In days gone by, people told stories to pass the long winter evenings, lit up by flickering firelight. Now you're more likely to find them huddled over a keyboard and bathed in the greenish glow of a VDU as they battle with dragons, negotiate with Norse Gods, escape dungeons or pretend to be Denis Thatcher.

Since PCN's first sortie into the adventure world with the Dungeon page, we've been spoilt for choice of adventures to review. There's never been a better time for the adventure player.

The last few months have seen such masterpieces as Sherlock, Macbeth, Return To Eden, The Saga Of Erik The Viking, Doomdark's Revenge and Hampstead, not to mention two Scott Adams titles: Spiderman and The Sorcerer Of Claymoruge Castle. To buy all of them for your collection would set you back just under £100, so where does the newcomer to micros or just to adventures begin? It could be a bigger challenge than the adventures.

You can always begin where adventures themselves began and buy a copy of Colossal Adventure (Level 9), which is available on almost every machine. This is the home version of the first ever adventure, in those dark days of long ago, the mid-1970s, when micros and flashy graphics were almost unheard of.

There's only so much fun you can have on the number-crunching mainframes, so turning to the computers for entertainment was bound to happen. That's just what two Americans, Willie Crowther and Don Woods did and created the original Adventures, though it's often referred to as Colossal Cave Adventure and similar names.

The first adventures were text only. They placed the player in a challenging and obviously adventurous situation, just like a book, except you're frequently not allowed to 'turn the page' till you've solved a problem. Adventures, for instance, at one point describes your surroundings at the Hall of the Mountain Kings, a huge room decorated with majestic statues.

There are trophies, the mounted heads of elves and monsters, a carved granite throne and the tattered remains of rich tapestries. Large doorways are on all sides, and a huge green snake hisses fiercely at you.

If you type in an instruction to try and take you past the snake, you discover that it won't let you by. Your problem is sneaking past the snake using some of the objects you may have found along the way. In fact, you should have accumulated a black rod, some food, a bottle, some keys, a singing bird and a cage for it. If you give the snakes some food, will it allow you to go past, or should you maybe try hitting it with the rod? Will that kill the snake, or will the snake kill you?

Adventures has remained successful because it covered so much. Programmers can ensure that you only get past the snake if you do a certain thing. Or they can create a pirate which will appear at random and steal one of the treasures you've laboured for hours to find. Or they can dump you in tortuous mazes that make Hampton Court look like someone's front hedge. So, no matter what your machine, Level 9's Colossal Cave is an essential purchase at some stage.

Equally seminal would be an adventure by Scott Adams who is the superstar of the adventure world.

Adams began by playing adventures (he was hooked in minutes!) and he set about writing his own program, Adventureland. This nearly didn't see the light of day since Adams' wife, feeling rather neglected in favour of a TRS-80, put the disk of the finished Adventureland in the oven. Fortunately, it wasn't switched on at the time.

She realised she wasn't going to beat him so she joined him and wrote her own adventure. Between them they have produced a series stretching to thirteen for their company, Adventure International, and these are available for many home micros.

Try one, but don't expect it to be easy, and you may decide it's too irritating. Where many adventure writes go for a hundred and even two hundred locations, to explore the Scott Adams technique is to sacrifice mere quantity for superior quality.

The next ground breaker was The Hobbit, published by Melbourne House for the Spectrum, Commodore 64 and BBC machines, though the BBC version lacks the graphics which created the stir when the software first appeared. Where players had once relied on words for scene-setting, The Hobbit drew pictures. It was revolutionary in other ways too. First, it was adapted from a book read by millions; second, it developed the idea of other characters at large in the adventure, i.e. not just the player.

This occurred to a limited extent in Adventures, but when you take the part of hobbit Bilko Baggins there is much more activity from other characters who have been programmed with a certain level of independent existence.

The main figures are Thorin and Gandalf, who appear and disappear from locations, and who you converse with and instruct. There are lesser characters such as elves and goblins whom you aviod - but again, this was an element of Adventures, where a dwarf would pop up at random to throw a none-too-friendly knife in your direction.

The next big commercial success was Valhalla (Legend, for Spectrum and Commodore 64) which took adventures in a new direction and almost eliminated the text to concentrate instead on the graphics. You see a cartoon-like screen where matchstick characters respond to your commands and the text occupies a few lines.

Tell a character to get a bottle and he will traverse the screen and pick up the bottle. The price for this is a restriction on the adventure elements and, for many, the novelty soon wore off, making Valhalla an optional rather than essential for an adventure collector.

Sherlock, however, is a recognisable successor to The Hobbit. The long-awaited new Melbourne House adventure, for the Spectrum and Commodore 64, took 18 months and a reputed quarter of a million pounds to develop. Graphics have become less important, but the level of artificial intelligence for other characters has increased, so you get a greater variety of options and responses. The adventure is also a tough nut to crack, as you would expect from a Sherlock Holmes storyline. You play the detective, and adopt disguises, read newspapers, talk to Watson, question suspects, send notes to other characters, and so on.

Another essential purchase, for Commodore 64, is Macbeth (Creative Sparks) - from a team of seven who have produced four adventures based on Shakespeare's play. It is undoubtedly the adventure of the year. In two of the adventures you play Macbeth, in one you play Lady Macbeth and in the other adventure you aid the witches as they gather eye of newt and toe of dog, etc. There are four 'psychoanalysis' programs too - they are question and answer sessions which probe Macbeth's motives at different stages. It might seem to some a little heavy-going and (heavens above) educational - but it's great fun and anything you learn about the play is simply because the play makes for excellent adventure storylines.

Macbeth is also a pointer to the future for adventures, where increasing memory capacity on home machines will enable people to explore many other avenues of a story - whether an original one or an existing text. What might have happened if Macbeth had not killed Duncan, or had been discovered in the act? How many children had Lady Macbeth? You can take these possibilities to any lengths, possibly ridiculous, and allow the player to see a story through the eyes of different characters.

There are plenty more adventures that may not make the highest standards, but still present difficult and intriguing challenges. Sci-fi fans should tackle Snowball (Level 9, most machines) and, if you're game for a laugh, try Urban Upstart (Richard Shepherd, Spectrum and Commodore 64) or Denis Through The Drinking Glass (Applications, Spectrum and Commodore 64). BBC owners, who are rather badly served, should tackle two adventures that are as yet available only to them, Philosopher's Quest and Castle Of Riddles (Acornsoft).

Amstrad owners are still short of adventures, but if you've a penchant for the difficult and bizarre, take a look at the "Arnold series" from Nemesis (also available on the Dragon).

Valkyrie 17 (Ram Jam, Spectrum) is very well presented, taking you into a fantasy workld of fascist organisations. The booklet contains transcripts of interviews. There are also recorded messages on cassette.

Atari owners have access to the Level 9 adventures, and also have the privilege of Dallas Quest. Who shot JR? I'm willing to bet that it was an Atari adventure player.