THE SPECTRUM GAMES DATABASE THE GREEN DEATH PUBLISHER Spectraxx Tape Magazine AUTHOR Lee Tonks YEAR 1988 DESCRIPTION The Green Death is a text adventure game with illustrations, developed using Incentive's Graphic Adventure Creator, and given away as a free gift with an issue of Spectraxx tape magazine. (See Facts and Notes below for a description of both of these). CONTROLS Errrrm.....the keyboard? INSTRUCTIONS You play a normal worker on a interstellar starship, returning to Earth from a long mission in another galaxy. After being convicted of a crime you didn't commit (as always), you are sealed in suspended animation for the remaining three months of the journey - destined to face trial when you are revived back on Earth. However, not everything goes to plan and something happens to the ship en route. When a power failure accidentally revives you several million years later, you are the only human left alive on the entire ship (not very surprising, seeing as it's several million years later). However, during that time the plant life on board seems to have become a little more.... Bloodthirsty! You must survive long enough to escape in the ship's life pod, destroying the ship and it's contents first! CHEATS None, really. This is an adventure, after all. I should be able to do a walkthrough, really, seeing as I wrote it, but the truth is that I really don't remember..... I'll have a go and try to get all the way through it - in which case I'll update this text! SEQUELS/PREQUELS None. INLAY CARD TEXT None SCORES RECEIVED None URL's FTP://ftp.nvg.unit.no/pub/sinclair/snaps/games/adventure/ graphic/green-death.zip GENERAL FACTS The Green Death was designed specifically to be a freebie, given away as an incentive to buy my tape magazine, Spectraxx, way back in 1988. I sold a fair few, but I don't think too many people will have seen this before. The game took over two weeks to put together, including the time taken to map it out and decide on all the puzzles (i.e. before I even touched GAC!). It was probably the last of a long line of adventures that I produced over about six years, but was only the third to be written with GAC (the rest were created using The Quill, a much superior utility even though it was many years older). The other two GAC adventures were produced for Spectraxx and were called 'Magma Man' and 'A Nightmare on MEL Street'. However, the former refuses to load now, and the latter seems to be lost into the mists of time. The graphics are awful, I admit it. I'm crap at drawing and the tools offered by GAC are pathetic to say the least. I only put them in because other people like graphics, personally I believe a thousand words say much more than any picture! The snapshot was made by me! I uploaded it to NVG too, just to see what people thought of it. It still seems okay by GAC standards, I guess I'll have to play it seriously for a while - I don't remember how it ends! NOTES The Graphic Adventure Creator was released by Incentive and allowed the user to create his or her own graphic text adventures with no programming knowledge. It was fairly easy to use, but the interface was fairly slow and the graphics capabilities were dire to say the least. A snap of GAC is available from NVG, and will work with any emulator which supports some kind of tape support (or you won't be able to save your adventure as a stand-alone game!). Z80 can save Speccy tape output to a .TAP file - this is fine.