Hello and welcome to Adventure4!  

No, this is not Yet-Another-Adventure variant.  It may stick to a single
verb/noun commands (shock , horror!  - no adjectives, no prepositions...
not even a special kludge for putting objects into other objects!!), but
it has something many other pretenders do not have - character. 

To  start with, Adventure4 re-merges the two divergent extensions of the
the original game (Peter Luckett's and Jack Pike's Adventure II and Dave
Platt's Adventure 550), with some minor improvements all of its own. 

More  importantly,  however, the game had benefited from being a part of
an official games package on a very large installation, which allowed me
to  scan  through  literally thousands of game logs generated by a large
number of players.  Adventure4 incorporates a  number  of  modifications
and  improvements,  based solely on this unique experience of seeing the
game as it is played and *not*  as  the  author  might  have  wished  or
expected  it to be played.  Judging from players' feedback, it does make
a difference. 

If you have a hard disk, I suggest you copy over to it both ADV4.EXE and
ADVENTUR.DAT.  The text database size is far too large for most  PCs  to
hold in memory, so the game constantly accesses the data file.  ADV4.EXE
does a lot of clever internal buffering to make up  for  this,  and  the
game  *is*  playable  from  a  floppy,  but  there is no point suffering
needlessly, is there? 

Anyway,  have  a  go  and  see  what you think!  Afterwards, if you feel
strongly enough about it, don't  hesitate  to  let  me  know  what  your
thoughts were, be they rude or polite - all opinions welcome. 


                                        3rd November, 1991

                                        Mike Arnautov 
                                        Glaxo Group Research,
                                        Greenford Road,
                                        Greenford,
                                        Middlesex UB6 0HE,
                                        England.

                                        mla1290@ggr.co.uk

P.S.   Adventure4  is  written  in  a  superset  of  Dave Platt's A-code
language and is highly portable.  It is available under many flavours of
Unix as well as under Primos, VMS and (obviously!) MS-DOS.