A few years back, a utility called The Quill was released for the Spectrum and other popular machines. This enabled the general computer public at home to create their own adventures. As was the norm (and still is!) no Dragon version was available.

Finally though, Cowen Software are producing Adventure Writer, which as the title rather gives away allows you to write your own adventures.

The 'writer' package consists of cassette with the standard text adventure program on one side, and on the reverse the facility to incorporate Rainbow Writer and DOS. Also there are two user manuals which take up 23 pages of A4 between them, all of which has to be read, understood and re-read several more times before you can attempt to dive down into the dungeons of your own adventure world. The notes themselves are comprehensive and concise, showing the features and giving examples.

First stage is creation of a new database through the Formatter program, then onto the second stage, which is the heart of the system, the Editor, where the adventure itself is constructed and to which I will return, and finally the Executor which runs the finished masterpiece. There is also an example adventure, to illustrate some of the basic techniques and faults.

Back to the Editor. This is where your locations, etc. are entered. To try and show all the commands is impossible, within this review, but you can do just about anything you desire, until you run out of memory, which is 24K Standard and 15K on extended versions.

You can have objects to carry, wean break, up to 253 locations in which you can have the old gem of making rooms dark, which in 99% of adventures is overcome by LIGHT CANDLE or LIG CAN if the game accepts abbreviations, as this utility does allow. The finishing touches such as automatic wordwrap also are there (it's a pity Adventure International never used this program) along with many more commands.

If you can, then you could produce a very good adventure, leaving you to market your game, give a copy to a friend, or even melt Adventure Writer down into a modern sculpture, as you can load up a completed game totally independently.

I've yet to write anything resembling a decent game from this language. I call it a language because that is basically what it is, like machine code or Forth. You have to become proficient in the commands before starting.

That doesn't stop me seeing the value of this offering - the fact that Cowen's Colossal Cave was written on this system shows what can be done.

So if you are a half-decent programmer producing half-decent games, try this as it might give you the extra 50% you need. I'm only giving it four Dragons, firstly because it hasn't given me all the extra 79% I need to write a good game, but mainly as it does seem a little dated - text adventures aren't exactly vogue nowadays, and the extended version only gives 15K to play with. Otherwise its just about all you can expect from a 32K Dragon, even if it is three years too late!