1st February 1985
The objective of this adventure from MP Software is to find and set free the Golden Bird of Paradise. The Bird has been captured by the evil wizard and imprisoned in the castle in Firienwood. Dire warnings are given in the instructions including a hint about needing magic.
When I started my trek through this adventure I was pleasantly surprised by the descriptions. They were descriptive! Included within these were the visible exits which was nice of MP. However, I was not so happy about the inclusion of all the compass points, up, down, left, right, in and out, giving a grand total of fourteen possible directions from any one room! This makes map-drawing difficult!
The game itself I managed to solve in about ninety minutes having visited only 55 rooms. I must admit that I scored only 120 points, but at least I freed the Bird! There is no indication of how many rooms there are and we really should be told. The only indication to how many points may be scored is that the maximum is some four digit number (120 being shown as 0120). There also seemed to be a distinct lack of objects spread around. I only found about eight or nine.
An intrepid adventurer will have to cross valleys and go through woods and tunnels, as well as searching a castle for the elusive Golden Bird. There is a good variety of location, though I did feel uncomfortable that there were many places where going in one direction and then going in reverse did not always put you back where you started. I've never believed in this illogical movement. It's unnecessary.
There are monsters, creepy-crawlies and evil goblins lurking in the dark corners of this adventure, which seem to strike randomly and are killed by the adventurer with random success (you get 10 points for each murder!), again not a particularly good feature that caused frustration more than anything else.
However, MP have included a couple of good features in the adventure. HELP gives basic instructions for playing the game (though no hints) and so gets over any problems of forgetting the objective! There is an excellent save-game facility which is very, very fast (on a par even with the speedy Epic save-game).
On the whole this is a reasonable adventure which would suit an inexperienced player.
Other Acorn Electron Game Reviews By Dave Reeder
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