The Tripods

Crash

Atmosphere 6/10

Vocabulary N/A

Logic 5/10

Debugging 9/10

Overall Value 4/10

Derek Brewster 4/10

DEREK BREWSTER'S ADVENTURE TRAIL THERE IS A FAULT, PLEASE ADJUST YOUR SETS In February a Green paper, a discussion document, went before Parliament which proposes the levy of 10p on an audio tape and 25p on a video tape. The reasons behind this unwelcome addition to personal finances lie in the estimated 65 million LPs lost every year to the illegal taping of music and startling statistics which suggest that up to 90% of blank tapes are used for reproducing copyright material. Could I take this opportunity to put a voice to what many must think of this bill, that it is ill-concEIved and insensitive. The loss of LP sales is a very difficult commodity to quantify as the figure assumes that a fair proportion of those who tape LPs would have been prepared to buy a good number of their taped collection. My own experience, and that of many of my acquaintances, does not bear this judgement out. Before looking at the bill's effects on computing let us first analyse another vested interest which has called for the levy. Video cassettes are used to tape TV programmes more conveniently viewed at a later time. It is hard to visualise exactly where the TV companies are losing out. The idea that taping reduces the life span of a TV programme as it reduces the number of occasions on which it can sensibly be repeated is not borne out by the facts which relate an increase in the number of repeats since the meteoric rise in video recorder sales. It is true that three years ago, say, all blank tapes could be used for were dictating machines or copying but now a significant number are used in the home computer sector, for example, in the legitimate acts of saving adventure games or, for that matter, programming itself (the pile of blank cassettes which build up developing a complex game can grow incredibly high). So the question is, how is the money raised by the levy to be split between the music and computer industries and if the Government seriously intended to include the computer industry why are discs and microdrives not included in the bill? If money is to be appropriated to the computer industry how will distribution be achieved amongst all the companies vying for a share of the proceeds when some are reticent over sales figures and other distort figures up to a factor of ten? It would seem this bill could end up as a direct tax on adventuring with the levy (which amounts to a fine) being added to the amount already allocated in the price of adventure games to offset the proportion lost to illegal copying. The bill is an insult to all those who have never made an illegal copy of a computer game. A law which assumes everyone to be a criminal and punishing everyone as such will set a bad precedent and is the equivalent of imposing a levy of 20p on a gallon of petrol to combat speeding. By imposing this levy the Government would be virtually legalising the copying of copyright material and instill a feeling that has it that, since the levy has been paid then it must now be all right to copy. In short, if you've paid the fine you might as well commit the crime. THE TRIPODS Producer: Redshift Retail Price: £12.95 Language: BASIC with some Machine Code How far should a reviewer let the reader progress through a review before unleashing the line that says it all; it is one of those unfathomable questions. I could begin by saying how interested I was in the game having seen the rather curious television programme that drones on in the background while you busy yourself making a large pot of tea, and as slowly as possible. Sitting drinking the tea you began to realise Tripods are harmless, it is the television that does all the fate-capping. Well, here is that line I was on about. The Tripods computer program is harmless and in the worst possible sense - it won't have you engrossed while you should be snoozing with a steaming cocoa in front of Sergeant Bilko hand The Weatherman (in case you don't watch TV, and haven't yet been capped, these are two separate programmes!) It s not the packaging that is amiss, very sleek in fact, or the instructions, the stylish booklet is eminently readable, or the competition which beckons with £500 worth of software or hardware of your choice. No, you've guessed it, it is what is on that piece of brown tape revolving within that block of plastic that fits snugly into your cassette recorder which is what leaves you as sunk as a two-legged Tripod. Never mind, do read on, if only to find out what dubious projects the BBC will endorse these days. You can choose any name you can think of for your character who, after crossing over from England having been recruited by Ozymandias, starts from one of the French ports (Dieppe, Le Havre etc.) to get to the White Mountains in SE France to help the free men defeat The Tripods. Having noted the TV series only for its remarkable plagiarism of War of the Worlds, its long silent passages interspersed by futuristic (Dr Who) music and laboured dialogue fit for a tortoise's coming-of-age party I