The Odyssey of Hope

C&VG (Computer & Video Games)

Keith Campbell

I hoped Martech's new Adventure would come up to a high standard because I had criticised their last offering on a false premise. I a claimed instructions were inaccurate when, in fact, I had read them incorrectly. For Odyssey of Hope, Martech has turned from Commodore to Spectrum and they sent me the game with a letter expressing their hope that I did not find the print on the inlay too small. All too often the inlay on a standard cassette has almost microscopic printing to squeeze it all in - have you noticed? Anyway - no grounds for complaint this time - the inlay was clear, precise and uncluttered. Additional instructions were supplied on one side of the tape itself - to be loaded only if required. On to the game proper, and here we come to the nitty gritty. What's in the pudding, I wondered? Odyssey of Hope sets the player the task of returning Hope to the top of Mount Olympus. Hope was man's only gift following the escape of everything nasty when Pandora's box was opened. The player starts in the Temple and progresses as he may! The game has graphics at every location and I have never seen such fast displaying graphics before on the Spectrum. There is an unusual text-screen format, whereby the visible objects are always displayed and updated just below the right-hand side of the picture. The prompting BEEP actually sounds some few seconds before the prompt appears. The response time varies considerably, depending upon the command entered, and things therefore tend to become confused, with the eager player starting to type his next command before the computer is ready to receive it. Taking an object gives by far the longest delay - an incredible eight-second wait. Admittedly, the way the screen displays the replies gives one the impression that the time is for less, but that was the actual time and hence the confusion! The game has a score feature based on problems solved and these seem to be banded in lumps of 4%. Unfortunately there are many of those "You are dead" locations, at which, without any warning whatsoever, you find yourself kaput, with no way of anticipating the danger. It's been said before - anyone, but anyone, con devise an Adventure so based. Luckily there is a save routine and I certainly had to use it to play the game enough to be able to write this review! I wandered into a wooden hut which was apparently a workshop. Within were a number of items of possible use, so I collected the lot, then turned around to make my way back. "The door won't open", came the reply. "Why on earth not?" I thought. No logic whatsoever - merely a ploy to put the player in a position where he has to try every possible trick to escape a trap which he had no way of anticipating. So to while away the time, I ate the fish I found on the table and got fish bones. I tried picking the lock with them and eventually found I could cut the door using the bones - despite the fact that I had a perfectly good sword with me which helped not one bit! As I said - illogical - so I make no apologies for telling you how! On I plodded, coming to the conclusion that here was one of those games that could described as "competent", its saving grace being the spectacular speed of its graphics. Odyssey of Hope is from Martech for 48k Spectrum.

