"Simple enough, but missing the bad grammar you'd expect..."

However, there is a question of a game having points where it drags on a bit to give the feel that it is bigger than it really is. Troll's Tale, a very early PC game featured on Al Lowe's website, harbors no such illusions. Apparently there are even more simple games being cranked out today; most of them involve meticulously drawn pornography, wretched fantasies, and choosing between several options, with twenty correct in a row leading to your, ahem, goal. Troll's Tale, written well before all this, still beats these games. It's the sort I wished I'd been able to make when I had an old Apple program called 'Storybook Construction Set' or something and almost makes me want to learn the simpler aspects of graphic programming to make my own game.

Now there seem to be no end of Dungeons and Dragons style books, and Choose Your Own Adventure almost sputtered to two hundred before the series was over. This game is based on that concept, only it is easier to re-cycle to locations. You have about twenty locations, and on each one you have three options underneath a big picture, with space scrolling among possible choices and return selecting. The object is to find all fifteen treasures that the Troll has taken from King Mark and scattered through a cave and the land beyond. They aren't much in the way of treasures; pennies figure in three of them and you also have a tasty sucker to go with the usual treasure chest, gold, silver and jewels that your average low-rent treasure hunt game always seems to have. The troll may also pop up randomly on any screen you enter, precluding you from getting the treasure until you leave and come back.

You will probably need to write down the map to the game if only because there are some one-way doors necessitated by having only three options, and the game frequently confuses 'left' for west. The one-way gauntlet at the start seems particularly pointless. You also have a bunch of ways to teleport, with switches and levers and bowls of magic liquid. But in the end it is not terribly confusing, and you will find there are many secret nooks and passages and inlets that result from having just the three options per room.

Given the game's early production date I was bowled over to see the different colors in the title screens. They were up there with Apple GR for variety! But that was just the introduction for the upgraded version. Still, despite the four-color limitations the game generally looks quite good except for when it tries to plaster a troll over the background. It uses the concept of striping two colors alongside each other well, and generally you have shapes that are hard to botch, such as stairs or dark caverns or huts or trees. Of course there are many bizarre rooms situated next to each other, but the pictures usually look as though the exits are supposed to be, and items you've taken even vanish from the screen. The game also makes an attempt at sound, with a few beeps for when you pick up treasure and a few tunes when you're doing especially well.

Troll's Tale should not take more than a half hour to solve, and even though it is shockingly easy, it's fun to run around and pick up all the items. It's also true that many of the tougher items to find are relics of slight unfairness(one way doors not mentioned or options that change the second time you visit a room,) but I enjoyed myself all the way through it. And this confusion makes it hard to remember how to breeze through the game at a later date, so for an change from the standard time-wasting computer game with cards or whatever(I believe every computer should have a suite of such alternative games,) Troll's Tale is not bad every few months or so. It will probably outdo many modern and more graphically detailed efforts at simplicity, and it is interesting as a sort of juvenilia for a programmer who went on to much bigger things.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 07/22/02, Updated 07/22/02