You may recall To Hell In A Hamper from early 2009. The adventure cast you in the role of Professor Pettibone and placed you in a hot air balloon with the world's worst travelling companion, one Hubert Booby.

Booby wears the biggest overcoat you've ever seen and, extremely suspiciously, it seems to have many bizarre and heavy items secreted in its pockets and linings. This is a major problem because the hot air balloon desperately needs to ascend before it piles into the Andes'. Booby is completely uninterested in this imminent peril however and instead just witters on about his Aunt Gertie in response to your protestations about the need to gain height.

The original game, a one room text adventure, which is a 'one-of-a-kind' BBC game was favourably reviewed back in EUG #67 with the only real disadvantage being the long response time between entering a command and getting a response. You might have thought that, being confined to a single location, it wouldn't be a particularly big game. However, it was originally written with the TADS Interactive Fiction creator on the PC with around 128K of text alone documenting all the comedy horror of discovering the secrets of Booby's overcoat. The author chose to keep all this text rather than slim the game down and produce a much diluted experience. But to do this he split the game into a number of files which were loaded into memory as and when required. This led to the long response times I complained about.

This new version of the game is a much faster, zippier experience, with all the text stored in a compressed format. It means that, with one exception, once the game has loaded, no further disc access is required and so you can enjoy Booby's hilarious responses without having to wait two seconds for him to make them.

The only exception is with the online help system. In the original this was a separate program in its own right, and was loaded in if you typed HELP at the prompt. This remains the case in this new version. Some of the things you need to do are quite obscure, so you will need to use it occasionally.

There's one more thing to mention too. This new version isn't Electron-compatible as the playing Mode has been switched to Mode 7 to free up even more space. So Electron owners are stuck playing the slow original.

There's no denying that, for BBC owners, this is a better version of the game. Of course, in terms of content it is completely identical. Ultimately, it's a more polished version of what I consider one of the best text adventures ever written. So if you haven't yet experienced its delights, play it. It's great.