Micro Adventurer

Tony Bridge

PANDORA'S BOX MICRO: Spectrum 48K PRICE: £5.95 SUPPLIER: Martech/Software Communications Pandora - the first woman! She was fashioned from clay at the direction of Zeus, and all the Gods gave her a gift. (Pan-Dora: all gifts). Thus, Apollo bequeathed to her the talent to sing; Zeus gave her a box, which he cautioned her never to open - what a sauce! And what a temptation. Of course, she succumbed and "let loose all the ills that now beset man; disease and sorrow, hate and jealousy, theft, lies and many more." Hope alone was left. Now, some has stolen Hope, and all the ills have taken over the world. You, as the adventurer, have been chosen to undertake an Odyssey, to find and restore Hope to its guardian on Mount Olympus, home of the Gods. This is the opening preamble, contained on one side of the tape. Odyssey of Hope is "a Classical Graphic Adventure", an allusion to the Greek mythology contained therein. The introduction is rather nifty, consisting of the turning pages of a book, on which are written the aforementioned introduction (no instructions, however, are forthcoming), and apart from the slowly turning pages, there is also a little graphic of various Ills, floating up into the air, from where they hope to destroy the world. Although the program contained in my preview copy sometimes got rather confused and overwrote the previous graphics, the idea is nevertheless unusual and a pleasant change. Loading the main program should be a simple matter of turning over the tape, but again, my review copy had trouble with this, and I found myself having to NEW the instructions and LOADing the second part separately. I'm sure all this will be sorted out on the release copies. On to the adventure: the player is first of all asked if a previously saved game is to be loaded - the only input is the full word (YES or NO), no abbreviations are accepted. It's not a big deal to type two or three letters instead of one, but the seasoned adventurer experiences a brief shudder up his back! Is this indicative of the friendliness of the program as a whole? I'm afraid it is. INVENTORY is definitely not accepted, but I is: NORTH elicits the response "Incorrect input, try again," and N is the Correct Input. Similarly, SEARCH will do you no good, but try EXAMINE. The program is written in Basic, so responses are little slower than we have become used to, which means that the player spends an inordinate time waiting for the program to wake up - really annoying if the wrong key is pressed (and beware hitting Q - for Quit - you can't get back into the game!). The graphics, however, are held in memory, and thus are commendably quick to appear on-screen, although the other side of this coin is that they are not great works of art, being rather blocky and simplified representations of the scene. The pictures do, though, include a constant display of objects at the scene, and an inventory if it has been asked for. How many locations there are, I haven't the faintest - no Help sheet was supplied with the review copy, and I haven't got very far into the adventure. This is partly due to a closed door in one location, the secret of opening which I haven't yet found, and partly due to the program's habit of killing you off every so often. The graphics are, however, often accompanied by sound effects, which is pretty unusual: the python hisses, deadly bees buzz and so on. Actually, I may be churlish in saying this, but they got on my wick in very short order; once the infernal noise starts, one has to sit through it until the bitter end! All in all, a reasonable knockabout. The graphics and sound don't add a bean to the atmosphere, of which there is none, despite the occasional appearance of nefarious monsters. The puzzles seem of the standard type (i.e., Here is a Closed Door/Dangerous Snake - how do you Open it/Kill it?), and a beginner would find it interesting. A more experienced adventurer would, I believe, yearn for something more unusual and friendly.

Big K

Graphics 2/3

Playability 2/3

Addictiveness 1/3

Overall 2/3

Steve Keaton 2/3

MAKER: Martech Games FORMAT: cassette PRICE: £5.95 Having ransacked Tolkien, the Legends of Ancient Greece seem to be next in line for software exploitation. And why not! The Place was obviously made with adventures and simulations in mind. In this scenario the gods of Mount Olympus are well cheesed off. Some rascal has stolen Hope from poor ol' Pandora's box and us mortals are in an advanced state of despair. The skies have blackened and lightning bolts stab from the sky. Zeus is clearly off his chump. Only you can venture out and recover Hope for all mankind. Much effort has been spent on creating an authentic world here, and all to great effect. Indeed, followers of the period will have a definite advantage over us lesser mortals when it comes to solving the quest. All the locations are illustrated, but these appear instantly so playability has not been sacrificed. Written descriptions though are sparse. I'd have preferred more evocative text to be honest, but then that's all a matter of taste. From my initial wanderings I'd say that the game is of a fair size and offers adequate headaches. If the subject matter appeals then this is well worth checking out.

Sinclair User

Gilbert Factor 6/10

John Lambert 6/10

Memory: 48K Price: £6.95 The Odyssey of Hope from Martech is an interesting adventure game based on the ancient legend of Pandora. She was the first mortal woman, created by the gods of Olympus, and because of her insatiable curiosity she released into the world all kinds of diseases and misfortunes. Fortunately, Hope was released at the same time but that has been stolen by some unnamed evil and your mission in the adventure is to recover it. The story is well-introduced with some amusing graphics. As with most mythical adventures, you need no knowledge of Greek mythology to complete the adventure successfully, although it can give some helpful clues. The various locations are well laid out and reasonably complex, with the frequent hazard of being drowned or bitten by snakes. There is a certain amount of independent action in the game - that is to say characters move round you a little - but it is not a game to be compared to such giants as Valhalla or The Hobbit.

