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→Beanstalk Adventure
| requirements = console, monitor or television, disk drive and controller, Extended BASIC cartridge, 32K memory expansion
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I have mixed feelings about the Beanstalk Adventure. The first night I had it the kids and I played it for hours. The combination of a well-known storyline, the anticipation of how it unwinds and the challenge of finding one's way through a landscape that seems vaguely familiar kept the midnight oil burning for more than one night.
Alas, though we seemed at one point to be on the verge of solving the adventure and defeating the giant, we also found out that this game is relatively easy to crash via the input of perfectly intelligible words at the wrong time. Mentioning the phrase
"cut axe" causes a syntax error, stopping the game. (I tried cut axe to try to cut the beanstalk down, a particularly sensible thing to do in view of the story). Other unusual entries caused the computer to lock up tighter than a drum. Having stumbled
upon this anomaly, we started entering other words and they too locked up the machine. It had the effect of dampening my enthusiasm, to put it mildly.
Ordinarily such problems, though not actually "bugs," wouldn't bug me, but in a text adventure game you expect to make mistakes in typing, not to mention entering words randomly in the hopes of finding one that works. Here, though, entering an unusual command may result in the completed destruction of your patience.
===Performance===
Beanstalk Adventure loads automatically from diskette and is unprotected. The program is actually a translation for the TI home computer.
Predictably, the storyline of this
adventure resembles the tale of Jack
and the Beanstalk. As the central
character, Jack, you are told by your
mother to sell the family cow. After
finding your way to a village, you
have the option of selling it to a
butcher or trading it for the fabled
