Rigel's Revenge

Your Sinclair

Graphics 8/10

Text 7/10

Value For Money 9/10

Personal Rating 8/10

Overall 8/10

Mike Gerrard 8/10

FAX BOX Game: Rigel's Revenge Publisher: Mastertronic/Bulldog Price: £2.99 Reviewer: Mike Gerrard A few months ago I raved over The Serfs Tale from Smart Egg Software, published by Players, and I know from the helpline letters that lots of you have bought and enjoyed it... If tearing your hair out is a sign of enjoyment. Now the Smart Eggs have hatched another game, courtesy of Mastertronic, so this one is likely to be even more widely available. It's not quite up to Serfs Tale's megagame standard, but there's only a whisker in it, it's still an ace adventure. It tells the story of Harper and Elliot, one of the great newsgathering teams of the 22nd century. They're covering the Re-Unification War and are sent to Rigel V, which is still holding out against the Federation troops. Sounds almost as dangerous as being at YS when the sandwich man arrives. It seems there's a bomb on Rigel V, Elliot's been smuggled into find it and you play Harper, joining him soon after. Not soon enough though, because when you find him he's on the verge, of snuffing it. But before he does, he manages to croak: "Go east across town. Cross no-man's land. Find device, disarm it... but beware android guard... Find my light-guide - buried in copse - use it to..." Well, you'll have to figure out how to use it for yourself, because Elliot, at this point, pops his clogs. Pausing only to give him a decent burial, off you go to check out the hostile town around you. A piece of advice - read the loading screen carefully otherwise you'll never even get the game started. The first problem's a bit too sneaky for my taste. I like my clues to be in the game itself, not printed on the screen when I'm elsewhere making a cup of coffee! There seemed to be sudden deaths all round too, and I thought I was going to hate the game. But then I realised the deaths had all been signposted if only I'd been careful, and this set me on my toes for later signs of danger. There aren't too many graphics in the game, but they are very well done. Mostly they come up when you examine things, like a door and a gun early on, and as well as being detailed they also often contain a clue as well, so keep your eyes peeled. The problems are tricky, and might prove too tricky for some as they do require a bit of inspired guesswork. In one place PULL BAR helps a little, but PULL BAR HARD helps a lot. Some of the problems also involve coming up with a sequence of commands. It's a game worth buying, with many of the routines being very convincing - bullets rain as you walk the streets, and you have to dive down into a basement out of the way, or a pack of dogs sets about chasing you. Breathlessly you try to outrun them. A touch of thriller-writing about the text, and this two-part tale is probably Mastertronic's best Speccy adventure yet.

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Crash

Atmosphere 89%

Vocabulary 89%

Logic 86%

Addictive Qualities 87%

Overall 88%

Derek Brewster 88%

Producer: Mastertronic Retail Price: £2.99 Author: Smart Egg Software Mastertronic doesn't publish adventures written with utilities, so I was eager to get Rigel's Revenge up and running. Sure enough, even the loading screen was pretty slick, with a designed look and a cleverly waxing and waning title. There's also a couple of pages of prose to set you off armed with the most recent news, some of which bears directly upon your first puzzles. The story centres on two cop-sounding chaps, Harper and Elliot, who are in fact investigative journalists. But this is way in the future, the 22nd century to be exact, and their coverage of the Re-unification War must have been good stuff as it was carried by every major Federation comm-network. Their story told how the Fleet troops had brought the insurgent colonies back into the Federation's grip. Success, however, has gone to Elliot's head, and he has persuaded Harper to join him as an agent for the Alterian Corps - not a Christmas food-hamper group, alas, but an influential bunch of dedicated peace-lovers. In return for Harper and Elliot's sterling work the Corps will guarantee scoop after scoop. Their first mission is to go to Rigel V, where one region still holds out against the conquering Federation troops. The recalcitrant rebels claim to have a Doomsday Machine and will wreak the ultimate revenge if the Federation refuses to withdraw from the planet. Elliot has been smuggled into Rigel V by the Alterian Corps as a Rigellian trooper; his mission is to discover the whereabouts of the Doomsday Machine and report to Harper, who lands on Rigel V a week later. Harper's instructions are to meet Elliot at night in a back street in the occupied sector of town. The game begins as Harper arrives on Rigel V, freshly alighted from the scoutship which now zooms off from above the darkened streets. With his light-intensifying goggles every detail is clear. All of a sudden an explosion from an adjacent alley tears the goggles from his face. He escapes serious injury but a low moan to the east emanates from his partner Elliot, who hasn't been so lucky... Rigel's Revenge is a really interesting adventure with a sophisticated, yet still very friendly, vocabulary. The redesigned character set is most pleasing; the occasional pictures, with clues actually within them, are detailed and effective; and the scenes are atmospheric, with finely written pieces ('skeletal remains of the geodesic dome that once covered the town', 'huge shards of plastiglass towered overhead'). The slick feel and look are typified by the 'Anykey' at the bottom - short and to the point. And though this game is no pushover, some parts being quite intricate (for instance, PULL BAR HARD is needed to do the trick when PULL BAR fails to achieve much after its first use), there's some humour, such as when you're examining the certificate early on: 'The Desert Scene Cert 18. British Bored of Censors. Signed Funny Squiggle.' Incidentally, Smart Egg Software is best known for The Serf's Tail, which I haven 't come across yet (probably because it's not been released on the Spectrum). DIFFICULTY: some very tricky bits GRAPHICS: few, but good PRESENTATION: smart, if a touch plain INPUT FACILITY: basically verb/ noun, with some additions RESPONSE: very fast

