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Two years ago I bought a copy of Jonathan Evans' Adventurescape for the Electron and spent many pleasant evenings constructing my first and only text adventure.

Since that time the market has been almost swamped with adventure-writing aids such as Gilsoft's The Quill, Logotron's Adventure Writer and LTS's Your Adventure.

I was therefore particularly interested to see how this new offering from Incentive compared with its peers, and especially concerned to ensure that it wasn't just a watered down version of its big brother, The Graphic Adventure Creator.

I am not overly fond of graphically-illustrated adventures, and to my delight The Adventure Creator pretends to be nothing more than a very user-friendly utility for writing text-only adventures.

The package is attractive and houses a single cassette with an easy to understand 24 page manual. No programming experience is required to use it, which is perhaps one of its greatest attractions to adventure buffs. It is, however, an essential prerequisite to read the manual very carefully before launching into your first silicon fantasy.

The tape consists of four main files - The Adventure Creator - which is obviously the core program, a Quickstart file (an excellent help facility for the true novice), Advman (a small adventure from the manual which acts as a tutorial guide) and Ransom (a super demonstration adventure).

On loading you are presented with a menu which, although lengthy, soon becomes familiar. For instance pressing V allows you to set up and edit up to 255 verbs, such as GET, DROP and EAT, which you may wish to use in your adventure, although the Quickstart file will supply you with a list of the more commonly used ones.

Pressing R on the main menu allows you the facility to enter room descriptions such as "You are in a dark, dank cabin with a hint of sunlight slipping through a narrow crack in the window boarding".

Only the amount of free memory limits the number of locations you can create and obviously the briefer the descriptions, the greater the number of rooms you can cram in.

If you press M on the menu you can enter up to 255 messages which will form the responses within the framework of your completed adventure.

Pressing N presents you with a set-up/edit option of nouns, and A provides adverbs which will allow your actions to be more realistically described.

The trickiest part of writing any adventure is setting up the puzzles. In Adventurescape and The Quill this was achieved by a flag-setting option.

However, The Adventure Creator uses a conditions system which, though perplexing at first, is more user-friendly than its alternatives.

Having digested the more difficult bits you now progress to Advman, which allows you to journey at your own pace through a tutorial type adventure using the manual and tape.

You can simply view and fiddle or, like me, re-describe the given locations and have immense fun customising your own mini adventure. In doing so you will soon become familiar with the workings of the creator.

Ransom is an enjoyable demonstration adventure, but not altogether essential to beginning to write your own much better jaunt.

The text compression facility is good, as is the response to synonyms of commands and actions - so much so that Steve Maltz at Shards used this program to write Operation Safras, a BBC Micro and Electron best-seller.

The Adventure Creator has the extra command CHAIN, which allows you to create massive multi-part tape-based adventures such as the infamous Lord Of The Rings and the more recent Ket Trilogy.

Comparison with other adventure-writing utilities is difficult as each has its own advantages and disadvantages. I found the limitations of tape a little frustrating, and hope that Incentive will soon bring out 3.5" and 5.25" disc versions for the Electron.

Conversely, I found the speed of operation of the program and the common-sense of the manual an absolute joy. It certainly isn't a poor relation of its stablemate, The Graphic Adventure Creator, as precious memory is not taken up by irrelevant pictures, which means more text for your masterpiece.

Pendragon