Publisher: Legend
Developer: Legend
Year: 1993
Platform: DOS
Review: Rated by many the best adventure game of 1993 and it’s pretty obvious to see why. You are the infamous Eric the Unready. You have been assigned to save the princess from her evil stepmother. Unbeknownst to you, you were assigned because you are the most ill-equipped knight in the land.
As with the early Legend games that used a text parser, you can play the game with or without graphics. The graphics are gorgeous for the time, and being a comedy they do well to serve the humor. The music is pleasant if too repetitive.
It’s more of a parody than a game. To the skilled adventurer, this should take less than a couple of weeks to win. The puzzles are not all that well-developed, and can even be annoying at times. But it is without a doubt the funniest game I have ever played. Bob Bates spoofs everything from Star Trek to Saturday Night Live to Zork and has a grand ole time with medieval culture. There is something here for everyone. I haven’t played the game since 2000, however, so it’s possible the jokes have become dated.
Contemporary Rating: Medium. Some of the puzzles seemed there just for busy-work.
Cruelty Rating: Tough. Like many text games, you can get rid of objects that you need later, but you never really need to.
Death By Troggles 
I remember booting this game up, seeing the interface, and quitting. Maybe I should give the game a second go, but it’s hard to go from the beautiful full screen graphics that were popular at the time to a near-text adventure.
Kudos on their Boris Vallejo cover art though.
Legend had a good parser, plus verb and noun lists if you were stuck. I believe this was their last game with a text parser, and their most user-friendly. The Spellcasting games are cruel. TimeQuest is fun, but really hard and I never finished it. The Gateway games are considered two of the best text games ever, but I haven’t finished those either.
Oh, my goodness, Beau, I had totally forgotten about this game. I think you told me about it and told me how to download it? I do remember playing it for a bit, and finding it hysterically funny, but I’m sure I never finished it.
I own it, so I’m sure I loaned it to you.