![]() ![]() Microsoft Adventure was completely written by Gordon Letwin in 1979, two years prior to the IBM release. This was actually worth advertising as saving and loading games wasn't a common feature back then. You can use your IBM Personal Computer for other things, and yet return days or weeks later and continue your Adventure journey. Since advanced players can survive in Colossal Cave for hours, Adventure allows you to stop the action in the cave. But soon, it was superseded by much better entries.īeing such an early game, it's no surprise that even its capability to save/load was advertised as a selling point! One of the first games on IBM PC and very first text adventure on PC, when almost nothing else was available yet. 40x25 text mode is used with more common CGA, which is strange, as indeed CGA has 80x25 text mode as well (in the end even early PC-DOS 1.00 booted into that text CGA mode). If you boot the game with MDA emulation, voila, 80x25 is there, which is way better. I found that DOSBox-X can emulate MDA (IBM's Monochrome Display Adapter). From that point of view, text adventure games which just came 1 year later on identical hardware (Zork, Infocom adventures) are much better in that regard.Įdit: so I found that it's possible to have 80x25 text mode in this game. IMO, it was not good decision as there's not lot of text on screen with minimum text decorations, thus reading it is a bit strain on the eyes. The game is using 40x25 text mode even if 80x25 was available on PC. Despite being made in 1981, Microsoft Adventure is not the best, what was possible in those times, from technical perspective. I'm trying to experience old games as they were, taking into account technical limitations of that era. An interesting history lesson, but probably too simple if you're not specifically interested in the topic. Today, the game is mostly interesting for historical reasons because of all the concepts it introduced, and for that matter, an authentic implementation like Microsoft Adventure is better suited.Ī good opportunity for home-computer players to experience the original mainframe Colossal Cave, much like it would have been to play the original one. But then I don't really see why you should be playing Adventure at all. In case you want to have a look at the original Adventure, but would like to have an improved interface and better mechanics than the original mainframe versions, there are a number of colourful clicky-button remakes with graphics and whatnot out there. This might not be the right thing for you if you're not up for the real oldschool. It doesn't leave anything out, and content-wise it doesn't add anything of its own. If you're looking to experience the original game, Microsoft Adventure is a good choice. It adds quite some comfort to the game play, especially if you're used to playing games that are a bit newer than this one. The only distinctive feature is the possibility to save the state to one of two slots on the diskette at any time during the game. ![]() The programmer, Gordon Letwin, clearly tried to recreate the original as closely as possible, right down to the crude parser. Microsoft Adventure implements the most popular version of the Colossal Cave Adventure: the one from 1977 with Woods' expansions to Crowther's original material. ![]()
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