Being quite fond of adventures I thought it was about time I tried one of the first adventures made for it, although it seems the C64 version of Adventureland only came in the shape of an updated graphical version in 1984. A binary exists for a text-only version too, but even though Commodore was sitting on the license to distribute the games they only distributed a select few in the Questprobe series. It seems even Scott Adams himself isnt sure how the text only binaries came to existence. But at least the Vic20 version is well known and indeed the first game by Scott Adamns in the SAGA Adventure series which would contain many games.

The 1984 graphical version for the C64 is a nice and fun text adventure game with some simple charmap illustrations. It is important to switch to text descriptions though (pressing ENTER) since the descriptions show more than what the picture can tell, and indeed the only way to see the list of objects. So chances are you will wander about looking at the graphics for a while and then switch it off and concentrate on the adventure. And this adventure has some fun puzzles that require some lateral thinking, some obvious and others quite tough. Its a game that requires you to experiment a lot although very unforgiving if you do things in the wrong order. The whole game is littered with small clues which will give you an idea about what to do. There is a fair deal of "curiosity killed the cat" incidents here where you die instantly by going somewhere in certain conditions. The goal of the adventure is to collect treasure, all 13 of them (lucky number indeed). :)

It has an interesting feature though that if you die you sometimes end up in Limbo and can go out a door and continue your adventure. Consider it a second life - a quite unusal feature of a text adventure game. You can also save and load which is very useful when playing on the real thing. The only place I got stuck is a certain lava stream... I just couldnt find the correct verb since it was not obvious what to do and likewise it was not obvious that it would generate some sort of treasure. Still, if you want a fun, but not too difficult adventure, I recommend Adventureland!

	Image from the text only binary.