I can't believe no one has done a review on many of the Trillium games that were available in the early 80s. My first text adventure game that I ever played was Zork, but there were no graphics. Nine Princes in Amber was right up there as a text adventure game with pictures. I remember in the software package, you really got very little information as far as what the heck was going on. The software actually sold like a "for your eyes only" file, with a help card for general loading/savings/ and other technical functions.
I can't believe no one has done a review on many of the Trillium games that were available in the early 80s. My first text adventure game that I ever played was Zork, but there were no graphics. Nine Princes in Amber was right up there as a text adventure game with pictures. I remember in the software package, you really got very little information as far as what the heck was going on. The software actually sold like a "for your eyes only" file, with a help card for general loading/savings/ and other technical functions. Other than that, you were given a sleeve with some names, some dates, some pictures, and a proverbial "good luck to ya". These Trillium games were based on actual
novels.
But it started off like many text adventure games, "You are sitting in a blank, you are wearing blank, and you are looking at blank. Not to give anything away, but Trillium games were very quick to kill you off quick. In fact in this game, if you do not do the right thing within the 1st or 2nd attempt, you die. Of course in the old days of slow loading times, if was really frustrating because it took so long to load, that you immediately starting thinking about your options at once with quite a bit of thought.
That being said, you find yourself basically reading a lot while you play the game, and the choices are geared towards the story. I mean to say that if you do something incorrect, you pretty much die right there. I liked this in the games, because I never really did like it in adventure games when there was something you could do earlier in the game, and then find out 500 moves later that what you did affected Everything up to that point! Nine Princes is quick and to the point: wrong move, you die.
That being said, it is very clear that my biggest suggestion when you play these games, is to save ALL the time. If you do not save, it can be frustrating to type the same stuff over and over. With today's technology it is so quick, but if you can only imagine in 1983-1984 when this came out, saving and loading took forever. It is kind of neat as I play this game today with the speed that you can actually solve this text adventure in a couple of hours. You also can find 3-4 different walkthrough solutions. I was curious about Nine Princes because it was one of my first text adventure games, that I looked at the entire solution. Funny. It took me 5 months to solve the game when I was 13 years old, but with the quick walkthrouh and the speed of the emulator, you can solve the game in about 1 hour.
Again... it probably was just a personal choice on my part, but I loved the text adventure games. I liked the storybook format. I liked the mystery of it... not knowing exactly what I was supposed to do... and really the frustration of looking at every little detail was very enjoyable to me. Strange, I know. If you were a fan of those games, I highly recommend looking at this one... and some of the others created by Trillium.
