Ah, the memories.....(Bad memories for some! )

Darryl produced some very basic, early text adventure games through Softgold. Were these games really only Australian releases?

Sure, they were not up to Infocom or Magnetic Scrolls' standards, but the two I played as a youngster were quite atmospheric - even with the limited parser and simple Charset graphics! Although, I still like these graphics.

In particular I am talking about "The Secret of Bastow Manor" and "The Search for King Solomon's Mines." Although, I believe I also dabbled in "Ninja." "Bastow Manor" was as creepy as hell (especially tense in areas where only a few correct moves were possible before being killed by patrolling guard dogs or a homicidal skeleton)!

A fun, but flawed adventure! Many bugs. Only possible to complete with a walkthrough I believe.

Hopeless ending screen though!

I know many of you will vote very low for these games, and many couldn't care less! They are old text adventures after all! But, I thought I'd bring them to your attention:

Alien

The Case of the Mad Mummy

Murder on the Waterfront

Ninja

Nuclear War Games

The Search for King Solomon's Mines

The Secret of Bastow Manor

Skull Island

Anyone else play these over 20 years ago?

Bastow Manor was one of my early c64 favs, as was War Games. Bastow Manor had a number of bugs, one that I remember was a corrupted sprite in one of the rooms. Did you ever play Oasis of Shalimar which was made by the same guy I think.

So they were Aussie made? These games were made to a high standard considering they were programmed in basic.

The case of the mad mummy... I did a release of it with the Hokuto Force label, I remember that I had to fix a step in the solution because all the versions on the web were bugged.
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Have to say I never played any of these. Although I think some of the screenshots look familar from reviews going way back.
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Actually I play a few now and again. You probably heard of winfrotz? You can play all of Infocom's old classics.

http://users.actrix.co.nz/stevgrif/howplay.htm (one at random)

I would recommend Anchorhead. It has the old style but it is very descriptive so it is like reading a book!

Baf's Guide to the IF Archive is an excellent site. You will find hundreds of freely available to download stories to play here.

http://www.wurb.com/if/index

Recommend again... Anchorhead and make a map. But the map makes common sense.
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I think Castle Of Mydor was another one of his. I'm getting really nostalgic and think I will use a walkthru with Bastow Manor on the weekend, plus some beer of course.

i OWNed mURDER ON THE wATERFrONT - tHE TALKIEsT GAME i EVER HAD! I KIdnappEd it and held It tO ransom back in the 80's AnD iT wAs nEver pAid!

I also loved another relatively unknown called Stifflip and Co, which was also quite excellent!



Thanks for the memories Canute!
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I think the best title he ever did was Mystery Of Munroe Manor which was released by Severn Software in the UK. It was a take on one of the other games he did - but the cinematic intro and music was great (well at the time!) .

The game made use of some decent spot effects and sprite animation - although the parser was very limited, the character graphics and atmosphere were superb.

This guy was a genius where c64 character graphics were concerned - the detail he managed to achieve in some screens was impressive.

I also liked those adventures like Ninja.

Generally I liked such Basic adventures.

e.g. Himalaya Odissey whose author did some more titles which I cant recall

there were also some fine German basic adventuresc with neat char graphics, a few years back I translated the (in my opinion) best of them:

http://www.gb64.com/game.php?i...18&h=0

G'day Canute!

Fantastically nostalgic thread, I've got those good graphical adventure juju vibes happening! I can remember distinctly getting copies of both Alien and Skull Island from a mate in primary school and spending hours at the keyboard frothing at the mouth just trying to get the voice-over to say more than just "Sorry Matey!" or "OK!". They were fun experiments with pidgin english, but I never did really get that far in them. I actually got out a walkthrough for both of them a few years back! I had a copy of Murder on the Waterfront from a garage sale once too, but the disk died! But what I played of it was great.

However, when we start talking about the creations of Mountain Valley Software - that takes the my childhood obsession with graphical text adventures to another level altogether! Unfortunately not too many are listed in Lemon64 game's list, but most are listed in Gamebase.

