Then when Basic became available, mainly because formatting the output was so much easier, I switched to that - especially when I got access to a Basic compiler. I wrote a couple of games myself, but computing was advancing so fast I couldn't keep up. I reckon this was roughly when C was coming in as a programming language, and that was pretty well my last input. I'd played the Crowther-Woods "Adventur" game - sometimes referred to as Colossal Caves - on an old Cifer computer running under CP/M rather than MS-DOS, and I was delighted to get my hands on the version of it that Level 9 wrote. I thoroughly enjoyed that and its two sequels, Adventure Quest and Dungeon Adventure. Another superb game of theirs was Lords of Time, which I played through a number of times.
Level 9 had a knack of writing games which were testing but not stupidly obscure. I remember one text-only adventure game where, to get the crucial piece of equipment (a key) you had to smell a flower, whereupon the pollen would make you sneeze, and when you whipped your hanky out of your pocket, the key would come with it. But you couldn't find the key by Searching your Pocket, oh no, much too simple! *Grrrrr!* That sort of stupidity really used to wind me up.
Similarly, Space Quest 1-3 were excellent, but 4 really got ridiculously obscure. In the opening scenario, you had to catch a rabbit, and the only way of doing it was hide in a tiny alcove and use a rope snare. Maybe I missed something, but I could see no clue telling me where to hide to do this, and it took forever to work it out by trial and error. By this time, I'd pretty well lost patience with the adventure games, and I was glad to find the Might and Magic and Eye of the Beholder series of RPGs.
