Lone Wolf returns to the ZX Spectrum

[Project Aon Announcements]

Lone Wolf has returned to the ZX Spectrum!

Joe Dever’s Flight from the Dark, the book that began the Lone Wolf series in 1984, is now a complete video game for the ZX Spectrum available to play online in your browser or as a free download.

The book was adapted for the Spectrum once before as Five Ways Software’s 1984 graphic adventure published by Hutchinson, also available on Project Aon. That game was abridged, and expected players to read along in the book. This new version is a different take: the whole book on the computer of its era, with all 350 sections, every choice and path, and Gary Chalk’s illustrations. It is built from the Project Aon release of the book and is distributed under the Project Aon License.

The game runs the rules for you. Roll your character, choose five Kai Disciplines, manage your Action Chart, and fight on the Combat Results Table. The section number is shown at every location, so you can read along with the online book as you play. The game follows exactly the same rules as the book, with the Random Number Table rolled invisibly for you, and it handles story narrative based on your game progression data directly.

Four builds cover a whole Spectrum family today:

• A 48K tape edition that runs on the original 1982 hardware, streaming sections from tape as you play
• A 128K tape edition with far fewer tape loads
• A +3 disk edition with no tape handling and a route back to the main menu
• A ZX Spectrum Next edition with colour illustrations, a save game option, and an optional Iron Man mode that disallows saving

Saberman RetroNews has a play-through on YouTube and a review appears in Issue 6 of BreakSpace magazine.

Go try it out at zxspectrum.projectaon.org!

(Many thanks to Holmgard Press for giving the project the thumbs up!)