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Adventurers all over the country still play Colossal Adventure in one of its many versions, so it's surprising that no-one has ever come up with the idea of doing some kind of follow-up...

Well, now someone has. The gent what programmed Classic Adventure (Melbourne House's version of the aforementioned game) has now come up with Mordon's Quest, an "extremely complex text adventure". The plot is something of a blend between Level 9's Lords Of Time and Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings. Some frightfully superior beings have made a muck-up of things (superior beings always seem to do this, don't they?) and. having created a fabulous but rather ill-defined 'machine', have lost control of it to an unprincipled colleague. In other words, the goodies are in trouble and you must sally forth and grab the various parts of this 'machine', thereby setting the universe to rights and getting your money's worth from Melbourne House.

Talking of getting your money's worth, I had a good laugh over the beginning of this game. When old Mordon rose out of the floorboards and asked whether I would undertake the vital task, the I rascally answered no. Since this threatened to end the game there and then, the following message flashed up on the screen: "We would like to point out that, hopefully, you have paid good money for this adventure, and we suggest you start again and co-operate with Mordon."

I haven't laughed so much for ages. Having said that, though, there wasn't all that much to laugh about in the rest of the game. However, Mordon's Quest isn't too bad... it's text-only but the location descriptions are pretty meaty. There are one or two quite tricky puzzles in it, and the program plays quite a clever trick on you right at the beginning by dumping you in a maze from which there appears to be no exit. Well, the fact is that there *is* no exit! Not, that is, until you make use of a certain object.

But, whatever the good points about the descriptions, it has to be said that this game isn't exactly state of the art when it comes to programming. You can't enter much more than the old verb-noun inputs, and the program is a bit annoying in that it doesn't properly monitor your entries - for example, typing "Examine Qwerty" gets the reply "You see nothing special" - but I reckon that if I saw a Qwerty I'd think it was quite extraordinary. Ah well...

Mordon's Quest does however have a goodly number of locations and will keep most adventurers, especially beginners, busy for a long time. I don't however think it should be compared with the original Classic Adventure - the design of the game isn't nearly so atmospheric, and the puzzles not so original... but then you can't get much more original than the original, can you?