Welcome to a new age in com-puter science... introducing a new generation of interactive role-playing...'

Hmm... really? A new age in computer science?! Fantasy Power is an adventure creator specifically written for creating role-playing games. Written in BASIC by someone called GFP, it has all the statistics you associate with an RPG - status, strength, agility, intelligence, battle skill, looks, armour, level and ZAP points.

The question is - can you write the next Bard's Tale using this? Well... not really!

Fantasy Power comes in four sections - The Shop, Monster Compendium, Designer and Fantasy Power itself - taking up both sides of the disk. There are pages of documentation but I still didn't feel that enough had been included. A walkthrough introduction would have helped a lot.

The version I received was pre-production and hence had quite a few spelling and punctuation mistakes which will be removed from the final version. However, the pre-production copy had more serious bugs than just slight spelling mistakes. Fantasy Power is very easy to crash, and when playing the demos with four characters there seemed to be a bug that meant that I had a fifth invisible super-character on my side which made fights rather one sided.

Another annoying part of Fantasy Power is the amount of disk flipping. Although there is not much actual flipping over of the disk, when the utility wants to access a file from the opposite side it just tries to load it... and then gives the 'File not found' message.

One plus point for the utility is that the author has offered to code special features onto Fantasy Power at no extra cost.

Fantasy Power is a prime example of a utility that just has not been tested enough before sending for review - save your money for something else.