R (Pron: Arrr...)
therealeasterbunny (2010)
R is written for the Adventure PDA and comes with a PC executable. The Adventure PDA is a Windows
Mobile PDA interpreter for Scott Adams’s games, shipping with a few like Adventureland and Voodoo
Castle. I think that the interpreter is written by the author of this game, but when I went to check
out his website my virus detection picked up a Trojan on the home page. I saw the same thing in Comp08
when clicking on an executable caused my computer to send out 90 malware e-mails. The author didn’t
even do it on purpose, but it’s the tools he used that were corrupt. Should I even play this game?
Too late, I already did, and I quickly found out that it’s built on the Adventure International engine
using a two word parser. But unlike playing one of the old Scott Adams games there are no graphics for
R or any of the games this interpreter plays. And the screen is small on the PC, so room items located
in the top margin can easily be overlooked. This might be resolved by playing on a PDA, the intended
target of the app.
Struggling with the two word parser becomes really frustrating, and I would suggest that the author take
a cue from Leadlight and include a list of all the available verbs in the game. Since the early 80s certain
verbs have fallen out of use. But once you do make it to the island the game seems to lose any kind of
direction that it had, and once again the author expects you to make logical leaps with no clue how to
connect the dots. In the end you wander around collecting a lot of stuff, but with no idea of what to do
with it. Direction is everything.
This type of structure is very limiting, and the two word parser works against itself. Simple becomes
impossible in this interpreter, and you have to ask yourself what type of advantages a language will give
you. This one is out of date, and I'm only going to bang my head against it for so long before giving up.
But if you loved Scott Adams’s games way back in the 1980s then you might enjoy this one. But I don’t.
So I didn’t.