Jewels of Darkness

Jewels of Darkness (formerly the Middle-Earth Trilogy) is a trilogy of text adventure games by Level 9. The individual games were initially released separately in 1983. They featured some themes inspired by the books of J. R. R. Tolkien and so became known as the Middle-Earth Trilogy.

Jewels of Darkness
MS-DOS cover art
Developer(s)Level 9
Publisher(s)Telecomsoft
Platform(s)Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Amstrad PCW, Atari 8-bit, Atari ST, Commodore 64, Macintosh, MS-DOS, MSX, ZX Spectrum
Release1986
Genre(s)Interactive fiction
Mode(s)Single-player

In 1986 the three games were revised, expanded and rereleased together as a compilation. For legal reasons the references to Middle-earth were removed and the trilogy was retitled Jewels of Darkness. The games include simple static graphics.

The games
Opening screen of Colossal Adventure for MS-DOS

Colossal Adventure

An expanded version of the original Adventure by Will Crowther and Don Woods

Adventure Quest

Similar in structure to the previous game; the player must defeat the Dark Lord.

Dungeon Adventure

A continuation of the previous game; following the defeat of the Dark Lord, the player must explore his tower looking for treasure.

Reception
Reception
Review score
PublicationScore
Zzap!92%[1]

Computer Gaming World stated that the compilation's claim that the games had been "significantly revised to incorporate the latest innovative techniques" was false. It described the puzzles as illogical, the Commodore version's graphics as "crude", and, like the parser, below the standard of previous Firebird text adventures.[2]

"[The graphics are] colourful but they're not great works of art. And the location descriptions and scenarios have always struck me as being good enough on their own."
Zzap! issue sept. 1986[1]

gollark: Not particularly. They're not cost effective for that.
gollark: Although I doubt the research™ was able to research™ the extreme high end.
gollark: As far as I know, life satisfactiony measures mostly increase logarithmically with money.
gollark: Fun fact: we live in a society.
gollark: It's overclocked.

References
  1. Jewels of Darkness review in Zzap! issue 17, sept. 1986, p. 74, ISSN 0954-867X here
  2. Seacat, Douglas (February 1988). "Jewels of Darkness". Computer Gaming World. No. 44. pp. 23, 26. Retrieved 24 April 2016.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.