couldn't tell you whether this is true to the television programme, but, come to think of it, there was a French geezer. The booklet goes on to warn of the dangers posed by the terrain, weather and The Tripods. This sounds about as exciting as a trip to see Hartlepool's United v Reelection Town or a Bosworth High Parents' Evening but the sad point is the game is even more boring than it sounds. Take your battle with the terrain which transpires to be no more than the computer coming up with 'You cannot move there'. Far from having the eight compass directions from which to choose you often find yourself guided towards a choice between two directions, and sometimes tunnelled into just the one! if this represents an invasion of France then here we have a game that steps off the ferry at Dieppe only to sink in the marshes around Cherbourg. On the journey across France you will need to eat well and to collect only those items really needed as too much weight will slow you down and you might never reach the mountains. When you begin a new game you can enter the names of up to four players. The structure proves highly elastic and allows the deletion of any players who do not wish to continue, suspension of any who can't play just at the moment or the addition of any to make up the four on restarting an old game. In areas like these - offering a team game and a sophisticated array of options - this program shows some of its class. Apart from the black guards, who will arrest, beat and possibly report you if caught, your main adversaries are those huge metallic beasts resembling 50's decor breakfast stools. Every time a Tripod sees you, your immunity to being capped may decrease and should it fall to zero you may well be capped, thereby losing all. (Incidentally, 'capped' is something dreadful and refers to the feeling you get when you are the only one wearing his cap on the first day at the local, posh, public school). If you want to move on and there is a Tripod nearby you will always be noticed, and possibly capped, unless you first press T allowing you the options of either hiding, or disorientating The Tripod by jamming its communications with a radio or dazzling it with a strategically placed mirror. If the screen layout resembles Lords of Midnight (or rather, Doomdark's Revenge, as the shading for the sky is very similar) then that can hardly be a bad thing given that game's universal appeal. The Tripods has a very pleasing appearance, the sort that lends itself well to colourful screen shots in glossy magazines with trees in full blossom, fields, marshes and farms, windmills and ruins, castles and small towns. When the day clock at the bottom of the screen runs out you will be forced to camp until the next day. our food then goes down while you eat and your health improves with the rest. At the end of the week the items you are carrying will be examined and the worn out or broken ones thrown away. Also, all four players receive an update. The next players then get a turn where even if they follow the same route may meet different people or experience greater success than yourself. This is the paragraph that has our Tripod hopping on one leg. This game is so slow you become aware of grass growing and the vastness of geological time. It thus joins the burgeoning populace of the home for geriatric games and its founding member, The Wrath of Magra. After five minutes you become lethargic and disinterested as if sitting in one of those interminable college lectures where everyone falls asleep to the metronomic chantings of the ranting crony at the front. This simile is most apt as it is the feeling of non-involvement which strikes you about the game. Movement is often restricted, choices in any one frame are between picking up an item or not, or talking to a stranger or not and the results of your actions are similarly hit or miss. Arbitrariness and a deep detachment win the day, so much so that even a dedicated reviewer cannot muster the patience to check whether this game really expects three people to sit and wait all that time while one person completes his moves. The Tripods is a real-time game but this feature is rendered almost useless since it is painfully slow due to much of its action relying on BASIC. Its complexity does not warrant the label 'strategy' and there is little left to do but choose between move, eat, pick or examine pack when the program eventually delivers a prompt for you to do something. The Tripods is somewhat similar to the strategy classic Lords of Midnight but does not offer as much flexibility in movement, as deep a perspective a landscape or reasons to choose one direction over another. To the extent Doomdark's Revenge expanded upon a tried and tested theme, The Tripods does not develop the television series to its full potential and pales in comparison. COMMENTS Difficulty: Easy to play but will probably take a while to complete. Graphics: Quite good 3D perspective as in Lords of Midnight Presentation: With text on both top and bottom of graphics, rather messy Response: Very slow, has you continually prodding keyboard for a response