Read it at Sinclair User Magazine Online

Personal Computer News

Mike Gerrard

BACK TO THE GREEK Adventure playing is now a weekly activity in the pages of PCN. The week the intrepid Mike Gerrard gives an account of his travel son Odyssey Of Hope, a stylish adventure. Problems are solved here too, so if you're stumped just write to Dungeon Master, PCN, [redacted]. Literary works are proving to be a fertile source of material for adventure writers, from The Hobbit to Sherlock Holmes by way of Dante's Inferno, though of course the adventures still have to be good. The Odyssey of Hope, for the 48K Spectrum, is not a straight adaptation of any one particular book, but plunders several areas of the Greek myths and does it in great style - one of the most enjoyable adventures I've seen for several weeks. ZEUS ON THE LOOSE Side one of the tape contains the introduction, with the game program on side two. This is one of those rare, if not unique adventures where the instructions are worth looking at for their own sake. That's because they're printed on the pages of a book, which flip over rather nicely as you press the Enter key, and some of them are illustrated. 'Once upon a time,' the story begins, 'Zeus had one of his master craftsmen fashion a mortal of perfect beauty - the first woman. He called her Pandora - meaning all gifts.' The pages turn to explain that Zeus gave Pandora a golden casket, but forbade her to open it. Cynical readers might ask why bother giving it to her in the first place, but then there wouldn't be a story or an adventure, as naturally curiosity got the better of her and she lifted the lid. This released all the ills that now beset mankind, so if you're bothered by disease, sorrow, hate, jealousy, theft, lies or anything along those lines, write to Pandora... or failing that, Claire Rayner. The only thing remaining in the casket when Pandora rushed to close the lid was Hope (and there are some excellent animated graphics illustrating the escape of the various woes, with Hope remaining in the shape of a butterfly). Needless to say, some charmer comes along and steals Hope, giving you the chance to become a hero and return Hope to its home on Mount Olympus. Maybe Zeus will even slip you a few drachma and a cup of hot nectar by way of reward. The game itself is a graphics adventure with the traditional simple noun-verb input, except when you decide to attack something. Then you're allowed the luxury of KILL CYCLOPS WITH FLUTE, or whatever your chosen weapon hap, pens to be. Movement commands are abbreviated to the first letter, as are Inventory, Help, Total score and Quit game (Save option included). Though Look isn't used to redescribe the location as usual, it tells you if there's anything else around in that location. In fact you don't need to Look in the first location, the oracle's temple, as you can hear what's there: the hissing of a python. That's why I say the game has style as there are other sound effects too, including the buzzing of bees in the meadow south of the temple, which contains a dead cow. The meadow, that is, not the temple, as it's dead rather than sacred. If you linger too long round the bees or the python it might be bad for your health, although both can be put to good use if you can work out how. Some of the other problems presented to you early on include a wooden hut which contains a table and a workbench with lots of interesting items, but unfortunately the but also has a door that closes behind you as soon as you go in. I've tried opening it with everything inside, even the fish in a moment of desperation, but I remain resolutely locked in there for the time being. Perhaps I should write to the PCN Dungeon page and ask myself how to get out. CENTAUR SPREAD Many of the first batch of locations have you at sea, and there's a lot of drowning going on, particularly if you can't remember how to cope with the seductive singing of the Sirens. Other creatures you might be familiar with, though not too familiar one hopes, are centaurs, harpies and naiads. The graphics are not stunning but are quite pleasant and do have the virtue of appearing instantly, though I wish the same could be said of some of the responses, which take an age to appear. You can almost hear the program saying 'Now hang on, I've just got to check that. Don't go away, I know it's in here somewhere,' But it does at least seem to be thoroughly done, with no odd responses or noticeable bugs, though there is one spider outside the neglected house. The house has three floors - quite impressive by ancient Greek standards, I'd have thought. And by adventure standards this game is quite impressive too, taking you a little bit further each time, with something to investigate in about every other location and one or two nice touches of humour here and there. At £5.95 it's reasonably priced, and published by Software Communications, [redacted]. I wonder if they get a lot of trouble from the Cyclops down Pevensey Bay way.

