Karyssia: Queen of Diamonds

Your Sinclair

Graphics 8/10

Text 7/10

Value For Money 8/10

Personal Rating 8/10

Overall 8/10

Mike Gerrard 8/10

FAX BOX Game: Karyssia, Queen of Diamonds Publisher: Incentive, [redacted] Price: £7.95 Reviewer: Mike Gerrard Another Gold Medallion release from Incentive, and better value-for-money than the earlier Winter Wonderland and Apache Gold, which were decent-enough adventures but pricey at £7.95. Karyssia costs the same but this time it's a three-part GAC adventure in Swords And Sorcery vein, involving money, weapons, spells and speech. Dark deeds are afoot, or possibly twelve inches. Before you can get going, there are no less than six pages of cassette inlay to read, giving you the storyline and lists of weapons and the spells available in the three levels of magic: the lower plane, higher plane and exclusive plane. There's a lot going on in this game! GAC? I never knew there was so much in it. But who is this Karyssia anyway? Daughter of King Merenon I of the Isle of Senduarin. Her ascent to the throne coincides with the expiry of the diamond mines on which Senduarin's wealth is based, and her attempts to save the economy make her a popular figure. Little do her adoring public know, but... Oh you don't want to know all this, do you? The aim is to kill Karyssia, which means finding the Royal Castle from your starting point, "The Sword and Buckler". This first location shows the style of graphics that's been adopted, and very stylish it is too. A 3-D Batman/Sweevo type of perspective has been chosen for indoor scenes, and it's so effective you wonder why no-one thought of it before for an adventure game. Watch the doors in the graphics too, as not all exits are given in the text and it's up to you to find them. I like the style of the first real problem you have. Up a tree you find an acorn. At the top of a cliff is some soft earth, just ripe for acorn planting. Half-way down the cliff is a nest. Elsewhere is a rope, and then to and behold you find a GROWTH spell. What could be simpler? Plant the acorn, cast GROWTH at it, tie the rope to the tree and get to the nest. Wrong! As you hurriedly make your way back to the cliff top via the only route, your spell is confiscated and you can't get past. Or can you? I won't say any more but it's a bit of neat double bluffery from the programmers, D & R Shacklady. Or is it triple-bluffery... hmmm, I've only just considered that. At first I thought I was going to hate this game, as my wanderings took me to one of my pet hates: sudden death routines. Standing on a main road you're told: "To the west you can see Westmarket Street." Tum-ti-tum-ti-tum, let's go west. Oh dear, we seem to have been attacked by a 15 foot ogre who just happens to be hanging round Westmarket Street. Press a key for another game. Then elsewhere something shines in the water of a lake. EXAMINE WATER. Oh dear, you are bitten by a deadly poisonous glistening crab. How silly of me, I should have known. Press a key for another game. I very nearly didn't! I'm glad I persevered though, as apart from a few careless screen layouts this is one of the best GAC games I've yet seen. The speech function is often limited to saying 'Hello' just to get a response from the characters, but I liked the way the authors seem to have successfully packed lots of features into the program. Highly recommended.

Read it at Your Sinclair Rock'n'Roll Years

ACE (Advanced Computer Entertainment)

System 4/7

Encounters 3/7

Challenge 4/7

Landscape 4/7

Verdict 695/1000

GAC three-parter from Incentive. Incentive (as you can also see on the next page) have always lived up to their word when it comes to supporting GAC users. There has been a long string of releases from the company featuring games written by users and one or two of them have been quite attractive. However for the most part these games have been really quite simple affairs from the programming point of view - the GAC is rather limiting, to be sure, but as Pat Winstanley will tell you there is still quite a lot you can do with it. Karyssia is a three-part game with simple combat routines (that depend on your skill and experience levels), very rudimentary speech routines, and an attractive character set. The graphics have that isometric Ultimate look as far as layout is concerned but are otherwise rather devoid of detail - a pity because the rest of the game is nicely put together. Your task is to travel to the Royal Castle, enter it, and kill Karyssia who is mismanaging the economy of Senduarin and generally causing heart-ache and encouraging homicidal tendencies. This is certainly one of the better GAC games released by Incentive. The puzzles are quite tough in paces, but are to a certain extent spoilt by the frequent "You can't do that" messages that even greet the simple word LOOK (you have to use REDESCRIBE). But just occasionally the program comes up with a neat little bit of interaction that compensates for these weaknesses. My only other complaint is about the frequent inevitable deaths, so SAVE often. RELEASE BOX Spectrum £7.95cs, Reviewed No other versions planned.

