The Balrog returns from his near Oscar winning performance in Orb Quest to bring
you yet another three pages of reviews, news and letters.
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News
'New' Adventure Club started...
Following the recent closure of the Adventurers Club Ltd, three of the
original reviewing team have decided to form a partnership and start the
Adventure & Strategy Club. The Club will continue in a similar style,
quality and format as before, but will be under entirely new management, with
no obligations to its predecessor. They will continue to produce the Reference
Book of Adventure, built up from bi-monthly packs of new and updated material,
and covering a wide range of subjects and games.Members will also have free
access to the club's helpline, by mail or telephone.The first issue will be
published in September and the Balg will give a full review then. For more
information contact the Adventure & Strategy Club at 17 Sheridan Road,
London E12 6QT or telephone (081) 470 8563.
Hermitage revamped
Recreation Re-creation together with Tony Collins have completely
rewritten, using the PAW, one of Tony's best games and rereleased it. (A lot of
re-'s there!) The new Hermitage boasts 132 locations and will be 6128 disc
only. It concerns 'Ambrose the monk and his questing' - look out for a review
soon. Price is ú4.50. For more details write to 39 Gargle Hill, Thorpe St
Andrew, Norwich, Norfolk NR7 OXX.Bogus PD?Its come to my attention that JPD,
the PD library run by Justin Bonniface and mentioned in issue
67 of Balrog , is not returning tapes or replying to mail. Please avoid JPD
until some explanation is found. I hope Justin hasn't been naughty otherwise
the Balg would be forced to eat him!
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Reviews
Orb Quest
£5 cassette, £7 disc.
Joan Pancott, WoW Software, 78 Radipole Lane, Weymouth, Dorset DT4 9RS.
Three thousand years ago the land of Mandoria was a peaceful happy place, but
over that time it has declined into a evil state. You are Caldor Holford, of
noble blood, and the last heir to the kingdom of Mandoria. It has been revealed
to you that if you can seek the Great Orb of the Old Kings then you can destroy
the evil Dark Lord.Orb Quest is a four part Quill game comprising of four
different scenarios. In Part 1 you have to find your way out of the village of
Mirekemp to Questor's pit. Part 2 has you battling through said pits. In part
three you must escape from a dwarven fortress in which you have been imprisoned
and the final part involves searching a hidden village for the orb.Programmed
by two brothers, Paul and Timothy Stitt (both Lords of Adventure), the game has
mostly well-thought out, logical puzzles, some very good graphics in places,
atmospheric descriptions, it even has the Balrog making a star appearance in
the dwarvish sewers of part three - all the ingredients to make a good
adventure... except the parser is lousy.The best example of the poor parser is
at the start of part two - you have to cross a chasm with a rope and there is a
large rock on your side and a treestump on the other. Obviously you must make
some sort of bridge by lassoing the treestump and then tying the rope to the
rock - this is correct, but... if you type TIE ROPE TO ROCK the program
responds 'You're not serious'. THROW ROPE TO TREESTUMP gives 'Nothing would be
gained by doing that' (misleading) and LASSO TREESTUMP gives 'Impossible!'
(very misleading!). You must first MAKE LASSO, THROW LASSO (THROW LASSO TO
TREESTUMP isn't accepted), DRAW LINE (to tighten lasso - PULL ROPE or PULL
LASSO isn't accepted), TIE END (to rock - again TIE ROPE is not accepted) and
then CROSS CHASM. This lack of user-friendlyness pervades the whole program and
made the game very frustrating to play at times. Another example is that of a
drainpipe in part one which you must descend - the only input accepted as far
as the Balg could see was SLIDE DOWN DRAINPIPE - the program didn't like the
verbs SHIN and CLIMB.A lot of thought, time and effort has been put into this
game and it is a shame to see it falter due to it's poor parser - if you're one
of those adventurers who enjoy guessing the parser or enjoyed games with
difficult parser (such as Souls of Darkon) you'll love it - if you're not give
it a try anyway - the Stitt's have put a lot of imagination into their world
and the game can be enjoyable though difficult.
Eve of Shadows
Send £1 and a disc.
