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American fantasists Mindcraft cough up two intriguing fantasy roleplaying adventures for disk-using C64 owners. But are they magic? Our reviewer swigs a gonshi potion and goes on a quest...

When all 44 guardians of the magic candle disappear at once, you# instinctively know what's in store. What's in store is this: you'll go to the castle and the king (of all people) will single you out. He'll say, "Gather a party of brave friends and save my kingdom." Or something like that. And you'll go along with it, starry-eyed at the prospect of great adventure and (of course) even greater rewards.

Then you'll look for a few like-minded flunkies or at least a few favours. You'll tap the inhabitants of the king's castle for information about places and people. You'll recruit that party of brave friends and onward to your destiny you will go.

The Magic Candie has been available for quite a while now to IBM PC users, whatever they are. It attracted a lot of attention stateside and ended up winning an award. I don't think, however, that the C64 version is likely to do the same. Unlike Keys To Maramon, which holds the adventure together by being simple and straightforward, Candle has more in common with that meandering kind of roleplaying that's slow to get anywhere. You get all the opportunity you want to explore but if you do, it's because the game isn't going out of its way to attract attention to itself.

Candle's keyboard only input mechanism isn't too bad but it lacks both the depth and immediacy of any of the AD&D games' joystick driven menus.

And the graphics, bursting out of the screen as they do with primary colours, don't convey any of the atmosphere or conviction of more sophisticated rivals such as Ultima VI.

The Magic Candle's strength lies in its internal consistency. By that, I mean that, for example, all the potions and magical formulae your characters are likely to deal with are the same as those used in Keys Of Maramon. So the authors of Candle have obviously invented a fantasy world that's to be revisited in other games. Candle does come cheap - and it only takes a read of the game manual to realise that you've got a lot of game. But it looks and feels old fashioned, not otherworldly.

1. Cost-effective expanse of roleplaying stuff.
2. Original plot.
3. Interesting clues to dig up.
4. Loads of characters add to the atmosphere.
5. Lots of depth - an adventure that will take weeks to finish
6. Manual makes a good read!

1. Old fashioned in appearance and function
2. Not that easy to use the keyboard interface unti you've had practice
3. Garish graphics: not much to look at and the screen update is slow.
4. Too few ways of solving some of the quest problems.
5. Slow to really get underway
6. Not so easy for beginners.