Black Tower is a BASIC adventure by Thrillsoft, a company new to me. If they learn to program in machine code, one obviously destined for success. The reason I say this is that this adventure appears to have been well designed, though not implemented to its full potential.

The adventure has you shipwrecked upon an island to which you went to search for your friend, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances...

However, this game has one strange anomaly not found in other adventures for the Dragon in that the player is controlling not only himself as "Joe Average" but also a muscular father, a slightly weaker mother, and a young child, each of which can perform certain tasks that the others cannot.

For example, whilst you may not have enough strength to lift a large rock, the father might, so whilst GET ROCK as a command will give a reply along the lines of "You can't do that", typing GET ROCK1 (where 1 is the code for father) will achieve the desired effect, and so on.

The adventure starts fairly innocently but is planned so that just as the adventurer starts to become a bit bored with the drabness of the setting they come across a diary which reads ... no, I won't spoil the surprise - suffice it to say that it is enough to wrench the player back into the game with renewed vigour.

I hope that the game I received was a review (pre-production) copy as the cassette cover was dot matrix printed and the game stopped with an ?SN error when I died from drinking a poisoned stream (which I suppose I should have EXAMINEd first); due to the anti-piracy technique employed, the game was un-listable (without POKEing around in the guts) and so, for the average Dragon owner, un-restartable, and thus in need of re-loading - not really very fair!

I would have liked a list of commands, and some more purple prose to describe the locations but I can wait for Infocom or Level 9 to recognise the Dragon!

The game has SAVE and LOAD commands and is a fairly easy adventure, so for the beginner who likes a challenge you could do a lot worse than get this program - provided they iron out the bugs!