Eamon Adventure Reviews
Reviewed by Tom Zuchowski (1st of 2 reviews)
MAIN PGM Version: 6 Extra Commands: EAT, REQUEST, TELL, JMP, VERBOSE, BRIEF Deleted Commands: HEAL, SPEED, BLAST, SAVE Special Features: "text" artifact recognition unusual SAVE feature, 40/80 column display Playing Time: 1 hr Reviewer Rating: - Average Rating: 8.2/4
Description: You had become interested in legends of the far northern lands, and traveled there to see what you could see. While there, you saw several wondrous things before you were set upon by robbers and killed.
But this land is ruled by Odin, and his Valkyrior chose you for Valhalla. Soon you find yourself wandering the land of Asgard, tasked by Odin himself to learn about the gods and their deeds.
Suddenly you are called to the Valhall. There, you are told that the TIME of Ragnarok nears, and the gods find themselves ill-prepared. Frey had given up his mighty sword in a fit of wrong-headedness, and now Thor's war hammer Mjollnir has been stolen! You have been chosen to accompany the gods on a journey of desperation to the land of the giants in an attempt to find and recover the hammer.
This is truly a desperate move. The giants do not love men nor the gods, and the Valkyrior do not go there.
Comment: OK, I know, I shouldn't be reviewing my own adventure, but I've been waiting for years and no one else ever did it for me! <grin> This adventure has some unique features, and I want to spread the word.
The above description is not the intro text, but is a condensation of a good deal of the actual adventure. You get "killed" about a quarter of the way into the adventure, and don't find out what the true quest is until it is about half over.
I wrote this adventure in response to a challenge by John Nelson in an old "Adventurer's Log" to come up with a way for the player to get intelligent responses when he tries to manipulate anything that he can see in the room descriptions. I did this by coming up with a new class of artifact, the "Text" artifact. These text artifacts don't really exist, but when the player examines them he will get an item description. The program recognizes hundreds of words, and I am very pleased with the way this feature turned out.
Though there are only 30-odd rooms, there are nearly 100 special effects, and there is something special going on most of the time. Properly handling all those effects was an enormous task; for example, it took me two weeks of steady work to get all the bugs out of the encounter with the Man in Blue at the start of the adventure. The MAIN PGM is huge, and I didn’t have enough memory left for the standard SAVE command. It was replaced by the JMP command, which moves you to the middle of the adventure if you can answer a question about the first half.
The adventure is based on real Norse legends which I spent a lot of time researching. I also stole heavily from the novella "The Last Trump" by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp. It's a great story and you should try to find it. There is a fair amount of combat, but there is only one encounter that can kill you dead unless you are dumb enough to go around picking fights with gods or groups of giants. Most of the puzzles are pretty similar, so once you figure out one, the rest should be easier--they are mainly used to trigger special effect sequences.
In many ways, this is more like an interactive novel than a regular adventure. The difficulty rating falls in at about (7). I hope you enjoy it.
MAIN PGM Version: 6 (Heavily modified) Extra Commands: EAT, REQUEST, TELL, JMP, VERBOSE, BRIEF Deleted Commands: HEAL, SPEED, BLAST, SAVE Special features: "Text" artifact recognition, no SAVE, 40/80 column display. Playing Time: 1 hour Reviewer Rating: 9.0 Average Rating: 8.4/5
Description: Being interested in legends of the far northern lands, you traveled there to see what you could see. While there, you saw several wondrous things before being set upon by robbers and killed.
But this land is ruled by Odin, and one of his Valkyrior chose you for Valhalla. Soon you find yourself wandering the land of Asgard, tasked by to learn about the gods and their deeds.
Suddenly you are called to the Valhall. You are told that the TIME of Ragnarok nears, and the gods find themselves ill-prepared. Frey had given up his mighty sword in a fit of wrong-headedness, and now Thor's war hammer Mjollnir has been stolen! You have been chosen to accompany the gods on a journey of desperation in an attempt to find and recover the hammer.
This is truly a desperate move. The giants do not love men nor the gods, and the Valkyrior do not go there.
Comment: Let me start off by saying that fans of hack-'n'-slash won't care for this adventure, there are only about three to four foes and the program is entirely puzzle-based. I was amazed at the amount of special events and the way they interacted so perfectly with each other. Like all of Tom's adventures, it more closely resembles a version 7 Eamon rather than a 6.
The puzzles all basically revolve around three commands, TELL, POWER, and EXAMINE. Because of the size of the MAIN PGM, SAVE was deleted. In its place is the JMP command (named, I think, after the assembly language "JuMP" instruction) which allows you to skip ahead to the middle of the adventure.
The special feature being shown off here is the "text artifacts" routine. Each room has about four to six things mentioned in the description which can be examined. I wrote a short routine which printed out the names of all the "text" artifacts in each room, so I saw all of them. While I can't recall there actually being anything genuinely useful in the "text" artifact descriptions, it was a very impressive feature and was done in a very sensible and efficient fashion; I'm thinking about stealing it for one of my own adventures. There are also a few embedded artifacts in Asgard which are very important.
In one puzzle, your progress is blocked because of Thor's fear of any sort of bathing; just remember to "TELL" Thor about everything that is revealed to you by the POWER spell. The Giants of Jotunheim find great amusement in fooling the gods with illusions, you can see through those illusions via POWER also.
I was a bit disappointed by how quickly it was over, I was expecting to be sent after Frey's sword as well. All in all though, I would have to say that this is the best puzzle-based Eamon that I have ever played. I give it a (6) for difficulty.