AcornGamez

Andreas Dehmel of Do It Youself Doom fame has updated his 

RISC OS port of the current version of the Commodore emulator

suite VICE. Andreas is now leaving the RISC OS scene due to 

various reasons and we all wish him the best of luck and that his

work has not gone unnoticed. A request has been sent out for 

people wishing to develop VICE and other`projects further, and 

Marco van den Heuvel has already offered to take over. You can

download VICE from here. 

Andrea Gallo has now fully released all source code to his text adventure making program GTAC under the GPL. The old and new version can be downloaded from his site, the source code is also available from there to along with a few demos and examples of how to use this fantastic program.

By the AcornGamez News Desk 

Mirror of Khoronz is a text adventure originally designed for the

BBC Micro, but more recently expanded and revamped, with a

graphical interface, for RISC OS. It is available to download

for free from http://www.boulsworth.co.uk/intfict/ where there is

also more information about its background.  

In this short article I will be giving some of my first impressions 

of the game, running on a Risc PC.

The application !Mirror comes in its own self-contained directory,

accompanied by an HTML file "Instructions". Installation is simply

a case of dragging it to an appropriate place on your hard disk.

There is no !Help file within the application, which is a pity,

especially as the Instructions file itself is essentially raw text

with HTML used to add a heading and sub-headings.

!Mirror loads onto the iconbar, and gives Info, Help and Quit 

options. The Help option doesn't appear to do anything under 

RISC OS 4, even with a web browser loaded. The Info option 

describes the program simply as "Adventure".

The main game window provides a large scrolling pane for the main

activities of the game. This contains what you would normally expect

to see in a traditional "full screen" adventure. So for example

the prologue, room descriptions, commands you enter and their

results all appear here.

The immediately obvious additions over traditional adventure games,

in addition to the multi-tasking format, are a supplementary pane

to the left of the main window, and a text entry bar underneath it.

Neither can be detached from the main window.

The pane to the left allows you to use the mouse to enter common

commands such as forward, backward, left and right, up and down,

moving via compass directions, looking at the location you're in,

and listing your inventory.

These commands are entered, with immediate effect, exactly as if

you'd typed them into the text entry bar. The directional ones are

particularly useful if you want to explore quickly without reading 

the location descriptions fully; the valid exits are highlighted, 

including a red colour to show which way you are currently facing. 

The left hand pane also provides an indicator to show whether your

light source (if any) is currently lit, along with options to

repeat the last command, a toggle for whether you want to see the

full descriptions for locations you've already visited, and a save

button.

One advantage to the multi-tasking format is that, as you leave 

one location, the description does not disappear, just gets added 

to the scrollback in the main window. This allows you easily to check

where you've just been - and what you did there - without retracing

your steps. Clicking Menu over the main window allows you to save

this history as a text file.

The main window makes some use of colour for distinguishing 

different sorts of text; blue for the names of objects and some of 

the extraneous messages, red for events happening around you or

to you, and black for everything else.  Unlike the attached panes, 

everything in the main window is displayed in the System font.  The 

text uses block capitals for emphasis sometimes, it might have been 

better to take advantage of the desktop format to use bold, italics 

or a different colour instead.

There don't appear to be pictures associated with any of the

locations. Whilst this may partly explain Acornsoft's reluctance

to publish the original version of Mirror of Khoronz, it is no great

loss. Early adventure games that trumpeted their use of graphics

(like The Hobbit) mostly provided amusement and frustration by their

slow redraw times. The more sophisticated graphics

on some later disk-based adventure games would require a 

professional artist to equal them. It's clear from the instructions that 

Mirror of Khoronz is aimed at an audience that will find the text more

evocative than a few graphics.

The game does feature some graphics, because certain objects,

when examined, pop up a graphic over the main window to show what

they look like. This adds a certain amount of interest, whilst

not overwhelming the gameplay by being too frequent. The one

example that I encountered (a bit of decaying parchment) didn't

seem to display correctly in a 256 colour mode, but was fine

otherwise.

That's a look at the mechanics of the implementation and the few 

minor niggles that I found.  But what about the game

itself?  It is extremely detailed and carefully created.

It's described as having around three hundred locations and around

one hundred objects, and very few of the locations that I visited

seemed repetitive or without some purpose.

There is a very distinctive atmosphere created by the locations, even

though the largely deserted landscape of caves, forests and hills does

seem reminiscent of other software from the same genre. An element

of mystery is added by little touches subtly inserted into this

partly familiar setting... the quiet landscape seems to have been

wandered by Oxford undergraduates, amongst others, and other hints 

are given that there is a wider story behind and beyond the immediate

events.

The amount of work that has gone into the game, over several decades,

is apparent in the quality of the text, which of course is all

important in a game like this. In several thousand words of

descriptions and events, I didn't spot a single typing, spelling

or grammatical error, nor even any of the minor glitches between

singular and plural that affect objects in some other adventure

games. (I did spot a typo in the instructions!)

The parser is also noticeably more sophisticated than those

I've seen in earlier adventure games, even though it's still

occasionally difficult to get the computer to understand

what the player thinks should be an obvious and logical course

of action. But perhaps this happens in all text adventures... 
One unusual feature of the game is that it supports a primitive

form of multiplayer mode.  This is only a "hotseat" form of play,

because each different "player" has to log in at the same keyboard;

once each player is created, you can swap between them using the

function keys. There is no networking option for multiplayer play, but

there are interesting facilities like the ability for one player to

follow another, as well as hand over objects.

Although I've completed much less than a tenth of the game, I did

get an impression that some of the puzzles and challenges, like

some of the locations, were similar to other games.  After all, there

are only so many problems you can encounter in this sort of setting.

But even those situations that seemed very familiar, did have a

welcome difference in approach and presentation.

The instructions mention that for some people, "text adventures

might be their idea of what a computer game should be".  Sadly

I'm not one of those people, so Mirror of Khoronz is not the perfect

game for me.  That's why this article really is only "first

impressions", not a proper review.

But given the depth of the game, its size, and the obvious care

that has gone into it, it may well be the perfect game for anyone

who does enjoy, or used to enjoy, text adventures... or perhaps

someone who hasn't tried one since the very early era. If you might

fit into one of those categories, download it, give it a try, and let us

know what you think!

Email AcornGamez at news@acorngamez.tk 

Visit our IRC channel at Freenode: #AcornGamez 

Many thanks to an anonomys reader for writing article on Mirror of Khoronz. 

Soft Rock Software have updated their SRS module that runs in some of their programs such as !Trellis and !DropRock.

The past week or two has been brilliant for RISC OS text adventures with the release of a brand new and absolutely amazing text adventure! Mirror of Kharonz and the re-release of the text adventure creator GTAC, and now with this new module, Trellis and games authored with Trellis can now be made to run on 32-Bit RISC OS machines such as the Iyonix and A9Home!

I really do hope that with all the latest Interactive Fiction activity in the RISC OS market that more and more people will get adventuring and even make some adventures themselves! It's now as easy as pie to make a RISC OS game!

ManDown from Blasts of the Xtreme is another text adventure set in World War II and is hoped to be ready for a commercial release at the Wakefield show in May.