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