FRANKENSTEIN ADVENTURE


Welcome to Frankenstein Adventure, based on the story of Dr Frankenstein and 
his monster (the Boris Karloff film version rather than the book). The game was 
originally released in October 1981 as a 16K BASIC file in CLOAD magazine, which 
was produced on cassette for the TRS-80/Video Genie computer. 

There's nothing particularly special about the game, but looking at the listing 
helped me start programming my own adventure games in BASIC and I wouldn't like 
the game to be completely lost. This Inform version sticks fairly closely to the 
original (including the rather sparse text), though there are one or two minor 
changes and a greater variety of verb/noun alternatives.

For fun (and to see how it works), I've also implemented a 'bones file' (as 
outlined in ex137 of DM4) to generate the ghosts of the previous 10 player 
characters killed in the game. This is set 'off' by default. To switch on the 
ghosts, type GHOSTS ON (or HAUNT) near the start of the game. 
This creates and uses an auxiliary file (called 'catacombs') for ghosts whenever 
the player character is killed. The file is read after the GHOSTS ON command. 
If the file isn't found (as when using this for the first time), a fresh one will 
be created the next time the player dies. 
Some computer systems (such as RISC OS) do the file handling for all this 
transparently in the background; others (such as Windows or EPOC) ask the player 
to confirm each file read/save, which can get slightly irritating. If any filer 
boxes appear, just accepting all the defaults seems to work.

By entering the command HELP some special help hints are available at 
certain points in the game. Type GAMES or INSTRUCTIONS for more general help on 
playing adventure games of this type.

The names of objects can usually be abbreviated by typing just the first 
three letters. 
You can use the standard Inform Save/Restore and Undo to recover from wrong moves, 
and some game interpreters may allow you to do this repeatedly. This may be useful 
if your game character is killed.

There is also an Acorn RISC OS version of the game for the Archimedes.

William Stott, March 2004 (wstott@bigfoot.com)