PrinceWatercress plays M-25! - The Longplay

Now for the game minus commentary! Enjoy!

Let's Play

This is a really weird game. In it, you just go random cardinal directions - north, east, west and south - until you just randomly win. You can either spell the directions out in full or type N, E, W or S to make travel slightly faster. That's it. That's all you can do. You can't look around, you can't get out of the car, you can't go to McDonald's, you can't fill up on gas (sorry, petrol, this is the UK we're talking about), you can't go to a rest stop and you can't even die. This game was published on 8BS as part of the Jon Ripley Public Domain collection, on disc JJR-09, which, in fact contained 3 discs of adventure games. This adventure is on disc 1.

For those of you who live outside of England and the UK, this is what the M25 is according to Wikipedia:

The M25 or London Orbital Motorway is a major road encircling almost all of Greater London, England. The Dartford Crossing (A282) is part of the orbital route but is not part of the motorway. The M25 is one of the most important roads in Britain and one of the busiest. The final section was opened by the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1986; on opening it was the longest ring road in Europe at 117 miles (188 km).

Patrick Abercrombie had proposed an orbital motorway around London in the 1944 Greater London Plan, which evolved into the London Ringways project in the early 1960s. By 1966, planning had started on two projects, Ringway 3 to the north and Ringway 4 to the south. By the time the first sections opened in 1975, it was decided the ringways would be combined into a single orbital motorway. The M25 was one of the first motorway projects to consider environmental concerns and almost 40 public inquiries took place. The road was built as planned despite some protest that included the section over the North Downs and around Epping Forest which required an extension of the Bell Common Tunnel.

Although the M25 was popular during construction, it quickly became apparent that there was insufficient traffic capacity. Because of the public inquiries, several junctions merely served local roads where office and retail developments were built, attracting even more traffic onto the M25 than it was designed for. The congestion has led to traffic management schemes that include variable speed limit and smart motorway. Since opening, the M25 has been progressively widened, particularly near Heathrow Airport.

As anyone from the UK will tell you, travelling on it is a nightmare, and the game basically makes fun of it by having gameplay seemingly drag on forever. It takes anywhere from 100 to 120 moves to randomly get the game to tell you that you made it off the M25. Also, how can you travel in any of the cardinal directions at any time when the M25 is clearly orbital in shape? Anyway, hope you enjoyed this weird joke of a text adventure. More things, as always, are incoming.