Disc no: AMS 6
Adventure PD, 10 Overton Road, Abbey Wood, London SE2 9SD
The Balg tries to avoid giving full reviews to Public Domain games - firstly
because there are so many that I haven't got space to review them all and
secondly because the quality is usually low compared to home brew and
commercial releases. However, every now and then a game worthy of review is
written and that game is 'Eve of Shadows'.The storyline is short and
unoriginal. You are Tanis, the prince of the realm, and you awake to find the
kingdom in chaos and your father, the King, taken captive. It is your job to
travel the lands in search of your father.When the Balg first heard of the game
and was told it was written in BASIC I automatically presumed it would be
awful. It seemed near impossible to write a good game using BASIC - BASIC
adventures as a rule are even worse than their GAC counterparts! (Castle of the
Skull Lord is a prime example of an awful BASIC adventure) This month however,
both Al-Strad and Eve of Shadows are BASIC games AND are of high quality - so
the Balg has changed his mind... Slightly!
However, Eve of Shadows isn't your average BASIC game - it is disc only and, like Infocom and Topologika, reads the text and graphics off the disc, leaving the computers memory free for the actual code. This method means you can write adventures much bigger and better than could usually be held in the computers memory.
Rob Buckley, the author of the game, also wrote Smart Art which appeared on an old AA covertape, and you can tell by looking at the graphics in the game that he's certainly no novice at computer art - the graphics are crisp and colourful and match the location descriptions well. The graphics and voluptuous text descriptions mean that the game looks professional - the screen layout is similar to Lord of the Rings - in the game you can BECOME either Tanis or his best-friend Calardyr (a wizard of sorts). And the characters who are in a location have their faces drawn on the left hand side of the screen. However, how does it play? Well, once the Balg had got over initial problems (the ROM box interfered with the game and so had to be disconnected) and got into the game proper I found it was a good adventure as well as technically innovative. There are quite a few locations, and although not a graphic for each one, there are still many pretty pictures. The puzzles are nearly all logical and well thought out (except one involving the horse-shoe) and there are your usual adventure hazards, including mazes, dragons and trolls guarding bridges.
However, there are some minus points - the game has obviously not been
playtested and every now and then you'll spot a grammatical mistake or spelling
error. There are also bugs in the game - most of which are minor and will not
affect the play (the only serious bug concerned the troll - you must give him
the bronze coin as well as the gold coin otherwise you cannot cross the bridge properly.)
The other major bug occurs after saving a game - after the save is complete the
game goes a little haywire and all the location connections get confusing!
Overall a great game, which is well worth getting - I'm looking forward to
seeing Rob's next game soon.
Al-Strad
£2.50 tape, £4.50 disc
Recreation Re-created, 39 Gargle Hill, Thorpe St Andrew, Norwich, Norfolk NR7 OXX.
Al-Strad is the flagship of Mark Eltringham's new company, Recreation Re-created. Originally released way back in 1985 and reviewed in AA6, the game has dated little and still is very impressive.Al-Strad was written by Paul Gill using BASIC and is text only. However the character set has been redefined and the screen is well layed out into three separate windows - the upper one with location descriptions and the lower two containing typed input and score respectively.Al-Strad is continuing the royalty theme of this months reviews (are royal families in vogue all of a sudden!?) This time a Princess Sally Software has been kidnapped from the land of Kilobyte and you decide to attempt to rescue her.Input is basic, just one or two word sentences but it is sufficient for the game. The real beauty of the game is it's humour and also it's puzzles. The puzzles are so logical and well thought out that the game is very enjoyable to play - even if you get stuck the game has a superb help system to aid you. The humour in places is a bit dated - references are made to Addictive and Mastertronic but other parts are still funny today.What really makes a game good however are those little touches which add so much to the atmosphere - Al-Strad has many of these, the best one being when you get very drunk by the river and all the location descriptions change to that read by someone in an alcohol induced state.Some spelling mistakes lurk in the game (enterance and suttle!) but they cannot take away the charm of Al-Strad. An amusing game which is well worth buying.
|
|
Orb Quest |
Eve of Shadows |
Al-Strad |
|
Atmosphere |
65 |
68 |
67 |
|
Interaction |
33 |
69 |
50 |
|
Challenge |
79 |
63 |
58 |
|
Overall |
59 |
81 |
69 |
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Preview
Magnetic Moon
£6 disc, 6128 & PCW only
FSF Adventures, 40 Harvey Gardens, Charlton, London SE7 8AJ.
