Commodore User


The Inheritance: Panic In Las Vegas

Categories: Review: Software
Author: Ken McMahon
Publisher: Infogrames
Machine: Commodore 64/128

 
Published in Commodore User #39

The Inheritance: Panic In Las Vegas

Infogrames is a French software house, which probably accounts for the stylish presentation of this game. The box is nothing special, but inside is a white disk. Well wicked. The loading screen has a little white armadillo with a rainbow halfway down its back which is also pretty cute.

Let's not mess around. The plot goes like this. Your Aunt has pegged it and left you every penny she owned. You learn this piece of astounding news at the very beginning of the game from a telegram which appears out of nowhere on your screen. Poor auntie, wonder how much it was?

It's not that easy. The old bat has not been quite as well-meaning as you thought. It is a condition of her will that you must repeat her achievement of winning a million dollars in one night at Las Vegas. Nice one, Auntie.

The Inheritance: Panic In Las Vegas

This is a bit daft really. If you were to win a million in one night at Las Vegas, or even if it took you a week, you wouldn't want the old bag's cash anyway. Still, you could spend all day picking holes in adventure plots and never get to play them.

The game is split into three stages. The first consists of your attempts to get out of the building whilst avoiding your creditors (you're pretty skint and owe quite a bit). Life begins in your dingy, squalid little room. The graphics are lifelike, you can even see the paper peeling off the walls.

All actions are carried out with cursor keys or joystick. To move around, you simply move the on-screen cursor to the appropriate side of the screen and you do a 90 degree turn. You press Fire to go forward, pick up objects and so on. It's a bit like one of those 3D maze programs, but with a lot more detail.

The Inheritance: Panic In Las Vegas

The first thing to do is obviously to grab everything in the room that looks useful and head for the door. As luck would have it you are on the 17th floor. There are two ways down, stairs or lift. Take my advice and use the stairs, the lift is slow and prone to malfunction.

Sooner or later, probably sooner, you will be stopped on the stairs by someone looking for something. "Give me back what you borrowed from me, Mr. Stone" (that's you) they say - pretty impolitely if you ask me.

This is where it helps to have stocked up with gear before leaving your room. It's a sort of adventure game mix and match. You have to match the right item (plant, candelabra, necklace, pen, gun...) with the right person (oily looking guy, Chinaman, well dressed balding man, private dick). They aren't the right people, incidentally, well some of them are. Failure to come up with the goods results in your downward passage being blocked (ouch).

The Inheritance: Panic In Las Vegas

If you are fast enough, you can fly past people and dash down the stairs before they can catch you. Alternatively, if you just don't have what they want you can always resort to poking the revolver up their nose. They quiver at the mouth and say: "Mr. Stone, you have gone mad," but you get past, providing you can outrun the cops. If you make it to the lobby it's just a question of phoning for a cab (Forget the bike!) and you're on your way to the airport.

The following two scenarios offer similar, though more difficult problems. At the airport you must retrieve stolen papers, have a chat with an air hostess get on the right place and pacify a hijacker (the joys of travel).

Las Vegas. Here's where you have to win a million dollars, but I'm not going to tell you how because that would make things too easy [And you haven't done it yet - Ed]. Suffice it to say that you have to win stacks of money by playing fruit machines, Boule and Craps.

The Inheritance is a pretty enjoyable graphic adventure and will go down well with people who don't like to type in pages of text and work out unfathomable cyphers. If reminds me a lot of Terrormolinos. The graphics are fine and the variety of characters gives it added interest. My only complaint is that it would have been more fun if the responses were more varied than the half a dozen or so stock phrases that seemed to be continually churned out. The sound is also virtually non-existent. Apart from that, a good one.

Ken McMahon

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