Quest for Eternity

Micro Adventurer

John Fraser

ETERNITY MICRO: Spectrum 48K PRICE: £7.99 FORMAT: Cassette SUPPLIER: Argus Press Software Group, [redacted] Quest for Eternity comes in a video style case with guidance and a resume of the scenario on the cover. The blurb boats over 70 locations, with 99 verbs and 162 nouns being recognised by the program. Your objective is to become a Master of Eternity and to do so you must pass a series of challenging tasks. To begin with, you have to reactivate a disused spaceship. Once you've got this going, you must visit a number of planets to pick up objects that will be needed later. Then it's off to the teleportation booth which, if you succeed in operating it, will transport you to the Chamber of Creation so you can receive your just reward. According to the blurb the adventure is a "mind-twister". Well, it certainly twisted my mind. After several hours staring at the TV screen, I was seized by an attack of migraine and forced to temporarily abandon my quest. Even so, I was still stranded on the spaceship with a collection of gadgets which, so I was informed, couldn't be used yet. Eventually I located the systems manual and a memory cartridge. On examining the manual I was told there was something missing. Ah, I thought, you obviously have to insert the cartridge. This action did produce an "OK" message, but even so I couldn't switch it on. Occasionally, a wrong instruction resulted in an error message, while the computer sometimes couldn't distinguish between words with similar spellings. Also, whichever location I happened to be in, typing "press switch" gave "something happened" even when there was no switch in sight. There is no help or score facility. The former instruction simply urges you to persevere and reminds you that it's more fun trying to solve the game yourself. Enter score and you get "Liverpool 5 Man United 0", which isn't of very much use. The screen presentation is fine, although whenever you pick up another object the computer wastes time showing your inventory without being asked. More annoying is the fact that you can't return to the description of your current location if it scrolls off the screen, unless you go elsewhere and come back later. While there is a save facility, I found that the only way I could just quit and start again without having to reload, was (believe it or not) to misspell inventory. As far as I know, there's only one way off this spaceship and that's through the airlock. Since you don't have any air supply with your spacesuit, you can always commit suicide rather than be stranded on an interstellar Marie Celeste with no prospect of rescue. Unless, of course, you manage to get the spaceship working, in which case you've still got another 60 or so locations to go in this genuinely mind-twisting text adventure.