Prehistoric Adventure

C&VG (Computer & Video Games)

Matthew Woodley

SUPPLIER: MACHINE: Spectrum 48K PRICE: £9.95 Prehistoric monsters are back. In fact, they have never even been away! Here you control Ohio, a Brave Adventurer, in the quest for the apparently legendary Aramanth fruit. This is no ordinary fruit, as it can be brewed into an elixir of eternal youth. The only person able to brew the elixir is an old man who live at Stonehenge. Not content with living for a few centuries, the Old Man (how come he is so old if he hasn't the elixir?) wants to live for even longer, and promises to share his secret with you (Sounds like Campbell! Ed) But there's a catch. The Aramanth fruit can only be found on an arrow-leafed tree on one oceanic island, where, due to the fruit, prehistoric monsters still roam. Not only have you got to find a way to get to the island, you've got to get back again - with the fruit! The locations are varied, ranging from Stonehenge to a Burger Bar, and are all described in glorious black and white. No graphics here text-only fans!. All the other familiar adventure options are included, RAM and TAPE save, HELP, SCORE, etc. An extra feature is the provision of an EDIT key, which retrieves the last command entered, to allow it to be modified. This is a good idea for games which accept complex sentences, but as Prehistoric Adventure accepts only two words, it seems a little wasted! The parser is helpful, as its responses tell you what isn't understood in a had input Although the game doesn't involve complicated vocabulary, it is a good challenge for any adventurer. The initial sequence, which involves a hunt for a map of the island, will require careful thinking as you link new and old objects. An attractive adventure, where the emphasis seems to have been put on lots of mindbending puzzles, making it a good buy for those of you who prefer the traditional text-only adventures - if you can afford the rather high price of £9.95.

Sinclair User

Overall 3/5

Gary Rook 3/5

Label: Crusader, [redacted] Price: £9.95 Memory: 48K/128K Reviewer: Gary Rook Crusader Computings Prehistoric Adventure is a well crafted adventure that includes an element of horrors - education!! You get to learn about dinosaurs while solving the problems. They're big. Actually, even armed with clue sheet all I've seen so far a a dinosaur bone, but I'm sure I'll come across them soon. Basically, you have to get to the island of dinosaurs to find the main ingredient for the potion of eternal life which has kept the old man in the centre of Stonehenge young for centuries... You kick off in a high class burger bar with a dress code and American Express sign in the window. You'll need the burger later, along with something to quench the thirst, otherwise it'll be a case of water, water everywhere... Finding the map is a bit of a pain. First map the endless plains, then find the coppice. Use the rod to find the underground stream. And with a bit of manual labour, you'll have your map. There are a number of problems an the first section of the game - the bit that happens before you reach the island, that is - and they're all pretty tough. I think they might be just a bit too tough, but I suppose you'll at least be kept busy. Included with the game you get a dinosaur poster so you can spot who's who when you finally get to the lost world. Even so, I can't help feeling that £9.95 is a bit steep for a text-only adventure.

ZX ComputingZX Computing Glob Minor

Overall Grim

Peter Sweasy Grim

Crusader Computing £9.95 Find the Elixir of Youth somewhere in a strange Stone Age world which includes burger bars and yachts. Various prehistoric creatures have already drunk this elixir, which explains the evolutionary problem of why they're around at the same time as man. These creatures will have to be tackled to gain the potion. To succeed as a new adventure company must be hard, and Crusader are to be congratulated on the quality of their packaging: a double cassette size box. and a colour dinosaur poster. Their clue sheet is very well devised. Neither have they taken the easy route by using The Quill, instead they've developed their own machine code adventure system. However, I fail to see what the advantage of doing this was. It was not to enable advanced compression techniques: the game is text only, but there isn't a remarkable amount to be read. Input has to be two words only, which is unacceptable in this age of Level 9 style parsers. Furthermore, few words can be abbreviated, which is poor programming. One good point of the parser is that it tells you exactly what if doesn't understand: the first, second or both words, or the particular combination. But then the vocabulary is so small that this happens annoyingly often. There's no EXAMINE. Also, I found the mixture between authentic pre-history and more modern developments made the game a mish-mash rather than "lighthearted". All these faults would be criticised in a budget game. This is vastly overpriced at the standard maximum, £10. You can buy many better adventures for same price or less. Available mail order only from: [redacted].