Most Amstrad owners won't have heard of Fantasy & Science Fiction (FSF)
Adventures before, they only produced games for Spectrum... Until now. Larry
Horsfield, the owner and author of FSF adventures, has taken the plunge and
bought himself a 6128. Larry tells me he plans to convert all three of his
games - and boy!, are you Balgers in for a treat!Magnetic Moon is a three part
PAWed game - that means 157K of pure compressed text - no naff graphics to eat
up the memory here you know. You play the part of Sub-Lieutenant Mike Erlin,
assistant Astro-navigation officer on board the Survey Spaceship "Stellar
Queen". While in the region of the star Schedir, all contact is lost with
your scoutship. On arriving at the last know position of the scoutship, the
"Stellar Queen" is nearly wrecked as a tractor beam drags it down
onto the surface of the moon of an earth-like planet.Fortunately, the ship
sustains little damage, but the ship's sensors show that a powerful magnetic
field is preventing the "Stellar Queen" from taking off. The source
of this magnetic field is found to be a huge underground installation,
generating vast amounts of energy.You volunteer to join the search party, but
your Captain says you must stay on board to help with repair work! You, of
course, have other ideas, and you decide to jump ship to search for the
installation by yourself!...See next months issue for a
review!
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Balrog's Postbag
The Balg's postbag was bulging this month but I'm still hungry for more! If
you have any comments concerning adventures, the Balrog column or the economic
state of the world today (!?) or any suggestions on how to improve the column,
jot them down and send them to The Balrog at the usual address. Please do not
write to the Balrog asking if he knows where to get such_and_such a game - I
cannot print these requests and I won't be able to help.
Dun de Dun de Dun de de de, (Theme from Fantasia)
I am thinking of starting a PD library called Fantasia, and would like some
adventures for it. Whether I set up or not depends on the response to my
letter. It will be a tape only library and it will cost 45p per adventure tape.
So please print my address so the readers of your ace section can write to
me.Michael Holland, 30 Low Moorgate, Rillington, Malton, North Yorkshire YO17
8JW.
Good luck Michael! If you get established, please send me some adventures for
review and I'll plug your library.
Good adventure?
Dear Balrog
I've had my computer for a year now, and I'm looking for a good adventure (not
too hard), I know that 'Gnome Ranger' is good but are there any cheaper games
that would be good? Or should I start off with some 'home-brewed' games? (I
have GAC, so I might be able to send in one of my own soon!)Also do you do
requests? If you do, I have an enemy called Dougal (yes, he is Scottish) who,
if you are hungry would be more than happy to help you out I'm sure!
David Saveryr
David,
If you've never played an adventure before, then the Level 9 games are a
good place to start - most of them have full instructions for beginners and so
they will introduce you to the world of adventure. They are expensive, but are
worth it. However, if you want to try some very cheap adventures send a disc
and a couple of pounds to Debby Howard at 10 Overton Road, Abbey Wood, London
SE2 9SD. I recommend asking for CPM1 (Island & Base) and AMS1 (Can I Cheat
Death?, Doomlords, Roog, Spacy & Welladay) which should fill both sides of
your disc.As to your request concerning Dougal - no trouble! I'll come round
tomorrow and eat him for you (he better be tasty!)
Praise for column...
Dear Balrog
To begin with I'd just like to tell you how good your column is: Its a very
good column. (honestly I didn't bribe him! - Balg)And Rod if you're reading
this why give the Balrog another page, 'cause I love it.Anyhow, firstly I have
a complaint to make: a complaint about all those arcade players with their
consoles and PC Engines. I wish they would stop making fun of me for playing
adventures. Adventures consist of more than going east, south, waving wands and
killing monsters.While I'm in the spotlight I might as well make the most of it
and say a big thank you to Joan (Hi Joan!), Jay (THANKS Jay) and Steve.
