Review of Dragonlord

Dragonlord is a short adventure game that is written in the style of the old Choose-Your Own-Adventure books. You don’t have to fuss about with typing

>attack thief with elven sword of great antiquity

or whatever, since the game gives you a short series of options to point at and click. Dragonlord is beautifully presented, and has a clever story as well. It’s a painless way of spending half an hour or so, and is well worth downloading. You can get it from http://www.users.qwest.net/~gainaz/ or http://www.zdnetindia.com/downloads/games/info/2301521.html.

The game engine

Dragonlord uses a custom game engine, which was written by Okey Ikeako. The game is purely text based (except for some placeholder art), but it is presented beautifully in grey on a black background. It is very good to look at, and there were no bugs or glitches that I could find.

The text adventure community generally disparages people who write their own game engines, rather than using authoring systems such as TADS or Inform. The argument goes that a one-off game will never be as good as one of these systems, which have benefitted from the efforts of talented programmers over many years. In particular, TADS and Inform have excellent systems to interpret the text entered by the player.

In this case, the game engine is just about perfect. It looks great, and text parsing isn’t an issue since it uses a multiple choice system.

The story

The story was written by Mark Silcox, who worked professionally on the N64 game Aidyn Chronicles, the First Mage. He also runs the Suite101.com interactive fiction site.

Dragonlord tells the story of Ambrose Folley, reluctant dragon slayer. It is set in the familiar world of 1970s text adventures, where mythological figures such as trolls and pixies rub along happily with baseball cards and plastic back-scratchers.

It is a lightweight piece of fluff, but it bubbles along happily as Ambrose heads north to meet his destiny.

Conclusion

I suppose you could call Dragonlord a magazine article, compared to the epic novels – I’m thinking of the Baldur’s Gate series here -- that fill the shelves at Electronic Boutique. It’s perfect for one of those evenings when your brain has shut down, there’s nothing on the TV, and you just can’t face the intricacies of anything complicated.