visible to you in real life. The rest of the screen shows information about your current status.

To describe the game fully would take quite some time, as nearly every course of action is included. Indeed, a few hours could be spent just learning all the possible commands, and herein lies the game's main weakness - there are too many commands and no PAUSE facility. By the time you've figured out which command to use, you are usually dead!

This is a text only Quilled adventure. The objective is to erase some rather naughty graffiti written on a wall, and to this end you find yourself inside a cave, having been knocked out and placed there by two men wearing suspender belts!

I hadn't been playing for long before I realised just how much I was wasting my time. Considering the text is written in English, I had thought it quite reasonable to assume that my commands should be entered in English. Not so, the parser of this adventure is the worst I've ever seen.

To illustrate just how bad it is, I'll tell you about the newspaper. I wasn't allowed to pick it up, but I could read it, and thus discovered that it held a coupon. On typing READ COUPON the reply was "It's in the paper, stupid". Assuming that I had to remove the coupon before I could read it, I found the necessary items to do so. But what happened was even more surprising...! In response to my command to cut the coupon, I found myself deposited outside the location I had just entered!

This was not an isolated incident, either. Many times throughout the game my commands were misinterpreted completely, resulting in instant transportation to some other location, sudden death, or being told I couldn't move in a certain direction.

Finally, after every turn I was greeted with the prompt: "Any more great ideas?" At first this wonderful prompt was amusing, gradually being replaced with boredom, and eventually, pure irritation. All in all, a fine example of how not to write an adventure.

This was written by Fergus McNeill, who brought us Bored Of The Rings and Robin Of Sherlock.

Beginning in a spaceport, once you have found your space ship you can explore four different planets, each with its own set of puzzles to solve. On my last count, I'd discovered 80 different locations, ranging from the top of a 1,000 storey building to a mud hut in the middle of a jungle. I even managed to teleport myself to nowhere at all!

Galaxias makes good use of the Spectrum's capabilities, and the locations are well described. Definitely the best adventure of the four!

None of these adventures are special though, and some are very poor. According to Tony Bridge, who chose them, they are all fine examples of the Adventure Writer's "art". Sorry, Tony, but as a collection, I don't know how you dared to put your name to them!