The summer of '87 turned out to be somewhat unpredictable. Not only was the weather proving again that balmy summer days are a thing of our parents' imagination; but the Amstrad CPC also had some adventures released by either new software houses or software houses that had not previously produced for the Amstrad. In the past the usual time for these happenings has been at the PCW Show or on the run up to Christmas. The last few issues have seen some of these under our scrutiny and this month we have another - Rick Hanson from Robico Software.

Robico is based in Wales and has been producing very acceptable BBC and Electron software for some time. Rick Hanson is its first adventure for the Amstrad and is apparently an upgraded version of the BBC program that was released in 1985. It comes complete with a small but neat Adventurer's Notebook: 32 blank pages for you to enter all those vital clues. The instructions are short but clear and include an extensive hint section. The game has over 200 locations and is text only.

Although there is plenty of text to read, some of it is repetitive, with several locations using sections of the same basic text. I can only think that this has been done to try and confuse the player's sense of direction. If you draw your maps carefully as you proceed (of course you do!), the repetition just becomes boring and tends to destroy the atmosphere of what is otherwise a quite reasonable adventure.

Each location description, together with any objects found, is displayed as one continuous block of text, without paragraph breaks, scrolling up the screen rather than clearing before new text is displayed. These single blocks of text demonstrate good programming technique and an excellent word wrapping routine, but sadly it also adds to the overall bland presentation.

You play the part of special agent Rick Hanson. An eccentric dictator, General Garantz, is threatening to destroy the world and your mission is to eliminate him as quickly as possible. You have been parachuted to within striking distance of' the General's headquarters and must make your own way on from there.

You start off in an old disused railway station where you will also find your final instructions - not that they will help all that much. The programmer obviously had a liking for Mission Impossible and just had to elaborate slightly on its opening sequence! Death stalks your every step in these first few locations and your first major task is to get away from the station in one piece.

There are a reasonable number of objects to find and nearly all those I have found so far are of use somewhere. The puzzles are nicely devious and fairly logical. You will certainly feel pleased with yourself when you have solved them. There are also some that need a pencil and paper to help solve simple codes, so be prepared to exercise that grey matter.

The parser is capable of understanding short sentences although generally only a verb/noun input is required. Multiple commands are accepted, each separated by AND, THEN, a comma or a full stop. It's nice to see that the use of ALL and EVERYTHING, together with BUT, EXCEPT and APART. TAB repeats your last command and IT may be used to refer to the last noun used. Robico has its own version of OOPS - OG (GO backwards), enabling you to retract your last command. There is also that very useful command RAMSAVE although in this program it is called BUFFSAVE or BSAVE.

The plot is sound but not innovative and the presentation of this adventure is uninspired. Rick Hanson is not a cheap game and I think Robico may regret simply increasing the size of the adventure to utilise the extra memory available rather than sharpening up the overall presentation. What may be acceptable on the memory deficient BBC and Electron is below par for the course on the Amstrad.