Adventure XT
The sinister wizard Mordimar, having come into possession of the powerful
magical artifact the Orb of Destiny, is slowly sapping the life-force from the
forests of Blarg. Your goal: to retrieve the Orb, for the sake of the blighted
woods!
Author Paul Panks is known in IF circles for having settled on an early form
of the text adventure (perhaps that contemporary to the game’s maybe namesake,
the IBM Personal Computer XT?) as the pure, classic ideal to be visited and
revisited in permutations of his many experiments, unhindered by modern
developments in interactive fiction authoring systems, advances in game
design, and even improvements on primitive dialects of BASIC, his apparent
development environment of choice.
In most of them, sparse locations, mute NPCs and to-the-death monsters turn up
in predictable (classic?) configurations, fortified with occasionally
inspired, occasionally jarring train-wreck often-anachronistic mashups of
cognitive dissonance — here special unlicensed cameo appearances from
Gargamel, Azrael and several Smurfs… also rising to North American fame in a
period roughly contemporary to the IBM XT.
Adventure XT