Personal Computer Games

Complexity 6/10

Atmosphere 6/10

Interaction 5/10

Value 6/10

Steve Cooke

FORGET THESE TREASURES! Some of the games that have made their way to the White Wizard's Fortress of Solitude this month are pure rubbish. First into the bin was The Five Treasures of Ryzar from Space Age Software. This 'original and exciting adventure' is about as original and exciting as a spell for making lizards burp. 'You are not limited to single-letter commands' boasts the press release. Big deal. You are, however limited to a very small vocabulary and an extremely repetitive scenario. The display shows a line drawing of the room you happen to be in. You can choose between 'Olde Englishe Text' and the normal Spectrum character set; and a brief message tells you the number of the room and which direction you're facing in. The direction is really pretty pointless since the program doesn't understand words like North, South etc. You have to type in 'Go forward' or 'Go backwards' to move about. Most of the time you type in instructions you are told that 'You can't do that here', without it being at all clear why you can't. Every time you enter a new room another ugly line drawing, featuring a number of blank walls and a door or two, is flashed onto the screen. Sometimes you appear to be in a new room but the display tells you that you are still in the old one. All very confusing. Your task is to collect the five treasures of Ryzar from the five different levels below the city, but however exciting the objective may sound, the game, I assure you, isn't. CLASSIC I was getting rather depressed by this stage, but the next offering, Odyssey of Hope, from Martech, cheered my up considerably. Martech's game looks different from the start. The instructions are printed on the pages of a book that turn as you read them. The adventure itself has scrolling text with attractive graphics at the top of the page that draw instantly and are among the best adventure graphics I've seen on the Sinclair machine. You have to travel around the classical world of ancient Greece hunting for Hope, which has been stolen, and restore it to Mount Olympus. Compared to Five Treasures of Ryzar, Odyssey of Hope seemed like game of the year. In fact, it's a rather average adventure that is perked up with some surprising additions. First, the sound effects. Standing in the temple, you hear a hissing sound between inputs. Hang about too long and you get bitten by a snake. After that, in another location, you can be sure I didn't stick around to find out what the buzzing sound was. Being stung to death by savage bees isn't my idea of a Greek holiday. The responses are a bit slow in Martech's game, but otherwise I found it an attractive if rather unexciting game. One thing that annoyed me was the response to my entry 'Use loom'. 'What!', the program replied, 'That's women's work!'. The assumption that only men, boys and wizards play adventures is not only incorrect, but also, I think, a little insulting to half the population. WILD WEST However, it's very much a man's world in West, a new game for the 64 from another company jumping on the adventure bandwagon, Talent Software. This is a rather unusual game, a text-adventure but with a real-time element which can make play rather bizarre, to say the least. The setting is an old, decaying town in the Wild West, and droves of gun-toting bank robbers are on the loose. When you encounter one you have to type in 'SHOOT' at top speed or you're liable to bite the dust with a bullet in your back. Since we wizards have always preferred spells to touch-typing, this proved a most demanding ordeal. Even stranger is that when you die you are simply returned to the starting point minus all your possessions, including your gun. So you must immediately hare hack to the site of your death where you will discover 'a familiar corpse' from which you can recoup all your property. Unfortunately there are some locations you can't return to safely should you die in one of these you might as well reload the tape (takes 15 minutes) although you do have the option of loading a previously saved position. Since you have 30 lives, it's not long before the locations you visit are populated by 'familiar corpses' of you and your trusty steed and, as the text keeps telling you, 'the stench is awful'. Another unusual feature is that should you happen to pick up a pack of cards, you're likely to be challenged to a game of Pontoon, the rules of which are explained in the cassette inlay. You can keep playing as long as you like and if you lose you'd better have some money With you or guess what happens. Mind you, if you win the robbers don't seem to take that very kindly either. Other features which won't appeal to the purist are the rather bald nature