Previous Next

Find the Eixir of Youth somewhere in a strange Stone Age world which includes burger bars and yachts. Various prehistoric creatures have already drunk this elixir, which explains the evolutionary problem of why they're around at the same time as man. These creatures will have to be tackled to gain the potion.

To succeed as a new adventure company must be hard, and Crusader are to be congratulated on the quality of their packaging: a double cassette size box, and a colour dinosaur poster. Their clue sheet is very well devised. Neither have they taken the easy route by using The Quill; instead, they've developed their own machine code adventure system.

However, I fail to see what the advantage of doing this way. It was not to enable advanced compression techniques: the game is text only, but there isn't a remarkable amount of be read. Input has to be two words only, which in unacceptable in this age of Level 9 style parsers. Furthermore, few words can be abbreviated, which is poor programming.

One good point of the parser is that it tells you exactly what it doesn't understand; the first, second or both words or the particlar combination. But then the vocabulary is so small that this happens annoyingly often. There's no EXAMINE. Also, I found the mixture between authentic pre-history and more modern developments made the game a mish-mash rather than "lighthearted".

All these faults would be criticised in a budget game. This is vastly overpriced at the standard maximum, £10. You can buy many better adventures for the same price or much less. Available by mail order only from: 18 Henley Wood Road, Earley, Reading, Berks RG6 2EE.