Previous Next

In a daring helicopter raid on a summit meeting in Lichtenstein, the President of the USA, along with most of the Presidents and Prime Ministers of the EEC, are abducted.

Before long, a recorded message from the President is received. Having refused to record a prepared statement, he has been allowed to send his own message. It becomes clear that all the hostages are separated, and none of them have had any contact with the others, nor knows of their whereabouts.

A number of impossible demands are received from the kidnappers. Destruction of the state of Israel, re-establishment of Palestine, nationalisation of Islamic oil, an end to Russian occupation of Arab territories, sovereignty of the Persian Gulf, and unification of all Arab lands are among the list of nine conditions for the release of the top politicians.

This is where you come in. You have been appointed Special Investigator to the Commission on Abduction and Terrorism. To carry out your duties, you have been given access to all security files and databases, in order to expedite the recovery of the President and his fellow victims, and to bring those responsible to justice.

The action takes place on a simulated computer system.

Information is accessed by entering the command FILES, which displays a menu of eight file-types available.

SUBJECTS gives a selection list of all the characters in the game, each of which may be called up, to display a photo and biographical data. DOCUMENTS holds the text of official papers. CONFIDENTIAL offers two files, each requiring an access code, so unless you discover any on your way through, you may have to hack them without authorisation!

PHOTOGRAPHIC files consist of full-screen photos, with accompanying text. A facility is provided to magnify these into an almost meaningless set of pixels, where, by using the joystick, the area of the picture can be scanned for any useful detail hidden in the basic picture.

FILES also gives the player the option of entering his own case files - reports of his progress. To do this requires a spare disk, and thoughtfully a FORMAT option is offered at this stage.

However, since the program disk 1 is not write protected, care must be taken to ensure that it really is the spare disk in the drive, before using the CASE option. Since the CASE files are entered in free format English, as far as I could see they act only as a scratch pad.

As well as FILES, there are three other main commands. AGENT opens a channel for you to give up to eight agents under your control an assignment. CODES accesses a computerised decoding facility, offering Morse, Enigma, and Transpositions, and COMMS allows you to direct the authorities to detail a suspect or secure premises.

The two double-sided disks are accompanied in the package by an instruction manual and an audio cassette. The cassette is very realistically produced and consists of archived tapes relating to the case. These include a tape sent from the President while detained. An option under FILES classifies the recordings, and enables individual tracks to be found more easily. As you sift through the mass of information at your disposal and start getting reports back from your agents, you may well need to go back to some of the recordings, to refresh your memory, or perhaps to listen more carefully.

All the time you are playing, events are on the move worldwide, and the pressure is on you to succeed before the world moves into political chaos.

The game, described as an 'Interactive Graphics Adventure Simulation' (Adventure is misleading, and surely software producers must know what is meant by that term these days?) is let down only by a few minor points of user unfriendliness. For example, there are three boxes permanently on screen, marked 'State Department', 'Agent Report' and 'Bulletin'. When the Agent Report box starts flashing, you can go into the 'Reports' sub-option of 'Files' and get the feedback from the agents to whom you have given assignments. But you are asked for a file number and there seems to be no way of knowing it. When the Bulletin light started flashing, I just did not know what to do, and could find no mention of the feature in the instructions!

Despite these few difficulties, this is an extremely large and impressive program, well thought out and thoroughly researched, offering many hours of intrigue and investigation.