All the ingredients are here for a fairly standard bread-and-butter, meat-and-two-veg, vanilla-flavoured adventure game. There are evil enemy agents, a priceless royal treasure, and a trackless waste which you must explore (disguised of course), to track down the missing valuables - and all this without getting killed.
Objectives
Agents from the evil land of Grunlock have stolen some of the King's treasure. You are the head of palace security, and you're in disgrace. Now you must venture out into Grunlock, disguised as a peasant, to try to get it back.
You start from the west end of the palace, with the knowledge that if you don't get the treasure back, the King will have you killed.
First Impressions
The instructions for the game are brief, but to the point. Commands are the simple classics - N for NORTH, TAKE, DROP, THROW and so on.
After every move, the ZX81 displays your situation - where you are, what's happened - together with obvious paths you can take.
In Play
Starting from the palace gate, I decided to go south. I could hear the sea, according to the program, so I decided to carry on going in that direction.
YOU CAN SEE NEARBY...FISH, I was told, along with my whereabouts. So I took the fish with a very brief command of T. YOU TAKE FISH was the reply. I tried getting some more information about it. DEF I entered - short for DESCRIBE FISH. Oh boy. A SMALL RED DEAD FISH was the answer I got for my pains.
Maybe I should have eaten it? Still, after throwing away the dead fish, I moved on to find myself at the entrance to a large cave. A lamp was on offer, so I took it and went further into the depths of the cave. But just one move later, I fell down a hole in the dark and was killed. Perhaps I should have lit the lamp.
Adventure 200 proved to be very time-consuming, not least because it is interesting enough for you to want to complete it, and because you can't save the results on tape. There are no graphics but the messages are descriptions are ample. For ZX81 owners, this is a must.