African Adventure

Baf's Guide

Being a BASIC text adventure from the early 1980-ies, In Search of Dr. Livingston features (quite unsurprisingly) almost no plot and minimalist descriptions. Those are quite doubtful virtues in themselves; unfortunately, the game has got a few more confusing surprises for the player. One of them was the way it only understood commands in upper case for the most part; this was especially delusive because some of the commands (e.g., QUIT) were understood both in upper and in lower case, and as I found out later, at a couple of points in the game lower-case input was required. Then, there were several minor bugs or, rather, behaviour inconsistencies - sometimes, one action would have different results when repeated for no apparent reason (like room exits mentioned in the descriptions: some of them were totally unavailable in spite of being listed, but a few of them would suddenly get you somewhere after you tried entering them several times). The worst of all, however, were the puzzles - mostly of the "try something random" type. I quickly found myself completely unable to solve the game, and resorted to the source code that came with it. Even then, it wasn't *that* easy - as mentioned above, the game was written in BASIC, and untangling the spaghetti code turned out to be quite a feat. In fact, I lost patience before long and gave it up, feeling I already spent more time on it than it was worth. An even harder task, however, was thinking of one single reason why someone would play this. The only thing I could come up with was nostalgia; since, however, my personal childhood isn't burdened with memories of playing primitive (or any, for that matter) text adventures, In Search of Dr. Livingston had got no chances on me, sorry.

-- Valentine Kopteltsev