Game Review: Spy Trek Adventure (ZX Spectrum, Americana)

Americana was a confusing budget label for many. It’s split ownership, run by both Mastertronic and US Gold at different stages in its lifetime focused primarily on re-releases. The majority were games of American original as the name suggested, with the rest being arcade conversions or licensed titles. But a few original titles slipped through the cracks, including Spy Trek Adventure – a text adventure for the ZX Spectrum (also available for the C64 and Amstrad) written by Peter Torrance…

Spy Trek Adventure – The Story Begins

You’re a Spy and you’re on a Trek. That’s pretty much Spy Trek Adventure in a nutshell. As you can tell from the title, you’re a secret agent – essentially a Temu James Bond without the glitz and glamour. As one of the government’s top you’ve been assigned to recover some “secret plans” that are somewhere in Europe. Your mission is to find and retrieve the plans and bring them back home.

Your predecessor who was last in posession of these failed to bring them back just before meeting his untimely end, but managed to hide them safely. You’ve been left clues as to where they are so it’s down to you to return them and make it back in one piece.

Getting Started

So you’re a corpse. Well, not quite but at the beginning of the game you’re already being pursued so your death has been faked. You’re alive but you find yourself inside a closed coffin and somehow you’ve got to find a way out. It’s a fairly simple puzzle to be solved and more a case of finding the right words to use, and once you’ve figured that out you discover that you’re in ther back of a hearse on the way to a secret location. Soon after that, you discover that you’ve been given a new identity to carry out your mission – Mike Rodot (say it quickly).

From there, it’s standard text adventure fare, exploring your surroundings, examining everything you find and moving your way through the locations in your hunt for the secret plans.

That Looks Familiar

If, like me, you’ve been playing text adventures regularly then the screen layout and visual style used for Spy Trek Adventure may seem rather familiar. And you’d be right as the author Peter Torrance developed it using Incentive Software’s The Graphic Adventure Creator. It has to be said that using GAC does give everything a certain look and feel – as it did for his other titles Subsunk and Seabase Delta – but it does take away the hard part of adventure creation allowing writers to focus on the plot and puzzle development rather than worrying about the coding side of things.

While there are those that are dismissive of adventures produced with packages like this, The Quill and so on, it is an incredibly powerful package and capable of creating some complex adventures. It has a great deal of scope in terms of what it can offer to both the author and the player.

Getting Interactive

One advantange I found as a player with games designed using the Graphic Adventure Creator is that the descriptions for each location not only mention the location name in UPPER CASE (making mapping much easier), but also the key items that you can interact with as well. This may seem like a minor thing, but when it comes to trying to figure out puzzles, you don’t have to think about what items to look for or use.

The parser is also more complicated than you might expect, allowing multiple commands to be entered at once and while it’s not quite on the level of Infocom’s parser it’s impressive for an adventure creation tool.  The only thing I did find disappointing was the lack of some of the commonly used abbreviations found in other adventures. For example, it doesn’t recognise I as a shortcut for INVENTORY, but it does accept INV. This is more on the developer than anything else though as you can create a list of words with a shared meaning when you create a verb list. The same applies to objects so you could have CASE/BRIEFCASE and so on.

But I Can See It…

At this point, I can’t stress enough how important it is why I mentioned how useful it is that locations and objects are displayed in UPPER CASE in Spy Trek Adventure. There are more than a few instances where you’ll visit locations where the descriptions will mention things that you can see but you can’t interact with them.

One of the worst offenders I found was very early on in the game. Shortly after your trip in the funeral car you find yourself in a storeroom and while you are told a few objects are visible, the illustration also shows a wastebin and a ladder up against a wall. You can examine both and are told that you don’t see anything special, but if you try to take them the game doesn’t recognise that they exist.

This is really a combination of two problems. First, the graphics themselves have been designed with items that are not physically present in the game to be interacted with (presumably to add atmosphere and add depth to the locations). Secondly, if something isn’t on the object list then the player should be told that they can’t see it, not be given the response they are.

