[comp.sys.apple] wilderness game, a review

jmdavis@ihuxy.UUCP (Davis) (11/27/86)

Wilderness distributed by Electronic Arts is (in my opinion) the first
TRUE graphic adventure.  To be sure there are various types of
graphic adventures: ULTIMA type where you move your character to
the right places and have no language interaction problems, seems
rather arcadish; Graphics replacing text type where the prose doesn't
contain enough information alone to solve the puzzles but important
info is hidden in the pictures which is a) usually hard to find and
b) loaded slooooowly in from disk; and then there is WILDERNESS.

Your plane has crashed in the mountians and you must choose what
equipment you will take on your trek through the woods in search
of the ranger station about a week's trip away.  No prose can
fully describe the situation as you must determine from the looks
of the surroundings where you are on the map (mountian to the west,
river to the south, ahhhhh I think I am here!).  This is an adventure
that can be played again and again since you can change the season
in which you crash (winter- water easy to find but COLD, summer-
easy to travel) and even create a different terrain altogether.
The random variables include what stuff you crashed with intact,
if you have pots and pans, a gun and no broken bones from the crash
consider yourself lucky.

The instructions read like a survival guide and indeed they say they
got help from the armed services in preperation of this guide.  At
first the rules seem complicated, since they include detailed
descriptions of how to build various types of traps.  But to 
build a trap in the game simply requires saying BUILD TRAP (it
is assumed you know how to do it).  The language features of the
game are a bit sparce (similar to games 5 years back) but this
causes no problems.  And as a plus the scenery is not stored on disk
but is rendered from a database which makes it a little faster
that simply loading a picture in from disk.

There are a few minor problems, it seems to say in the rules that
you can swim down stream or across streams or raft across streams,
but you cannot raft down stream.  But this (and other small things)
did not prevent me from getting to the ranger station.

A great adventure game and if you thing flight simulators will
help you fly then this will surely help you survive in the
Wilderness.



			Mike Davis
			ihnp4!ihuxy!jmdavis