Wizard adventure

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Why, you might ask yourself, is Acorn User devoting a two-page spread to Castle Quest? The answer is that it marks a major stepping stone in the development of games on the BBC Micro, and, indeed, other machines.

Micro Power's Castle Quest introduces "scrollerama", hardware scrolling that has to be seen to be believed. In fact, the graphics throughout are very clever and have the witty Micro Power stamp all over them.

The adventure aspect is combined with finger-dexterity and, most importantly, some hard lateral thinking - the problems are definitely challenging.

For those of you who missed the review in March, the aim of the game is to find the treasure hidden in the depths of the castle. However, to do this you must be capable of solving the numerous riddles that thwart your passage to the wizard's hoard.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Castle Quest is undoubtedly the graphics. A Mode 2 screen is used throughout, gobbling up nearly 60 per cent of the BBC's memory. However, some ingenious programming by author Tony Sothcott (in his first attempt at a machine code game!) allows the actual map to be stored in a meagre 2K of memory. This is gone using a building block base of just 13 items stored in a compressed form. The screen itself is arranged as a matrix of graphics blocks seven high by eight across - staggeringly, a single memory byte is used to represent two adjacent graphics blocks on the screen.

The scoring in Castle Quest is straightforward (well, reasonably so), with points for passing a particular location in the castle. There are six of these worth 10 points each, giving a possible total of 60. At the end of the game, you receive 10 points for each life left, plus a further 10 for every item in your backpack.

In addition, there is a time bonus. You start with a maximum of 2550 points, but this reduces by 10 every 10 seconds. So don't hang around if you want to be in with a chance for the £500 prize being offered by Micro Power. The experts tell me that even if you know all the answers, it still takes around seven minutes to complete the adventure.

Bruce Smith