Dear Future Gamer

Regarding your recent comment on the irritation in text adventures where the person playing had to think up the exact syntax to carry on, here's a classic one for you from the old ZX Spectrum Game Mountains of Ket.

You're on a horse and reach a cave mouth. The cave mouth is too small for you to enter on your horse. What do you type? "Dismount horse"? Nope. "Get off horse"? No way. "Climb off horse"? You must be kidding.

After many fruitless attempts, the command was... "Drop horse"!

Would you believe it? It just shows how far adventure games have evolved.

Douglas Nicol

FG: Oh I remember the great days of dreadfully limited parsers in text adventure games. You'd be stuck for weeks for exactly the reason you've highlighted above. Still, at (usually) £1.99, I'd just chuck the game away and go and get another one. You can't really do that with a game that's some £45, so it's a good job we don't get stuck with that kind of scenario anymore. Or do we? Send your nightmare brick wall stories here please.