Amir Mansour
Amir, First, thanks very much for the praise - are you sure no-ones paying you to say it!? As to arcade players making fun of adventure players - they only do it because their jealous - they may have lightning fast reactions, but playing the latest shoot-em-up hardly exercises your brain much! Adventurers are usually far more mature and clever when compared to arcade players. And if that doesn't work give me these peoples names and I'll come round and eat them!
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Help!
Peter Seifert from Germany is stuck in two games -In Rebel Planet he can't
find the rebels' headquarters in the sewers of the first city and in Seas of
Blood he can't find the location of the jungle-temple.
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The Bards Tale Club - final episode
Over the past year and a half the Balrog has been running a feature for one
of the biggest and best games on the Amstrad - The Bards Tale. Now, all the
knowledge gleaned from the many people who wrote in has been combined to
provide THE complete playing guide:-Thanks to: Keir Ritchie, Will Shakespeare
(?!), Adrian Forbes, Stuart Whyte, Steve Fox, Andrew Wright, Adrian Lewis,
Simon Avery and everyone else who I've missed out!
The complete solution
You start in Skara Brae, go to all of the Inns and note down the name of the
Inn and the menu... notice something unusual? Good - off to the wine cellars we
go.The Wine Cellars are easy, from there you go onto the sewers. As you go
along you should map completely all the levels and note down the various
sayings you find on the walls - they all mean something. One of the messages
states...'...Know this, that a man called ****** thought to many to be insane,
had through wizardly powers proclaimed himself a God in Skara Brae a hundred
years ago. His image is locked in stone until made whole again...'The '******'
is the name of the Mad God - needed for when you enter the catacombs.Get the
eye by killing the Witch King on the 3rd Level catacombs.Go to Harkyn's Castle,
collect the silver square (level 2, 0,0 - You have to teleport to an adjacent
location from 9 north, 10 east.). On the second level there are some things you
need to know - Vampires are blood sucking creatures of the night and Shields
can be friendly. On the third level of the castle you will be asked about a
tavern (you did write down the street names of the Inns as well didn't you?).
Remember the message on the wall about the crystal sword when fighting the
crystal guardian. Then pay a visit to the Mad God (level 3, 1,21). The eye
activates him and you must fight till the death. When you have killed him, you
get teleported back to street level.The gate to Kylearn's Tower is now unlocked
(DO NOT GO INTO ANY OTHER BUILDING ELSE IT WILL LOCK AGAIN!). Once in Kylearn's
Tower (one step west and one step south.), remember that the endless byway is
'Sinister' and the one of cold, foretold twofold is 'stone golem'. Get the
silver triangle (20,2) and then go and meet Kylearn at (14,17). He will give
you an onyx key.You will be teleported back to the starting stairs, go down and
save your party before going down to the sewers (level 3 16,17). Here you will
find the stairs that lead up to Mangar's Tower. Make sure you have the Onyx
Key, Silver Triangle and Silver Square before you take them.In Mangar's Tower
you have to get the Silver Circle (Level 2, 15,4). Then get the master key
(Level 3, 12,19). On the same level (Level 3 4,10) is a Magic Mouth that you
must find and say "Lie With Passion and be forever damned." After
each word press the ENTER key.Go up the secret stairs at (9,3) to the fourth
level then up the portal at (0,0) to the fifth level. Make your way to the
boiling pool at (10,21), dive in and keep going north until you reach Mangar
and his "pals". One square north of Mangar is the spectre snare;
collect this, and then teleport down and out.Well, that's the end of the Bard's
Tale club - I don't think much more can be said about the game! The only sad
part of the tale is that it won't be continued - so CPC owners will never be
able to see parts II, III and IV... Still part one was very enjoyable and well
worth the wait.
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Contacting the Balg
The Balg is desperate for new contributions to the Cluepot and Just for
Laughs sections - to get in contact with him, write to The Balrog, Amstrad
Action, Future Publishing Ltd, Beauford Court, 30 Monmouth Street, Bath, AVON
BA1 2AP or balrog@uk.ac.ed.cs.tardis if you have E-mail.