C64 Game Memories - Revisited 30+ Years later : Aztec Tomb

My first dip into adventure games on the C64 is Aztec Tomb released by Alligata in late 1982/early 1983.

I have a love/hate relationship with adventure games where I cannot decide if I prefered the earlier all-text adventures or the 'graphical' text adventures. For my money, i'd probably go with the former because of the C64 limitations at the time. With an all-text adventure it was very much like reading a book but taking part and you had to imagine your surroundings yourself - I was also a big fan of the Fighting Fantasy books as a kid. I think todays kids wouldn't even give them a look to be honest, but its a different era.

My gripe with early graphical adventures was that the graphics were not good and rather than add to the believeability of your adventure they took away from it and Aztec Tomb is no exception.

Aztec Tomb is a weird game which feels didn't take long to write. The blurb on the back of the cassette suggests you are deep in the amazon rain forest and must find a hidden tomb but to be honest it looks a bit like suburbia! In a text adventure it would be so much more grand.

It's a fairly basic adventure with the usual commands, graphics which use the C64 basic keystrokes and has copious amounts of really bad english vocabulary. I mean, i'm not one to talk but look at the screenshots!

It would be another 5-6 years before the graphics and sound would make graphical adventure games exciting, especially the point and click variety. So yes, I guess i'm saying give me any famous Infocom text adventure all day. An all-text game would have me imagining the scene on the cover of the cassette tape above.

This would have kept me occupied back in the day, but now? Meh.. . bin it!