The objective of this adventure programming book is to teach the reader techniques to write games without the chore of coding a completed program each time around. It sets about this task by explaining and presenting "AKS" - what the authors call the Adventure Kernal System.

AKS is an adventure creating system in which the program - which is written in Basic - need not vary from game to game. Different plots and scenarios are supplied to it in the form of data.

However, rather than data being stored on and reloaded from a separate data tape, using this system, the data is actually typed into data statements within the program.

The inevitable debugging and modification following the initial implementation is made simpler as it is instantly readable and editable from within the program.

Befor ethe details of the AKS itself there is a short background to adventure, followed by a general explanation on the structure of an adventure game and the handling of vocabulary. The vocabulary parsing method expounded makes interesting reading because the program is designed so that certain words are location specific. This avoids the need to scan the entire vocab in the game, thereby keeping the response times down to a minimum.

This means, of course, that a word necessary to overcome a particular problem in one location, may not be recognised in others, and leads to the reply "You can't do that" rather than "I don't understand". The program only knows that it doesn't understand the word here, and not whether it might understand it elsewhere.

The "You can't do that" reply is one that adventurers tend to find very frustrating and unhelpful. For speed, I would have preferred to have seen a machine code subroutine (entered in Basic) scanning the whole vocab and giving a more intelligent reply.

This is a very well planned and written professional approach to adventure game programming. It introduces such concepts as linked lists and text compression, so a potential reader will need to be computer literate.

A good knowledge of Basic is essential and familiarity with other aspects of computers and computing, such as knowledge of binary arithmetic.

If you are interested in writing an adventure game on your Amstrad then you will enjoy this book - and probably learn a great deal from it.