Oasis of Shalimar (I never completed this one)
Castle of Mydor (Finished this!)
Volcano of Raka-Tua (And this!...with some help from a mate)
The Lost City (Escape from Raka-Tua on my disk copy) Unfinished!
Himalyan Odyssey (Long time ago...think I finished it!)
The Dark Planet (newly acquired)
The Scroll of Akhbar Khan (ditto)

That's all I can remember at the moment, but there might be more.
These games played a huge role in my childhood. I can still remember rushing to the computer room in grade three during lunchtimes in primary school (circa 1987) just to crowd around the grade six kid who was going to get further than anyone else before had done on Mystery Island - which was to become my first and most favourite text adventure ever. My computing teacher knew I loved it so much, so he kindly copied it to tape for me at the end of the year. Thanks Mr Lindsay!
I even went to night dreaming of finding emeralds and sapphires under my pillows! (You have to collect 10 treasures in the game).
I even had competitions with friends to see how fast we could finish the game, once we knew how. I think I can still remember the solution....

I had a rebirth with the genre in high school when a mate give me a single disk! (which I still have) with all of them except two, which I promptly plundered from Gamebase. (Dark Planet and Scroll of Akbhar Khan) Must get to try them out some day!

(Sorry to semi-hijack the thread Canute!)
Phew...I guess nostalgia aside, a rational question might be whether it
can it be confirmed that Darryl Reynolds was also involved in Mountain Valley Software? Its certainly a mysterious company.

I posted on a C64 solutions forum a year or so ago about the Lost City, hoping for more information about the creators, but I don't think I got a response. Must find the link now...

If anyone else has any relevant knowledge, let us know!
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Nice story, Bailsy. Text adventures really did captivate our imaginations back then.

Interesting about the mysterious Mountain Valley Software too. The extra adventure games you listed will hopefully be eventually added to the Lemon64 archive at some stage. Maybe Reynolds was responsible for some of them. Who knows?

Well, I finally tracked down the link where I'd previously asked for some info on Mountain Valley Software - it was at the C64 solutions forum some two years ago now.

http://c64.tin.at/forum/

No replies yet! Though I should hasten to add that I managed to track down a solution for The Lost City from Jacob Guness' superb solutions archive.

http://solutionarchive.com/

I guess I'm going to have to dig deeper into the esoteric obscurities of C64 history if I'm going find more info on this little company!
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Bastow Manor had this stupid bug where you are supposed to push a panel, but it had a pencil in the drawer somewhere. I think I aslo remembering objects going missing in the game, and the robot sprite at the end was a little corrupted.

...probably like my memory. This was long ago.

Man I never knew he did anything other than Bastow Manor and thermonuclearwargames! I'll have to check out his others.

Bastow Manor was one of my first c64 games (if not THE first) so i'm quite fond of it.

Re-reading my opening post, should have also stated that Daryll Reynolds overall made a valued contribution to the C64 text adventure genre. Despite some peoples' low votes, I really liked his games!

are any of these still available anywhere?

Hi,

I know this is originally an old post but I have just stumbled across it.

I developed most of the games refered to in this post under my SoftGold and Gameworx labels over 28 years ago - reading this made me realise how fast time goes !

Thanks for all the comments (good or otherwise) and it pleases me to see there is still an interest in this style of game. Back then when I saw an opportunity to write my own games I was playing with a Tandy TRS 80 until the Commodore Vic 20 appeared - what a lot of fun, hardly any memory, rudimentary graphics, tape storage. At the time, use of keyboard graphics for an adventure game was a real novelty but it added more to a plain text adventure. When the c64 appeared it was paradise !

All my games were sold locally (Australia) by myself initially then via an agent dealing with the retail chains. I also organised deals for sales in the UK (Severn Software), US and New Zealand. For UK sales, 'The Secret of Bastow Manor' became 'Mystery of Munroe Manor' with modifications.

Now the interesting thing is that I have been working on a project to re-release my titles in a similar format to the original but taking advantage of all the resources available now - however the focus of this project has been to retain the simple but entertaining and challenging aspects of the originals.

I have no set date for release as yet but things are moving along very well. I will most likely launch a new website for this or possibly use my www.gameboxstudios.com.au site. For those that have an interest I will post an updates to this forum.

Glad to answer any questions you may have.

Darryll

All these has been released on the Commodore Plus4. Lemon64 still needs to update Alien being available on the Plus4 too.

Very nice games I thought but only played them on the plussy. Same games though. Difficult but challenging. I prefer 2 parser text adventures anyway. I particularly like the use of the character set for the graphics
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