Slick presentation and involving gameplay in Mastertronic's Rigel's Revenge.

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Sinclair User

Overall 3/10

Tony Dillon 3/10

Label: Bulldog Price: £2.99 Memory: 48K/128K Joystick: None Reviewer: Tony Dillon I've been ordered upon pain of death to make this short, so here goes. A couple of geezers called 'Arper and Elliot have joined some rebels, ryte, and they meet in this slum area, and then wouldn't you just believe it, a bomb goes off killing one of 'em. Don't it always just happen, eh. So, this 'Arper fellar 'as to go on ahead and blow up this fing celled a Doomsday Device. So, off he sets, and guess who's controlling 'im? Yep, it's youz out there reading this. Now, come on, honestly, it's a rotten storyline! So what do you expect the adventure to be like? Well, it's Quilled, of course, and - although it does have long descriptive pieces which are, quite frankly, a delight to see in a budget adventure - the playability ranges from the impossibly easy to the pretty damned hard. I didn't enjoy this at all and if you're looking for a decent adventure - look elsewhere.

C&VG (Computer & Video Games)C+VG Hit

Vocabulary 9/10

Atmosphere 8/10

Personal 8/10

Value 10/10

Keith Campbell 8/10

SUPPLIER: Mastertronic/Smart Egg MACHINE: Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad and Atari PRICE CASSETTE: £1.99 The Rigellian war raged. Harper dropped down from the scoutship. An nearby explosion ripped off his nigh-sight goggles, plunging him into darkness. Nearby, a moan emanated from Elliot, lying mortally injured. "The Rigellians have a doomsday device. They plan to use it to devastate the planet if they lose the war." He urges Harper to find and destroy the device. He is halfway through telling him how, when he dies... Harper find the town in ruins, in the grip of war. Shattered flexiglass from the dome which once enclosed the town lies everywhere. Rubble, barricades, and broken windows are all around. He sets off in search of the device, first, of course, getting anything he can lay his hands on, that might help him in the task ahead. The graphics are not merely representations of the locations - they actually contribute to the game. For example, examine a door that has you worried, and you will get a couple of pictures - a distance shot, and a close up of the handle revealing a trap. All instantly displayed, and removed from the screen for the resumption of text play. The problems are there, an although some take a bit of thinking about (the first one had me worrying for at least five minutes!) none of them are too difficult, and the vocab and alternative commands allowed do not frustrate the solving process. Some of the replies have a footnote reference to them (shades of Infocom!). Type in FOOTNOTE 2, and you will get advice to write to an Adventure Helpline, if you can't solve the problem in hand! The way this is handled is yet another example of what sets the game apart. Despite its somewhat grim theme, a sense of humour soon becomes apparent, when, for example, Harper gets lost in the desert. There is obvious a clue in the sand that will help him get back to town - but EXAMINE SAND does not give it. The game has a RAMSAVE and RAMLOAD facility, as well as tape. Despite being non-Quilled, there is so much held in memory, that the adventure comes in two parts, and data must be tape saved to move from one to the other. Once into part 2, however, a restart is possible with that part, without having to reload the saved data. The character set is very clearly legible, displayed as white on black, adding to the very professional performance of what must be one of the highest quality budget titles ever! The only thing lacking is its price - at £1.99 it's a snip. If Mastertronic continue to release adventures of this quality at this price, they could well revolutionalise the cassette-based adventure market. Go out and buy it!

