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The year was 1985. PC games were almost non existent. The personal computer itself was in its infant stages. The amount of memory you had in a PC was about 64K. PC games? Certainly there weren't any PC games back then even worth playing, not with that kind of memory. Well, actually there was. If you had yourself a Radio Shack TRS 80, there was a game so popular that people who owned these computers couldn't stop playing it. The game was called "San Francisco Earthquake - 1906".

The game was to take place around the time of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. But the game itself was not really about the earthquake. Oh yes, it happens during the game, which only makes things that more difficult, but the main objective is to find your wife who has been kidnapped.

Played entirely in text mode, no graphics, you awake to find a note by your bedside that your wife has been kidnapped. You then receive a phone call with a ransom demand. Suddenly there is a terrible shaking and it hits. You're now in the middle of the worst earthquake in San Francisco history and your wife has been kidnapped. What a way to start the day.

The game is played by issuing commands to the computer such as look, get, north, south, east, west (to move around) open, close, inventory and a number of other commands. There is a very limited help function that basically gives you the list of commands that you can use. The only graphics in the game, if you can call them graphics, occur whenever the aftershocks hit. The screen shakes a bit.

The game, in spite of it being pretty bare bones, was very hard. The number of puzzles you had to solve and items you had to get were numerous to say the least. Many times you would have to backtrack to a place you had been to before to pick up an item that only appears after you got another item or another aftershock hits.

For example. There is one part of the game where you reach a pile of rubble. You search through it but don't find anything. So you move on. Later on during the game, another aftershock hits. If you think enough to go back to the pile of rubble, you will see that it had been disturbed and if you look closely enough you will now find an item that you didn't see before.

You had to really think outside the box to play this game. There was no instruction manual and no clue book. For those of you who are programmers, you can figure out where everything is. The game was written in a combination of BASIC and Assembler Language. By printing out the source and object files, if you can read this stuff, you can figure out exactly the order for every item you need to find and where they are found.

The game was a real challenge. And while it didn't have all the bells and whistles of the modern day PC games, it was far from boring.

Michael Russell

Your Independent guide to PC Games

With the credit crunch hitting us even harder just as we unpack our suitcases, people are going through extreme measures to accumulate a little extra cash. Travel insurance scams have seen an 80% increase recently as the credit crunch develops with holiday makers claiming on items which have not even been stolen or claiming for more than the items actually worth.

Some people have booked holidays but now cannot afford to go on them; you will lose your deposit if you can't attend your holiday if pre-booked. So people are paying a visit to the doctor and pretending to be ill so they can obtain a sick note, they can then use this sick note to legally get a full refund from the holiday provider.

It is extremely hard to determine a genuine claim as the foreign police are often uninterested in lost or stolen items such as cameras or iPods resulting in low prosecution rates for fraud abroad.

With the number of claims increasing it has forced the insurance companies to act, they now look out for tell tale signs from a claimant and can determine a fraudulent claim much easier now than a genuine claim. They are however, reluctant to release these signs.

If you have a claim rejected, it will be marked on your credit rating and will remain there for three to six years.

This has also forced the insurance companies to bump up their premiums resulting in the honest genuine people paying more whilst the frauds claim the extra cash. You can still save money on travel insurance by shopping around and comparing quotes.

You can obtain cheap travel insurance by searching for compare travel insurance or if you buy annual travel insurance you can save even more so you can make the most out of your holiday budget.