The Pharaoh's Tomb

Crash

Producer: Phipps Associates: 48K £4.95 Make yourself rich by plundering a luxurious Pharaoh's tomb. Phipps have put together a well planned and sometimes amusing adventure game here, with text and location graphics, which are simply but attractive. Responses are very fast and the atmosphere draws you in again and again. Good value for money and well worth playing.

Read it at Crash - The Online Edition

Crash

Producer: Phipps Associates: 48K £4.95 Make yourself rich by plundering a luxurious Pharaoh's tomb. Phipps have put together a well planned and sometimes amusing adventure game here, with text and location graphics, which are simply but attractive. Responses are very fast and the atmosphere draws you in again and again. Good value for money and well worth playing.

Crash

Producer: Phipps Associates: 48K £4.95 Make yourself rich by plundering a luxurious Pharaoh's tomb. Phipps have put together a well planned and sometimes amusing adventure game here, with text and location graphics, which are simply but attractive. Responses are very fast and the atmosphere draws you in again and again. Good value for money and well worth playing.

Personal Computer Games

MACHINE: Spectrum 48K. PRICE: £4.95. FROM: Phipps Associates. FORMAT: Cassette. THE CHALLENGE This is not a game for the zap and splat crowd, but rather a well-executed adventure in words and pictures. Pharoh's Tomb is most of all a brain- teaser, a game you'll need to spend a good deal of time with for it to be worthwhile. There's a stunning Egyptian treasure at stake here, so the time you spend on it will no doubt be worth it. You are an explorer in the land of the Pharoh, and one who's hot for all the gold and jewellery that's offered. HOW TO WIN Pharoh's Tomb uses split-screen graphics to give you a picture of the inside of the tomb AND the command line to control your characters. The command line is a scrolling text window which displays your questions or commands, and the program's response to them. To give you the solution would be cheating, but suffice it to say that victory in this game takes a hell of a long time. The program has a limited vocabulary which includes oblique and unhelpful responses, such as, 'I don't understand,' and, 'I can't'. As the game progresses, you start to work out the hints that lead you from room to room within the tomb. For example, the commands 'Go West', or 'Go South', or 'Move stone', or 'Pick up Cloak' would move you from the Crystal Room to the Sacrificial Chamber. But you don't really want to know whether that's closer to the treasure or not = do you? The program's rather short and vague responses make the game, to say the least, rather difficult. And after seeing 'I can't' 150 times or more, it can get rather boring. Patience is a big virtue here since even the 'Help' key is distinctly unhelpful, and the program refuses to give any hints at all - except repeatedly telling you that you don't need any - which tends to wound the old self-confidence. A feature of the game is that you can leave it and take it up where you left off. VIDEO VERDICT If you like something that taxes the mind and makes you think a lot, then this is the game for you. My complaint is in the lack of language that the computer understands - but then that is just my excuse.

Hmm. 'GO WATER' it doesn't seem to understand. What if you try 'DRINK WATER'? Ah…

Now what? Throw the stone? Wave the fan? More important, which way is the treasure?

You get a picture of the inside of the tomb and a command line to control your characters.

Personal Computer News

Lasting Appeal 4/5

Playability 4/5

Use Of The Machine 4/5

Overall Value 5/5

Mike Gerrard 5/5

NAME: Pharaoh's Tomb SYSTEM: Spectrum 48K PRICE: £4.95 PUBLISHER: Phipps Associates, [redacted] FORMAT: Cassette LANGUAGE: Machine code, some Basic OTHER VERSIONS: Limited version for 16K ZX81 OUTLETS: Mail order, most specialist computer shops. RIDDLE OF THE SANDS The only introduction needed for this piece of software is to say that it is an adventure combining graphics and text, set in the rooms and caves of the tomb of one of the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt. These must have been pretty restless corpses as the tomb comprises 62 rooms - including a rest room -and I'll leave you to wonder what ancient treasure you may or may not find there. OBJECTIVES The opening screen tells you: 'I am standing at an oasis in the Egyptian desert, close to a place where rumours suggest that an ancient burial place exists. To win, I must gather all the golden treasures that I may find and place them by the oasis.' For each of the treasures you gather you collect points, the points increasing if you take the treasures out of the tomb and to the oasis. Your goal is the maximum tally of 1,520, and you can find out how well you're doing at any moment by simply typing SCORE. There is one other tiny objective as well, I suppose. In that like most adventure games your chances of winning are increased considerably if you manage to stay alive, though if you're going to die somewhere it might as well be in a luxurious tomb such as this. FIRST IMPRESSIONS The cassette inlay is a professional job, and for once it is fairly restrained, avoiding those garish drawings and wild claims made by some companies who say 'This game will scare you half to death,' and suchlike nonsense. The inlay contains the loading instructions, the tape offers two copies of the program, and the program incorporates the simple playing instructions. Phipps Associates also offers to send you the solution if you're screamingly desperate. What more could you ask? IN PLAY You begin at the oasis, with a path to the north, steep steps going up a mountain, and a book of matches lying at your feet. As on all screens, a helpful compass appears in the top right corner pointing north. The directions you can input are the simple N, S, W, and E, with the addition of Up and Down. The program recognises about 70 words in all, including the usual Get, Drop, Use, Look, List, Help and Quit. You shouldn't need the Quit option just yet, unless you can't decide whether to go north or climb the mountain, but if you use it later you will be offered the chance to save the game to tape, and this does seem to be one of those games where the various objects stay where they are: put the matches down in one place and they'll still be there if you go back for them later. The graphics occupy the top half of the screen, and are colourful and good without exactly being breathtaking, while the text scrolls up the bottom half. 'What do I do now?' your guide will prompt you, and the machine code word scanning ensures that he responds to your orders very quickly, even if it's only to say 'I can't do that now' or 'I don't understand.' It isn't giving too much away to say that if you head north you arrive at the entrance to the tomb, where a large rock blocks the way in. An example of the game's occasional humour is uncovered if you request 'Move rock'. The answer comes back: 'Are you sure you want me to risk having a hernia?' Being a harsh taskmaster, of course I replied 'Yes.' to be greeted by a series of grunts while my guide made very heavy weather of moving the rock. The first room is the Fire Room, at which point the matches promptly ignite, assuming you've brought them with you. As these will obviously be of some use later on, my first aim was to solve that problem, which was no mean feat as it involves a combination of two items and a thorough exploration of about a dozen rooms. Other places you'll encounter include the Burial Chamber, Music Room, Death Row and the Windy Tunnel, which appears to be the only place where chance enters into the adventure. Apart from the treasures you'll find potentially useful items such as lamps, magic cloaks, fans and magic rings, and you can carry up to six items at one time. The responses were more or less instant, and the only annoying delays occurred when I wanted to rush back to a particular room to try something out and bad to wait while each of the rooms I passed through was drawn on the screen. Even though this only takes a few seconds, and there's probably no way round it. It does seem like ages. The game itself was well worked out, and there were no simple answers to anything. Most hurdles to be overcome involved using at least a couple of items, perhaps carrying one thing while wearing something else, but afterwards all these answers seemed very logical... once you'd worked them out, of course. One area of the tomb has to be explored in a limited number of moves, before a door closes and locks you inside forever, while the almost impenetrable maze lived up to its name. VERDICT Although I only unearthed one item of treasure in several hours of playing. I wasn't inclined to give up as each time I seemed to get just that bit further, tempted on. The game itself is like the graphics: good without being great. It's certainly not The Hobbit, but at less than a fiver it's definitely value for money.