Say That Again…

Even though my first foray into gaming was with a Pong clone in the 70s, my first computer game was Adventureland from Scott Adams so it was that entire genre that drew me into computer games. However, there are a some things that I always found frustrating with them and unfortunately these are both present in Spy Trek Adventure. One that happened early on in this (and something I noticed recently in Questprobe: Spideman and The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy) was the need to repeat commands a number of times to solve a puzzle. When you encounter any puzzle like this it does make you wonder what the author is thinking. After you enter a command once and nothing happens, you immediately think you need to do something else to solve the puzzle and you just end up wasting time or screaming out for a hint or two – which most games aren’t willing to offer. Then there’s the other issue…

Save Save Save!

One thing I can’t stress enough with Spy Trek Adventure is that the save feature (or save state if you’re playing on an emulator to keep your original tape safe) will quickly become your best friend on your quest. While I didn’t encounter any locations where just walking into them lead to instant death (one of my pet hates with interactive fiction), there were numerous instances where player demise happened very quickly if you couldn’t solve a key puzzle quickly enough. In fact, once you solve the game’s first puzzle you only have a few moves to figure out what you need to do to solve the next one or it’s game over.

Now, I don’t mind games that kill players off if you do something that really warrants it, but taking a couple of moves too many and having events take place that are beyond your control just makes the game punishing when it doesn’t need to be. Each time you enter a command, it’s classed as making a move and if you’re struggling to find the right words to do something and die as a result it’s simply not fair.

Playability

But many of my gripes so far are technical issues and have little or no bearing on the gameplay itself. Despite the odd spelling mistake here and there, the descriptions are well written and give you a good sense of what’s going on in each of the quite varied locations for the game. In fact, I’d say they’re strong enough that you could even opt to turn the graphics off if you wished (which would also speed the game up).

Even though some of the puzzles are repetitive and a little frustrating, especially where unexpected death occurred too frequently, it’s a fun and challenging adventure and you’ll find yourself eager to keep playing to see what awaits, especially as the game shifts between countries and you begin to explore the globe. Truthfully, I think this variety in the locations really helps there as well so you don’t get bored of the clichéd never ending corriodors, open forests, roads and so on that seem to fill other adventure games so often.

Presentation

I won’t talk about graphics and sound for Spy Trek Adventure, but rather the game’s presentation as it’s unfair to comment on sound when it has none. The screen layout itself follows the same structure as most games developed using the Graphic Adventure Creator with the illustration at the top and the text panel underneath. The graphics for each location take a second or so to draw each time, but this is down to the game engine itself as images were created in GAC using a line drawing method rather than a traditional paint tool to save memory. It has to be said that the images themselves aren’t particularly fantastic, but considering the tools at his disposal, they do the job. Not every location is illustrated and a few of the images are duplicated with just minor colour changes but I would assume this was done to save memory. You can swap them out using TEXT or GRAPHICS though to suit your personal taste.

Also, some of the text can be a little cramped on screen as it’s not as spaced out as games developed using custom engines, but again this is another quirk of the GAC engine and there wasn’t anything that Peter Torrance could do to change that. You get location descriptions, user commands and responses all packed together and it can be difficult to read, but you do get used to it quickly enough.

Overall

As a gamer, I’m quite happy buying games that were created and released commercially that were produced using the Graphic Adventure Creator. I started writing a sci-fi game of my own with it years ago and found it to be a great package so I’ve always appreciated the work anyone put it to create finished games with it. So bearing that in mind I did honestly enjoy playing Spy Trek Adventure, even if some of the puzzles were frustrating or illogical.

It’s far from perfect, and the quick deaths and repetitive nature of some of the problems do sadly destract from what could have been a bigger success but as a budget release it’s still worth giving it a try. Hardened adventure fans won’t be disappointed.

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