Adventure Land (VIC-20)
By definition, an adventure is a dangerous or risky undertaking; a novel, exciting, or otherwise remarkable event or experience. On your personal computer, Adventure is that and more.
Playing any of the Adventure series consists of three elements: you, the user; the games themselves; and the author, Scott Adams of Orlando, Florida.
In beginning any Adventure, you will find yourself in a specific location: a forest, on board a small spaceship, outside a fun house, in the briefing room of a nuclear plant, in a desert, etc. The top portion of your video display will tell you where you are and what you can see; the bottom section of the display is devoted to inputting commands to your robot computer and receiving messages that may arise as the result of your orders. You have to get used to looking at both the top and bottom portions in order to find out what's going on in the game but it doesn't take long for the reading to become a reflex. In fact you will have to live in those imaginary worlds.
By using two-word commands you move from location to location (called "rooms," although some rooms represent outdoor sites such as a swamp), manipulate objects that you find in the different rooms (pick them up, put them down, carry them, etc.), and perform actions as if you were really there.
The object of a game is to amass treasure for points or accomplish some other goal such as preventing the destruction of the automated nuclear plant in Secret Mission. Successfully completing a game, however, is far easier to state than achieve. In many cases you will find a treasure but be unable to take it until you are carrying the right combination of objects you find in the various locations.
If you're tired of video games of bouncing balls or shooting at targets; if you're ready for an intellectual challenge that transports you to new worlds of experience; if you want to see what a skilled programmer can do with a micro, invest in one of Scott Adams' games. An early Adventure (Adventureland or Pirate Adventure) is a good place to start because the more Adams creates, the tougher his puzzles get.