of the descriptions and the fact that many common words such as 'Wait' and, more ominously, 'Help' are not understood. But the instructions claim a vocabulary of up to 200 words, and there seems to be quite a large number of locations. The aim in West is to track down the bank robbers' loot and escape from the town in one piece. Could appeal to anyone fed up with battling dragons, trolls, and serpents - but look out for the rattlesnake! Dorcas Software are a company I haven't stumbled across before. Their game Oracle's Cave for the 64 is one of those 'hit points and heal wounds' programs where you go for a wild romp through a maze of caves, attacking ogres and cackling with glee at the sight of gold. Dorcas' game is different because of the quality of the graphics. There's a display of the cave you find yourself in at the top of the screen. Below is a status display and a map of the caves which is added to as you explore them. In each location you are presented with different choices depending on what you're up against. Commands are entered with single key-presses and the results are then displayed graphically on the screen. Move straight ahead and a little figure walks hesitantly along the tunnel. He can also climb up and down ladders, fight with assorted monsters and, of course, collect treasure, food, potions, and all the other curiosities to be found in your local cave complex. The White Wizard is not, as I've said before, a great fan of this type of game. I prefer to have the opportunities (and even, sometimes, the frustrations) of proper text input. I also prefer to have something more to do than just go around collecting treasure and fighting. However the graphics did add to the atmosphere and I enjoyed it more than most programs of this type. POT OF GOLD The troubles at Dragon came at a particularly unfortunate time for adventure players because Dragon Data have just produced two excellent games for the Welsh machine. Shenanigans and Sea Quest are among the first games for the Dragon with decent text/graphics displays. You get a picture in the top half of the screen and a scrolling text-window below, with both upper and lower case letters. The graphics are great - and in Sea Quest they even boast the occasional animated effect as waves cross the screen, or a waterfall plunges down onto a beach. Both games have you searching for treasure. Shenanigans has, as the name may suggest to you, a distinctly Irish flavour. Searching for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, you'll have to solve a number of tricky puzzles with the aid of a decent vocabulary and an excellently presented program. What I liked about both these games was the logic behind them. In Shenanigans one of the first puzzles concerns a mail box. How do you open your mailbox in the apartment building unless you know which mail box is yours? The White Wizard struggled with this for quite some time, and eventually gave up in despair. The solution (given me by a very helpful man at Dragon) was so blindingly obvious and so logical that I couldn't help laughing. What was it, I hear you cry? Check out next month's tips grid to find out. Meanwhile, rush out and buy the game. Sea Quest is every bit as enjoyable as Shenanigans. Instead of leprechauns you'll be rubbing shoulders with mermaids and sharks, buying goods on credit, and finally humping your hard-earned treasure back to a cave on the beach. Definitely a game to dive for. Both programs are two word input only, but this never seems to be a limitation and each game is quite clear about telling you what it understands and what it doesn't. These two adventures are easily comparable to games on the Spectrum in presentation and content. I only hope that despite Dragon's troubles they will continue to be readily available in the shops. Ah well, as Mark Ormiston pointed out in a letter last month, Dragons are a persecuted minority. And on that note, fellow adventurers, I take my leave and wish you well. GAME: The Five Treasures Of Ryzar MACHINE: Spectrum 48K PRICE: £5.20 Complexity: 4/10 Atmosphere: 1/10 Interaction: 1/10 Value: 2/10 GAME: Ruby Runabout MACHINE: Spectrum 48K PRICE: £1.99 Complexity: 4/10 Atmosphere: 5/10 Interaction: 4/10 Value: 6/10 GAME: Odyssey Of Hope MACHINE: Spectrum 48K PRICE: £5.95 Complexity: 6/10 Atmosphere: 6/10 Interaction: 5/10 Value: 6/10 GAME: West MACHINE: CBM 64 PRICE: £9.95 Complexity: 7/10 Atmosphere: 6/10 Interaction: 6/10 Value: 6/10 GAME: Oracle's Cave MACHINE: CBM 64 PRICE: £7.95 Complexity: 3/10 Atmosphere: 5/10 Interaction: 2/10 Value: 4/10 GAME: Shenanigans MACHINE: Dragon PRICE: ? Complexity: 7/10 Atmosphere: 7/10 Interaction: 6/10 Value: 7/10 GAME: Sea Quest MACHINE: Dragon PRICE: ? Complexity: 7/10 Atmosphere: 8/10 Interaction: 6/10 Value: 7/10

Odyssey of Hope.