Crash

Atmosphere 84%

Vocabulary 76%

Logic 86%

Addictive Quality 85%

Overall 84%

Derek Brewster 84%

DEREK BREWSTER'S ADVENTURE TRAIL A very hectic time it has been getting this issue of The Trail out, but I think I've just about made it. Next month is the full-blown editorial which regulars will know comes along every bumper Christmas issue and I'm busy working on some of the ideas now. By the deadline I will have some words that reflect on the state of microcomputer games and how it relates to the broader picture. This month I've reviewed Twice Shy, a Mosaic game based on a book by Dick Francis, which, for a change, I have received before everyone else has even previewed it! The Bimbles are really a set of derivative Bombles, I mean Wombles, Demon of Darkness is quite a tough adventure which likes to fool around with the location descriptions, and Prehistoric Adventure is one of the best packaged adventures I have ever seen for a game which at the time of writing is still mail-order only. It comes complete with a superb poster showing all those strange dinosaurs that walked the lands over 150 million years ago. I hope I've got these details correct as I'm writing this just after I've sent the whole works back to Crash head office for screen shots, so I'm pulling all this information from memory, which is fickle at the best of times... Also this month is a mention for two fanzines (as they call themselves), for adventure enthusiasts. One, THE Questline Chronicles, is basically a review magazine, while Adventure Contact is more a forum aimed at improving adventure writing skills, a cause of which I wholeheartedly approve! I was most impressed with the standards of both, and perhaps one day I will get around to a proper survey of this whole underground world of publishing. PREHISTORIC ADVENTURE Producer: Crusader Retail Price: £9.95 This adventure represents a return to old values when size, tremendous involvement on behalf of the player, and a cracking set of intricate puzzles ruled the day. An enormous amount of effort has gone into this project, far more than is normal for a new software house, whose motto is 'Adventures for Connoisseurs'. The cover and instructions are of a very professional standard, and when I saw the quality of the poster, depicting all manner of prehistoric nasties and not-so-nasties, I was most surprised to see it was copyright of Crusader and not the Natural History Museum! All of the creatures you are likely to meet are presented in a most informative fashion, with the poster dominated by the largest group of animals ever to wander the face of the Earth - the Dinosaurs. These developed into beings of widely varying shapes and sizes during the Jurassic Period, 150 million years ago. Some are Instantly recognizable: the Stegosaurus with its rows of plates along the length of its back, now thought to be an adaptation for controlling its body temperature, Tyrannosaurus Rex, a scavenger with tiny forelimbs, and Brachiosaurus, the largest of the whole bunch, thought to have wallowed around 'in swamps. It's a nice poster - it really is. In the sensibility stakes the storyline doesn't win any prizes for lucidity, but perhaps a complex game can be forgiven an involved introduction. You begin at Stonehenge, you being a chap named Ohio, listening to some old man tell you about the secret of eternal youth. Ignoring the fact that this man is old for a moment, you listen attentively while he informs you of this great elixir of life which bestows eternal youth (we'll have to assume his age has crept up on him due to his supply of the elixir running dry!). The man divulges the secret ingredients: a fruit which grows on a tall arrow-leafed tree found on but one island. This Amaranth fruit covers the island and is the staple diet of a bunch of renegades that should have died out ages ago - them very same dinosaurs as so nicely depicted on the poster. The reason for these creatures staying way over their allotted place in history is attributed to the same elixir qualities which keep men young. Getting to the island is no walkover either, but there is some help in the form of the old man's map which, for reasons best kept to himself, he has secreted beneath a plain (a maze to you and me) by an underground stream On other words when you find it, you'll know it). As you might expect from a traditional adventure which resembles the classics of the past, this game is no walk-over and will take quite a concerted effort to complete. Traditional in its general feel perhaps, but in many details the game has quirks very much its own. First of these curios is its insistence on full word entry with no abbreviations, so commands even as long and common as INVENTORY must be spelled out. (The program does offer relief with some of the dinosaur names where shortened nicknames can be used, like Ally for Allosaurus). Keeping to the out and out eccentricities for a moment, a certain amount of imagination has gone into the location descriptions, but in a way which has locations seeming to change name, eg a pool of water is simply described as a spring on subsequent visits, not a totally distracting influence, but some cause a series of double checks to see if you are indeed in the right location shown by your map. The game does feature a fast RAM SAVE but the quit routine can catch you on the hop if you haven't saved first; there is no option to return to a new game, a previously saved position offering the only route back. The inconvenience is much lessened, though, by the authors kindly supplying the start position load immediately after the game on the tape. There seems to be a total lack of an EXAMINE command. Set against some of these eccentricities is the very useful input-error handling which can point out words the program doesn't understand and also supply hints or very direct prompts towards what the program might understand. Lastly, the Crusader team provides a very good set of hint sheets which, far from just dumping the solutions in your lap, still make you work for your progress. Hints lead onto easier clues if needed, followed by the problem solutions for those who really are flummoxed. Even with these, on some occasions direct solutions are still left to the adventurer. Prehistoric is a most professional adventure game which is a much better bet than the reams of Quilled games on offer at the moment. Although expensive, the game is all machine code and sports many sophisticated features. The game is available from Crusader at [redacted]. COMMENTS Difficulty: difficult Graphics: none Presentation: minimal, redesigned character set Input facility: verb/noun Response: fast