UGVM Retro Week – The Hobbit (Spectrum)
Ok, so I played this to death as a wee tot. At the time, the ability to type actual English (well, nearly) into a computer and see the characters in the game respond. It wasn’t my first adventure game, though, having spent a silly amount of time playing DEC Dungeon (i.e. Zork I) on a VAX, but it was the first adventure on an ACTUAL COMPUTER in my bedroom, and therefore amazing.
As adventures go, it’s a little flawed. The self-drawing vector graphics allow a fair number of static scenes to be drawn and still leaving room for a couple of dozen locations. Not bad for a little 48K machine. The adventure is, of course, very linear but not without its challenges. Like this one:
The Goblin Dungeon. Never has there been such an annoying construct in a video game. The sheer pain of being captured and slung into this room over and over again is sheer hell. When I completed this game as a lad, I skipped the whole goblin dungeon bit completely, so I never got the Ring, never met Gollum, and thus only really completed half the game. Well, time to address that. I’ve started playing again as part of the uk.games.video.misc retro week and – well – I’m in the Goblin’s Dungeon.
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