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As readers will know, Adventuresoft have taken quite a hammering in this column recently. I'm afraid their latest release isn't going to do much to endear them to the Wiz and his followers...

First, the good news. There are one or two useful features here - a BACK ONE MOVE facility (BOM) which enables you to resurrect yourself when killed, for example. We've also got QSAVE and QLOAD for fast restoring when in difficulty (or dead). There's even an 'extended text version' on one side of the tape which doesn't have graphics and gives the text-only fan a bit more beef.

But the fact remains that these games are *still* behind every other release on the market in programming and design terms. I don't expect spelling mistakes in games costing £9.99 - even if there's only one (there may be others - I haven't finished the game at time of writing). I don't expect a system so inflexible that it can't make grammatical sense, as in: "Of particular interest is: a man's body, two dead Dark Elves." It doesn't take much effort to check for plural objects and change the "is" to "are".

I also expect a little more in the way of vocabulary and flexibility in the parser. For example, take the location where you get the above message about the bodies - if you enter: "Examine man's body" You're told that "There's nothing of interest or significance about it" - silly, as the program's jsut said that it's of "particular interest"! You get the same message if you type "Examine body". The problem is that the parser expects "Examine man". Ah well...

There are numerous other small points which annoy the player (or at least me), like double printing of location descriptions after actions, or having to enter things like GO EAGLE to climb onto an eagle's back.

A reader reckons that these games remind him of the old Scott Adams games. I have to admit that they show very little advance in design or content over, for example, The Hulk - or even some of the earlier titles like Adventureland. Come on boys, we're in the Infocom Age now, not the Stone Age... There are better games than this being written using The Quill... and they don't cost £9.99!