Crash

Atmosphere 81%

Vocabulary 85%

Logic 83%

Addictive Qualities 88%

Overall 87%

Derek Brewster 87%

Producer: Incentive Retail Price: £7.95 Author: D & R Shacklady For what seems like all summer long the big boys have kept well clear of adventures, so it was with interest that I loaded up Karyssia from Incentive. The packaging is rather plain, but this Medallion Adventure, written using Incentive's own Graphic Adventure Creator (GAC) is graphically quite attractive. Superficially it'll be the crisp 3-D pictures which attract the adventurer, but Karyssia has many highly sophisticated features such as speech, magic, cabalism (spoken magic), combat with a huge variety of weapons, and a full story - all will help its successful launch into the adventurer's imagination. The Isle Of Senduarin was once a very pleasant land with famous diamond mines. Under the wise rule of the 'smiling monarch' King Merenon I, the wealth from the precious stones was spread throughout his peoples. Prophets, however, predicted doom in the form of the king's first-born, and when the princess Karyssia was born the prophets, convinced of their infallibility, made an abortive attempt on her life. Later, two more daughters - Anassia and Sarassia - were born to the king. On his death Karyssia became queen and proved a wise ruler. But there were rumours of the diamond mines running down, and the people of Senduarin became aware of their real plight. The money to transform Senduarin into a self-sufficient agricultural state was to be found in Karyssia's vast wealth, but for a while the island had to rely on its near neighbours, Arduarin and Tresduarin, for food. Karyssia's generosity with her fortune made her ever more popular, but the truth was that the prophets had been right all along - only Karyssia and her sisters knew that the diamonds had NOT run out. Meanwhile on Arduarin, the largest of the three islands, there was turmoil. Three fighters had cut down the king and assumed control. They were extremely unpopular, so Karyssia seized her chance and offered the fighters a large sum to leave their island. This they gladly accepted and Karyssia took over the throne of Arduarin with its people's approval. Soon Karyssia and her sisters controlled all three islands, using aggression and tyranny to retain power. Karyssia set up a huge army to control the disgruntled peoples and herself became skilled in swordplay. She appointed 12 bodyguards and a court wizard, the evil Sindowa, to protect her. Her summary justice emanated from the Royal Castle in the north of Arduarin, set high in the Altivian Mountains near Stillwater Lake. This lake, set in a high plateau, is said to hold strange powers... The rightful heir to the throne of Arduarin, Loranin, has asked you to kill Karyssia. This will involve a long journey to the Royal Castle. You begin the adventure in the Sword & Bucket Inn in Mottinan, the southernmost town of Tresduarin. You should endeavour to travel across this island, pass through Senduarin and go on to the far north, to the Ativian Mountains and Karyssia. Your first rendezvous is with Loranin in a cove, and so you quickly sup up and take your leave of the innkeeper of the Sword & Bucket. How you react to the characters you meet in the game will depend upon how they present themselves, but just in case they want to get aggressive you have the option to attack them. This can be risky, though - you can't retreat from a battle once your opponent is engaged. Naturally enough, the victor is usually the more able of the fighters, determined by comparing skill and stamina ratings. (Your own status can be monitored with STATUS.) There are two types of weapon: hand-to-hand weapons and projectiles. Hand-to-hand weapons increase your ability in combat but projectiles don't, and employing them effectively may require some skill. The hand-to-hand weapons include doubleswords, a longsword, a scimitar, a mace (a spiked ball chained to a stick - gruesome!), a staff (which can block swords and maces), a morningstar (another spiked-ball-on-stick job), a club and a whip (easy to carry but ineffective against armour). The list of projectiles is just as long, and some are equally as nasty - such as the javelin, which is described as heavier and more penetrating than the spear, and the flyingstar, a star-edged disc with fingerholes. Used only by the best fighters, the flyingstar is deadly when tipped with poison. In the world of magic there are three levels: lower plane, higher plane and executive plane (it's exclusive plane actually, but I couldn't resist the joke). Lower planes are widely available, higher-plane spells are expensive and used by rich fighters, and exclusive planes are useful only to wizards. Lower-plane spells are chosen from quite a long list: Stamina, Skill, Fire, Ice, Illusion, Friendship, Curse, Bless, Blindness, Remove, Growth, Invisibility, Fear, Levitation. Probably the most interesting of the higher-plane spells is the Dispel Magic Spell, which wipes out lower-plane magic. To cast a spell, CAST (type) SPELL ON (object), as in CAST CURSE SPELL ON INNKEEPER, or simply CAST CURSE where the object is obvious. That curious word 'cabalism' here refers to spoken magic. It usually involves an amulet and is cast on an object. If you know a cabalistic spell, and you are in possession of the amulet, then you can use it by saying the spell to the object, as in DIAMOND (SPELL). This formal follows that of all speech in Karyssia, as in FLORASSIA HELLO, or INNKEEPER GIVE ME A DRINK. The Ultimate-style 3-D graphics are the first thing you notice in Karyssia: you see the picture by looking down obliquely through the two nearest walls, which are presented as see-through. The doors in these walls are marked only by their ghostly frames. Along with the very smart redesigned character set, these pictures, though sparse and often repeating items of furniture, give the game an attractive appearance. As for gameplay, there are no mid-compass directions like NE, SE and so on, which are often missing from GAC games. There are one or two places where you might be puzzled as to why you can't pick up an item - the acorn at the tree, for example, or the 25 gold pieces - but this is because you already possess such items as soon as you meet them. Another problem: there might be a little warning tucked away in the instructions, but I found out the hard way that L, intended by me to mean LOOK, sent the program into LOAD mode. You can quickly get out of the situation by BREAKing, but for a moment the program has you hopping mad... Karyssia is a fine adventure with many admirable features. The pretty 3-D graphics are thin on the ground, and the location descriptions aren't the most evocative I've read, but the plot, which unwinds along three separately-loading parts, holds the attention marvellously. DIFFICULTY: not difficult GRAPHICS: few, but very pretty PRESENTATION: good, clean INPUT FACILITY: basically verb, noun RESPONSE: reasonably fast

In a 3-D world of war and complex magic, the tale of Karyssia unfolds.