The aim of the Graphic Adventure Creator (GAC) is to free your imagination from the coils of the programming monster and allow you to create your own full-scale adventures - complete with pretty pictures.

The GAC provides a menu of options which as well as making selections easier, help to remind the user what he should be doing next. The two main selections are the Graphic Editor and the Text Editor.

The Graphic Editor is a keyboard-driven drawing package with which you create your artistic masterpieces. A sample program is included with the GAC which shows what terrific pictures can be achieved with this package.

The usual Rectangle, Circle, Line, and Fill commands are available to speed up your drawing, and various shades of colour are easily provided. As the graphic side to this whole program is its selling point, a truth should be quickly pointed out. If I sold you Leonardo's paintbrush, would you be able to draw the Mona Lisa? Sadly the answer is "no".

I soon found that to draw anything worthy of inclusion in an adventure would take me a very long time indeed. Anything better than a rectangle with a red triangle on top to represent the "Palace of Fairy Nuff", was going to take me more time than that taken to write the whole adventure. This unhappy situation is mainly caused by my own lack of artistic sense, but also by the lack of a number of commands which are standard in more sophisticated art packages. To create anything half as good as the examples given will require careful forethought using a paper grid and a lot of painstaking input.

Okay, if the paintbrush is only as good as the fistful of bananas wielding it, what of the text-handling side of the package? Happily I think it's pretty good. The final game can accept complex sentence input (e.g. "Take the box and open it carefully") and a 'Quick Start' file is provided which has a host of commonly required useful words and presets with which you can get your game into a working state with a minimum of effort.

In general the method of creating your game is what you would expect. You must provide a list of nouns, verbs, room descriptions, object names etc from which the editor can produce lists with numbers allocated to each item (e.g. OBJECT 1 is a SWORD, VERB 4 is KILL). As with The Quill adventure creator (reviewed in Vol. 5 No. 5), the nitty gritty arrives when you have to create the logic rules for your game to follow. Somehow your game must understand what to do when a player types "KILL THE DRAGON".

To solve this problem the GAC requires you to give it a list of statements which it will use to decide what action to take for a set of player commands. These statements look like simple Basic commands and as in The Quill they include special words to do common tasks (e.g. MESS 4 means write out message number 4). To complete this part of the adventure creation is always going to be awkward for absolute beginners in the art of programming, no matter how sweetly it's wrapped, but the GAC editor does it as painlessly as is possible.

So what's the best buy? The Quill has no built-in graphics (although an add-on is promised soon) and it's slightly more complex to understand than the GAC.

The GAC has sacrificed some of the Beeb's precious memory for the dubious advantage of adding pictures to your game. I believe if your aim is to create fairly simple and colourful games then the GAC cannot be beaten. Coupled with the easier Logic format almost anyone can create some kind of fun game. Should you wish to create more challenging games, The Quill has the edge, as in this case the only final limit to your game's complexity is your own skill.