Here is an adventure book that is good value for money. It contains six major adventures systems, all of which can be expanded to become more difficult or to contain new and different scenarios.

The six systems are: "Preset Fantasy System", "Warrior Mage System", "Tribe System", "Preset Future System", "Fangmole Tunnels System" and "Anarchic System". There are also chapters inbetween describing the major aspects of adventure programming, such as how to structure your game, mapping for programmers and players, saving memory and adding graphics.

Each section is laid out in the same way. First, there is an overall introduction, describing the type of program, what it covers and how it can be expanded. Next comes the core program, which is the heart of the system. Here it is explained firstly how to play and then how the listing has been designed and built up, in a line-by-line code description. The playing instructins here are very full and well expressed, with a number of helpful diagrams also provided, much more than a lot of books contain. Also the line-by-line descriptions are fuller than usual and actually give quite a clear demonstration of how the structure of the game has been developed.

The listings are photographed directly from Spectrum printout, so they tend to be a bit uneven and blobby, which gets to be a bit of a strain after a time. I think the author's recommendation that you back up every twenty minutes when keying in is defintely a good idea!

Once you have keyed in the listing, there is a short section on "Hints on Play" which provides a few hints and tips in case you should get stuck. Then follow several parts, complete with listing, that you can use to expand and develop the adventure as you want.

This book is well worth recommending. It contains several adventures (which is rare in a book of this sort) and it is well thought out, giving a lot of help to the hapless programmer and plenty of useful information that should come in handy later over many hours of games writing. It is very good value for money and Spectrum freaks should definitely give it a try.