Your Sinclair


Witch Hunt/The Cup

Publisher: River Software
Machine: Spectrum 48K/128K

 
Published in Your Sinclair #22

Witch Hunt + The Cup

Finally another twin-pack and two PAW'd adventures for you to pore over. Witch Hunt and The Cup will set you back just £2.50, making them another bargain. The first has you playing the part of, what else, an adventurer. Out walking in the woods one day, you get lost in the mist then stumble across a cottage where an old woman welcomes you in. She says if you ever want to see your loved ones again (like T'zer, Phil etc) you have to do exactly what she does. What she does is don a blue cap, turn round three times and disappear. You pick up the cap, do the same and find yourself in a cellar. Hope it's got central heating as you're wearing nothing but a pair of shoes!

Witch Hunt is an intriguingly mapped game, and you'd better use the RAMSAVE option a lot as there are plenty of one-way doors that provide you with several different areas to explore: sewers, cliff-top paths, passageways, rooms, garden mazes. Good marks for use of RAW, bad marks for error-checking: everywhere mistyped as eveywhere, and responses like 'The dishes is too heavy to pick up' or 'You're wearing pair of shoes'.

As for The Cup, that's unlike any adventure you've ever played before. You've just attended the Liars' Club Annual Dinner and Prize Giving, and the winner of the Cup this year is Paddy Murphy for his tales of animals in the wild. But later that night you're woken from your dreams by a redheaded Irishman screaming that he's been attacked and a lion has stolen his cup. Lions in Cricklewood?? Sounds like a lot of blarney, but it's hard to ignore the clawmarks on his back and the terror in his eyes. Off you go again to sort things out.

Once again you're starkers, not even a pair of carpet slippers, let alone a pair of Marks and Spencer's thermal pyjamas, warming those parts that other jim-jams cannot reach. Anyway, before you know it you're in a large cornfield. Can this really be Cricklewood, home of my adventure-playing buddy John D Ryan? Well, there's the grim reaper himself, and you discover a native hut just on the edge of elephant country, so maybe it is Cricklewood after all. Inside the hut a chief sends you on a quest to track an elephant and bring back an ivory tusk to help cure someone's illness. What, armed only with an aerosol can of Snowmaker? You have to be kidding!

Again, good use of the utility, and where does author J Lockwood get his ideas from? A nicely different tale to end this round-up of adventures that are only available through the mail. I'm often told that people are sometimes reluctant to order mail-order games for fear of being ripped-off. All I can say is that if you don't bother to buy at least one or two of the games listed here, you're missing out on some great adventures.