Crash

Angus Ryall

FRONTLINES From our correspondent at the front Angus Ryall. AAAARGH! Shows, Shows, Shows! I think I have gone off exhibitions. There's probably a lot of stuff about the LET show elsewhere in this issue (too right - ED), but well, what would life be like without me throwing in my ha'porth? The art of the exhibition is to stand around looking meaningful and authoritative (buyers for big shop chains tend to be far better at this than exhibitors, unfortunately) and thereby cadge as many drinks as possible off the assembled journalists, foreign buyers, advertising executives and sundry other lackies. Naturally, in the course of doing one's business (ie selling the product) one has to buy quite a few drinks for the same lackies; in fact the really seasoned and professional exhibitors cut out all the extraneous hassle by keeping large quantities of booze on their stand at all times - I mean, walking to the bar can be such a draaag.... All in all, though, this show seemed remarkably flat, especially compared with the PCW show in the Autumn. Perhaps it's just that you always get much more pzazz at a public show than at a trade one, but it did seem to me that there was precious little new stuff around at all, and what was there was hardly revolutionary. One or two notable exceptions were Ocean's Gift from the Gods and Beyond's Shadowfire, both of which were written by Denton Designs - now how come these people never produced anything classy while they were at Imagine? Also getting its first public airing was Gyron from Firebird, which looked very impressive - well worth the Crash Smash it received last month. There was not a lot of strategy games to look at though, and one story that emerged at the show was that of Lothlorien signing up to do a game or two for Quicksilva. I know I've not always been kind to Lothlorien, but at least they do try and create games that do more than just improve your wrist action. Perhaps with Quicksilva giving them a nudge in the commercial direction, they may start really showing us what they can do. Realtime Software, who so far as I could make out are three beer-gutted, cider-swilling, bearded heavy metal lovers, spent a lot of time demonstrating their extremely tedious game 3D Starstrike which they have just converted for the cataleptic Enterprise computer. As I approached to ask them what they thought of 'Star Fleet Battles' I was hustled away by a bevy of Enterprise salesmen - I wouldn't have minded that they nailed my feet to the floor and forced me to watch their forthcoming TV commercial 84 times, but I'm still waiting for my official Enterprise track suit to pop through my mailbox. Any chance of it boys? Or will I have to compare your machine with the Spectrum first? On limping downstairs I was very pleased to discover the Ludlow mafia handing out traditional Shropshire hospitality, ie gin, from the Crash stand in the corner. The stand was (am I being biased here?) really the only decent thing on the ground floor. A last thought on the LET show: the biggest computer game company in Britain (and probably the world) was not there. No, I'm not talking about the Inland revenue, I'm talking about Ultimate, who never sully their hands with these show things. Would they have gained any business by being there, and did they lose any because they weren't? I doubt it. Once again, it looks as though Ultimate know something that the rest are only just finding out - that exhibitions are, for the most part, just an excuse for a binge, and that there are far more effective ways for companies to spend money on promotion. Think about that next time you buy a game - how much of your hard-earned cash is going towards some marketing executive's exhibition blowout! Oh, and I almost forgot, many thanks to the wonderful Dutch people on the stand next to me, who kept me going with regular supply of Pils, a couple of barrels of which they had the foresight to bring with them. Well that's got all the exhibition stuff out of the way, unless you want to hear about this Sinclair QL Trade day (No, we don't - E D ) I'm sure you don't want to hear about it, actually, but I'll tell you anyway. (Please, no....) It was full of some of the snottiest, most self-congratulating, jumped-up breadheads in the business, all discussing how this program was going to work out the movements of their shares, write the SUN leader column and assassinate Arthur Scargill before breakfast. One chap (who shall remain nameless because he works for a major software house) particularly got up my nose - he said, 'How do you find developing software on the QL? Tricky? Ya, well we use a VAX for all our work you know.' (A VAX being a £30,000 mainframe) I pointed out to this revisionist jackal that most of the best games software was actually written on the machine which it was intended to run on, and that game software authors were used to working with the idiosyncrasies of various machines, and indeed managed often to exploit those idiosyncrasies. In fact, the only software house to go in for writing on bigger machines than the intended end-user was, you guessed it, Imagine! Enough of all this; let's move on to the really important stuff (at last - ED), like whether my loo has thawed out yet (AAAARGH! -----) and my plan to build an ornamental shopping centre in my back yard out of broken bricks. Maybe I could sell part of the yard to Sainsburys! (Come back Robert Maxwell, all is forgiven!) THE TRIPODS Producer: Red Shift Memory Required: 48K Retail Price: £12.95 Language: BASIC with some Machine code Interesting enough, this month I had to set things up to review just two 'heavyweight' games, both of which are menu driven. However, while Alien definitely lives up to, and even exceeds expectations, The Tripods does not. The packaging is nice (as indeed is Alien's) and include a large full-colour map of France, showing the various rivers and the White Mountains, your destination. But I began to have doubts about the game when I started reading the instruction booklet. It promised lots of interaction with NPCs (non-player characters) but said nothing about how this was going to take place. Not to worry, I though, all will probably be revealed in the game itself. This did not transpire. There is a basic menu, consisting of looking left or right, moving, eating and getting status reports on health and possessions. There are also options to pick up or not to pick up objects - you cannot drop objects. A special menu comes up when there are Tripods around - you can look left or right, move, or try to dazzle it, try to disorientate it, or examine your pack. Great, I thought, I just happened to have found a grenade lying around earlier, let's try and blow one of its legs off. But I was not able to get the pineapple out of my pack, let alone fragmentise the machine with it. This same problem seemed to apply to all sorts of other things as well - for example, there are shops dotted all over the place, and you carry money with you. Foolishly, I jumped to the conclusions that you would be able to go into these shops and buy things. Well, apparently you can't; perhaps you have to find a translator (a babel fish perhaps?) first, but there is nothing to give you a clue. While this is quite acceptable, indeed half the fun, in a text-interpretive adventure, in a ten input menu driven game, it seems obfuscatory to say the least. That you can't apparently do very much in the game is not its only shortcoming. The graphics also leave a lot to be desired. Red Shift have gone for their own 'landscaping' system, giving them (I would guess) several thousand views in the game. Each part of the picture is well drawn - there are four or five different kinds of trees, loads of different buildings, bridges, marshes and so on - but they are assembled to form pictures that throw perspective out of the window. There are also a series of graded lines drawn across the top of each picture, which I presume are intended to enhance the overall three-dimensional feel of the picture - I found them messy and irritating to look at; the drawing time of the pictures is not fast; and this is a complaint which applies to the whole game - response time is far too slow. Most of the game is written in BASIC, which means you get these tedious pauses between pressing a key and being able to do something else. And occasionally, for example when you come across a Tripod and need to move fast, these delays make effective gameplay impossible. I gather that The Tripods was going to be the game that would revive a rather ailing Red Shift but I have the feeling that it may be their death warrant instead.