No Revels For Rebels

Previous Next

This is a program which promises much, yet achieves very little. A U.S. Gold adventure based on one of Penguin Books' Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks sounds worth a second look. It's a text only adventure, having a screen layout similar to the excellent Scott Adams Marvel Comics series from Adventure International, with a few lines description of the current location always at the top of the screen, and scrolling commands and responses below. Plenty of facilities are offered - save a game, use abbreviations, send for a hint sheet. Yet rarely have I played a game with less enthusiasm.

Perhaps it was the hackneyed theme: 'The leaders of the secret Earth organisation SAROS gather their slender resources... only you stand in the way of the galaxy!' Yawn.

Perhaps it had something to do with U.S. Gold not answering my letter or sending me the help sheet.

Perhaps it was because, despite a healthy 400-word receptive vocabulary, and a willingness to accept fairly complex commands, such as DROP THE LASER AND THE TICKETS THEN GO DOWN, the program's responses are so limited. Take the message 'You can now disembark', to which I replied, very reasonably in my view, DISEMBARK. The response? 'That's silly'. And when asked to read the coded message 'urwi g ndmi', I felt the response 'I see nothing unusual' a little unprofessional to say the least.

The game begins with you setting out on what is described as a 'daring and foolhardy mission' to discover and destroy the queen computer of the Arcadians - the one which controls and organises the minds of the Arcadian troops. Disguised as a merchant, you travel to the planets Tropos, Halmurus and Arcadion, looking for clues which will eventually help you discover the right combination to enter the building housing the queen computer. You must keep one eye on the clock all the while, in case your space ship Caydia takes off without you.

Most of the time I got arrested on landing and left to rot in a damp cell. Perhaps that's why I didn't like it!

Bernard Emblem