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In a medieval fantasy world, strange drugs appear that create an addiction among the population. It appears that they are all coming from one central point that is controlled by a mysterious stranger. The player controls a group of heroes in this role-playing game as he tries to find out the origins of the drug and to break down on the man who is responsible for them.

Today's release is a special one because Spirit of Adventure was never officially released in English by Starbyte way back in 1991.

CB of FGC worked his magic on it. He used the English PC version's files to translate the bulk of the original German version and then dived into the executable and fine-tuned the translation once more. Some of the fixes he has implemented ensure that the ST version more complete than the original PC one!

Download
Get your copy of the game here.

The download contains 3 x ZIPs (one each for the English, French and German versions). Within each separate language version is the .MSA disk image, or the files version for your hard-drive (real or emulated).

Hints and tips:
CB has these tips for those wanting to play this game:

-A good party is composed of 2 warriors and/or amazons, 1 samurai or banshee, 1 priest or faery, 2 magicians and/or godesses.

-Each character gets one magic skill when created, the mandatory ones are compass (puts a compass in the bottom right corner of the screen), armor (better defense for the whole party), regen (magic regeneration over time), wielder (better attack for the whole party), healer (HP regen when out of combat for the whole party) and booster (mind points regen for the whole party). YOU HAVE TO ACTIVATE EACH SKILL IN THE CHARACTER SCREEN.

-You start with a few weapons; you also have to activate them in the inventory.

-The game is in real time; if you don't move, time will pass but you will not be attacked by random enemies. The combats are not in real time, but negative effects like poison are. Also, there is a day/night cycle, and even week days. Some places may be closed during specific days.

-Dwarves give a nice amount of gold when killed (usually 100 GP).

-Don't waste mind attacks on stupid animals like bats or spiders.

-Samurais and banshees can (and should) be equipped with dual weapons. And buy your priest a bow and a lot of arrows.

-Gaining levels takes a lot of time, even the first level requires 1000 experience points. The enemies in the first town only give 5-20 XP depending on their strengh and number...

-Food rations are consumed real fast when travelling on the main map. There are of no use inside cities.

-Some shortcuts: num keys on main keyboard can be used for most menus, Y/N should also work, and to get back to the previous menu sometimes N or B can be used. To give an item to someone else, you have to click once on it then click on the name of the character you want to give it to. Hit CTRL-U to use an equiped item.

Elite are in charge of today's release which features a previously unreleased game, Trivia Game Show which was released by Energize in 1991. However, before you can play the game, there's an excellent new Elite intro by DHS (Code: Evil, Logo: Lowlife, Music: Epic).

Grab the game from this download link and start refreshing those grey cells using this quiz game.

The game is not the prettiest looking quiz game that is out there (*) but it's a rare release.

After playing the game and poking around the files on the disk, I (Mug UK) can offer you a little "Advent bonus": if you open up the .DAT files on the disk using a decent hex/text editor, you can see all of the questions before your very eyes. However, the correct answers aren't as easily marked though!

(*) I'm probably saving ST Graveyard some time with this one line review!

We're back tomorrow with yet another release.

Today's release - Star Fleet I: The War Begins - puts you as a new graduate of Starfleet Academy in command of a starship. The Federation is at war with the Krellans and Zaldrons, so the player has plenty of combatants to engage from the beginning. Every ship system is modelled in meticulous detail, making it a must play for all every armchair Trekkie commander.

This was released in 1984 for the older 8-bit machines, with this 16-bit version released in 1986. It was originally designed by Trevor Sorensen and developed by Interstel.

It is a strategy game that is similar to the old BASIC games that a few of the 'older generations' used to type in from 8-bit computer books. So don't expect too much in the "whizzy graphics" and "amazing sound" departments. This is how games used to look.

Download the ZIP file here

The FGC (it's that CB again) has done the fixes required for it to work on Falcon machines, as well as running from a real (or emulated) hard-disk too.

This is something that's a little bit out of the ordinary for today's Advent release: a collection of source code from one of the colder parts of Europe, Unique Developments Sweden (UDS).

UDS was the development team that created both Obsession and Substation for our Fuji-machines back in the day.

We interviewed Tord Jansson (of UDS) earlier this year. Click here to read that interview if you're interested in some of the history of UDS - from their early days doing STOS demos through to coding the excellent titles above.

This .ZIP is full of source code (in both assembly language and STOS) but it also contains other items, such as the music modules from their demos and games too. It really is a smörgåsbord of coding delights!

Far be it from me to spill the beans and tell you all what's inside this little 3.7MB ZIP file, you will just have to download it yourself and dive in! (There is a README file which gives you a few clues as to what's inside).

Don't forget to set your Google Translate options first though, as a lot of the comments will (naturally) be in Swedish

On this 8th day we bring you Zork : Solid Gold edition by Infocom. Fixed by CB. This rare version of the game has a new parser and a built in hint system.

From Mobygames : "Zork: The Great Underground Empire is a classic text adventure game. The player begins as an "adventurer" standing near a white house in a nice forest, but soon descends into the Great Underground Empire, where most of the game takes place. The player's quest is to collect the Nineteen Treasures of Zork.

As was typical for adventure games of its era, Zork does not use graphics. Instead, it communicates with the player via text, and the player interacts with the game by typing commands, such as "examine mailbox" or "take torch". For movement, the player types in geographical directions (such as "north" or "east" - or just "n" and "e", and can check what items are being carried with the "inventory" command (or just "i".

The game was adapted from a larger mainframe version from the late 1970s, and is one of the first examples of its genre."

Download Zork : Solid Gold edition

The countdown to Christmas continues. Today, we are happy to present a super famous game: Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny. This is the "penultimate" (no pun intended?) volume of the series on the Atari ST and it came out in 1989. It is also considered one of the best in the series.

This version has been patched by the FCG to work on hard drive. It also works on most of the configurations (it's even supported by the Falcon 030). It also features the runes alphabet patch. It's time to shut up and let you download the game. See you tomorrow!

Download Ultima 5 - Warriors of Destiny