Back in the early days of home computing, technology was so limited that displaying anything other than text characters was next to impossible. All that you could do was type commands and create small programs using BASIC or some other programming language. Some computer experts decided to exploit the latter, even though the technology of the late '70s to early '80s was severely limited. Remember folks, this was before 1984, when the first versions of GUI operating systems like the Macintosh OS and Microsoft Windows came around, even before people started widely using MS-DOS instead of BASIC.
These very smart individuals created interactive text adventure games on their home computers. These programmers would create vast situations and dilemmas in their games, couple with richly detailed descriptions of surroundings that made you feel like you were actually in the game, even though there were no graphics to accompany you. One of the most popular text games of the early computing era that is still a huge cult favourite today is the crime simulator "Drug Wars". Many hardcore and old-school gamers, both young and old, still play a certain version of "DW" today, and you can find many versions, including the original version, on the Internet.
This brings me to the "Computer Novel Construction Set", a simple DOS utility that allows you to create and test text
games. Basically, the words "Computer Novel" translate into text adventure games, since text games are basically styled like a novel. What makes this text game editor different from others you may have seen on the Internet is that there is huge amount of friendly menus and dialog boxes that can assist you during the creation of your text game. There are menus that have dialog indexes which tells you what commands to type and what they do. Other menus can give you a step-by-step tutorial for creating a basic bare bones text game. These tutorials come in very handy if you're too young to know what a text game is, or forgot how they work.
To put it plainly, this application shows you the in's and out's of creating quality amateur text adventure games. Now, once you have gotten used to how it all works, you'll find that creating text games is relatively easy after a little practice, some trial and error. If you're a hardcore gamer, old-school gamer, or curious about the first generation of interactive home computer games, or if you want to learn how to create your own text games, then this would be a great download for you. It doesn't matter if you plan on running this game on an ancient 386 beige box or a top of the line Vista system with all the bells and whistles, this program is worth giving a shot.
You may or may not find it necessary to run DOSBox with this program. I tested the program on my Pentium MMX 200 Windows 98SE tower system, and there were no complications when I ran it without the aid of DOSBox. However, if you feel sceptical about it, then your best bet is to use DOSBox.
Again, the "Computer Novel Construction Set" is a worthy download if you're into old school games, a text game fanatic, or simply curious. Why not download the program and give it a spin on your PC.
