Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!accelerator.eng.ohio-state.edu!czei From: czei@accelerator.eng.ohio-state.edu (Michael S. Czeiszperger) Newsgroups: comp.sys.cbm Subject: Re: Game Review: Adventure Construction Set (long) Message-ID: <360@accelerator.eng.ohio-state.edu> Date: 6 Jul 88 15:47:42 GMT References: <94MSd30cYn1010x4zlg@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> Reply-To: czei@accelerator.eng.ohio-state.edu (Michael S. Czeiszperger) Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Electrical Engineering Lines: 48 In article <94MSd30cYn1010x4zlg@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com> dwl10@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (Dave Lowrey) writes: > Summary: An impressive program for playing and generating graphical > adventures (both manually and automatically). The only major shortcoming > is that the graphics themselves are barely acceptable by C-64 standards. > Comes with one complete "hand-crafted" adventure to play. Dozens of > additional hand-crafted adventures written by ACS users are available by > mail from the ACS Club for $5 each. > I purchased this a couple of years ago for $35, and managed only to solve most of "Rivers of Light", and complete only the very beginnings of an original adventure. The problems I encountered centered around the general slowness of the machine, coupled with the fact that my drive is a Blue Chip. The copy protection is such that that game editor would hang every time, although where exactly it would hang is not known. Even if it worked perfectly, it would still take months of work to complete the most simple adventure. The problem is not that the game is not well designed, but rather the limitations of the machine make any user interface very clumsy to use. I simply don't have the patience to invest that kind of time in a game, when the same concept put into another machine would obviously cut the task in half. Don't get me wrong- ACS is an amazing piece of programming, and uses every bit of the capabilities of the C64. It was impressive enough for a poor self-sufficient college student to plunk down $35! The general problem with these type of games is that I'm enamored with the capabilities of the machines because of the inventivness of the programmers, but not because their results stand by themselves. It is amazing to see ACS construct adventures on it's own given a rule set, but the resulting game is not usually worth playing. One thing I thought would work well for the random generator, would be to create the creature and object set from Rogue, and then have ACS randomly construct the dungeon so that the nastier monsters were in the lower levels. It did not work well because the random generator insisted on creating extra friendly monsters that would run around dropping potions all over the place. Because the actual game play is quite clumsy, the player would get stuck in hallways unable to pass because of random monsters dropping stuff all over blocking the exits. Sigh, -- Michael S. Czeiszperger | "The only good composer is a dead composer" Systems Analyst | Snail: 2015 Neil Avenue (614) The Ohio State University | Columbus, OH 43210 292- ARPA:czei@accelerator.eng.ohio-state.edu PAN:CZEI 0161