Week 4 - Game Review - Adventure

Adventure above is a screenshot of the game in all of it's textual glory


Playing adventure was for me a nostalgic trip back through time to my gaming roots. I have many fond memories of playing text based games and MUD's in my early childhood and indeed some of the very first digital games that I have ever played were text based.

Adventure is mostly typical of the genre, a text based adventure game (the first of it's kind) and a form of interactive fiction, where Adventure sets itself apart however is in it's relative ease of use due to the game's understanding of standard English rather than key words and also in the accuracy of the game setting. Adventure also makes use of abbreviations to be further approachable and was written at the time to be usable by people whom were relatively inexperienced with computer usage.

Adventure takes place in a fictional world that has been heavily influenced by the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky and is known for being so accurate that cavers whom have played the game have been able to easily navigate their way through parts of the Mammoth Cave system on their first visit due to the game's accuracy. The game world is further augmented by fictional elements such as mythical creatures inspired by the works of J.R.R Tolkien's "The Hobbit".

Upon launching the game the player is presented with a console in which the game outputs a descriptive summation of the player's surroundings, the player may than parse in commands to the game through the prompt such as: "Walk north". Whilst this game obviously lacks in aesthetics and is entirely dependent on descriptive and well written narrative the game can be quite immersive as it allows the player's imagination to envisage the game environment.

As the player delves into the world of Adventure they may come across various objects that will help them in their travels. Eventually as the player progresses through the game they may stumble across treasures within the cave system with the game accumulating a score dependent on the player's progression throughout the game.

Games such as Adventure were born largely in part due to the limitations of hardware at the time, this genre of game however still lives on in present day both as emulations of previous games and as newly created games with the genre often used as a means for new programmer's interested in game programming to utilize their programming knowledge in a practical manner.

Having an interest in game design and development in this day and age and wanting to develop games can seem be both approachable and seemingly unachievable. On the one hand we have almost unlimited resources both from a knowledge base perspective and a hardware perspective however on the other hand most gamer's these days are only content with A+++ titles with multi-million dollar budgets. Thankfully independent video game development is currently experiencing a resurgence with digital distribution networks and development tools simplifying the creation of, improving the quality and increasing the exposure of indie games.