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.

