Question about Quill version of Pirate Adventure

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pippa
Posts: 57
Joined: Sun Jan 16, 2005 3:28 am
Location: London

Question about Quill version of Pirate Adventure

#1 Post by pippa »

World of Spectrum has a version of Scott Adams' Pirate Adventure that's written on The Quill. (In fact one of the CASA screenshots is from this version, via WoS. See if you can guess which one it is!)

Does anyone know where this comes from, and who wrote it? WoS lists it as "Original Release", but I doubt that! And it wouldn't be the first time they've got adventure details wrong.

The program itself claims to be "From The Original By Scott Adams", whatever that means. Was this an official port, or just a fan project?

There are various changes to the text. A lot of static objects have been moved into location descriptions, and messages have been altered. For example, where Scott had: "Bird flys off looking very unhappy", the Quill game says: "The parrot take fright and flies away."

Very odd.
[b]~~[i] Pippa [/i]~~[/b]
dave
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Joined: Tue Aug 21, 2007 10:20 pm

Re: Question about Quill version of Pirate Adventure

#2 Post by dave »

It looks like an unofficial port, just like the C64 German version of Adventureland, and some more that have been removed from our database.

Because Adventureland and Pirate Adventure were published in magazines with full source code they are commonly re-interpreted. (I myself have sort of done one in the past couple of years for the BBC Micro.)
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pippa
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Joined: Sun Jan 16, 2005 3:28 am
Location: London

Re: Question about Quill version of Pirate Adventure

#3 Post by pippa »

Thanks for the reply, Dave. You could be right.

Mind you. If he had the source code, he didn't follow it very closely. As well as all the pointless little changes to the messages (e.g. "There's a strange sound"/"I hear a strange noise") there seem to be some changes to the actual game mechanics.

You need to actually WEAR the sneakers, not just GET them. This seems to have been introduced just to take advantage of the Quill's built-in Wear routine. And because worn items don't count towards inventory limits, the players strength has been reduced from 6 items to 5. (So you're still limited to the sneakers and 5 other objects. But if you drop the sneakers, you can't carry a non-sneaker object instead!)

Also, there's no advertising flyer or "I like parrots" note hidden in the book. But the parrot can still shout "Check the book," even though there's no reason to. That's why I wonder if this was a fan project based on memories of actually playing the original game, not the source code. (You'd think the programmer would've put his own credit in the flyer, if he'd known it existed!)

I think tomorrow I'll play through the two games side-by-side to compare all the differences in detail, just so there's a thorough record of what was changed.
[b]~~[i] Pippa [/i]~~[/b]
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