Adventuring is a pastime which must be keeping millions awake trying to defeat elusive creatures, collect treasure and, more importantly, survive.

After much adventuring many players begin to think they could come up with more interesting ideas than those in the games they use. But writing your own adventures is more difficult than it might at first seem. For one thing, there are so many ways to approach the task.

This book may help. It starts with the assumption that you have played and enjoyed adventure games. Then it shows you how to write adventure games by example rather than be explanation alone.

It contains several complete adventures and a heap of adventure-type utilities including tunes and drawings. The adventures, which are quite good vary in difficulty. Original scenarios, like a city in the 1950s, make these fun to use, while offering insights into the structure, design and programming of adventures.

The book loses points on its lack of index and rather useless contents page, giving only chapter and page number where headings are needed.

Nevertheless, this provides a good start to adventure programming, and it's nice to get a book for £5, when many now cost much more.

Piers Letcher