The Realm of No!
By Al Backiel
This is a 32K text-adventure game in the style of the old Zork series. It's based on an unpublished adventure module for the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game by Kim Ryan (who wrote it in 1984 and submitted it to TSR in 1985).
The VCS version was inspired by the Choose Your Own Adventure books by Edward Packard and the text adventure games for the Timex Sinclair 1000. The game was done by Greg Zumwalt and Charles F. Gray and first released at the 2015 Portland Gaming Expo. It's currently available at Good Deal Games.
I received a review copy and I am assuming that this was the final release. The scenario is reminiscent of the old low budget B-movie and cult classic Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (there was another VCS game homage called Revenge of the Beefsteak Tomatoes). There is also a humorous plug for V-8 juice. There are several checkpoints within the
program, at which point you must make the correct choice of two options by moving the cursor over A or B and pressing fire. Scroll down when it says -MORE- by holding the joystick down and pressing the fire button.
There were a few misspellings in the text that may or may not have been corrected by now (i.e. "weilding" for wielding, "thrown" for throne, "message" for massage, "Esmerelda" for Esmeralda, "defeat" for defeating). By reading the messages and making the right choices, you should be able to complete this imaginary journey. After reading through a good amount of text (65 pages worth!) and making the right decisions, I was able to complete the game by trial-and-error to reach the end.
As for the solution, there could be a shorter route or even multiple endings.