What is it like struggling to make the grade in the competitive world of adventure software? How does one go about setting up a full-time business, and what are the pitfalls? Over the past year, Keith Campbell has been following the progress of two adventure enthusiasts who have created Smart Egg software, and reviews their first big game - Rigel's Revenge, a budget adventure from Mastertronic. Nigel Brooks is not only an adventure enthusiast he is a businessman. A couple of years ago, he decided, together with his friend Said Hassan, to write adventures for commercial sale. As boys, Nigel and Said were friends at a Prep school in Purley, when both their families moved home. It was quite by chance that they met up again at the age of 11, at Brighton College. Said went on to obtain an A-level in Computer Science, and then spent a year at Hatfield Poly before dropping out and deciding further study was not for him. He got a contract in a telesoftware project at Brighton Poly, developing software for transmission to local schools. At the same time, he was writing educational software on freelance basis, for Letts Dairies. But O-level revision subjects on the Beeb and Spectrum are not great money spinners, Said discovered, and so more and more he spent his spare time doing what he enjoyed most - playing adventures. Meanwhile, Nigel, too, had a Spectrum, and a copy of the Quill. He tried out a few ideas using it, and showed the results to Said. Said liked what he saw, but they both agreed that The Quill had too regimented an approach. So Said, by now an accomplished machine-code programmer, went ahead and developed his own Adventure system. Nigel, unemployed, decided to set up in business as an adventure software company. He looked into the Enterprise Allowances Scheme, and discovered it was possible to get a weekly payment of £40 for a year, plus free counselling. But first he had to demonstrate that he had a sound business idea, and that he could lay his hands on £1000 to support the business, if and when it became necessary. Nigel being strong on knowledge of adventures, had little difficulty in persuading the powers that be that he knew his subject well enough to make a go of it. He and Said have definite views about adventurers, and how they will go about writing them. Preferring text only, they believe that graphics detract from a game unless they are of really high quality. The Pawn's graphics, they think, are well justified, and although they see the development of Level 9's system as having gone so far in terms of technical expertise, that the system now rules the game. So, accepting the need, commercially, for graphics, Smart Egg's would be 'different'. But knowledge of the primary subject alone is not enough to run a business, and so when Nigel's proposed company was accepted under the scheme, he took a number of short courses to help with the business side - such as finance and marketing. Consistency in an adventure is one of the priorities of Smart Egg, and that means objects clearly visible must be supported in the program. Their parser accepted two-word input, and they decided to test the mettle of their system by recreating Colossal Cave - with a few variations - on a Spectrum. Their next step would be to upgrade the parser from two to three words, but possibly no further, since they feared that the cost of supporting the extra words to maintain consistency might limit the games themselves. Although it was not their original intention to publish 'Adventure' (their version of Colossal) they were so pleased with the end result, that they offered it on mail order themselves, at the same time approaching a number of publishers, and sent out review copies. Typical of the replies received was one from Audiogenic, which, perhaps predictably, concluded that the Crowther and Woods game had been done to death. Nevertheless, it expressed an interest in any future adventures the pair might come up with. More encouraging, however, was the reaction of Mastertronic. Again, none too interested in 'Adventure', Mastertronic was so impressed with the way it performed, they sent Nigel and Said a storyboard to evaluate, with a view to producing the adventure for them. Good news was soon to follow. Interceptor Software accepted 'Adventure' for publication on their Players budget label, and Mastertronic gave the go-ahead for them to produce Rigel's Revenge - the storyboard they had been evaluating. Plans for writing their own adventure, already story-boarded and ready to roll, would have to wait, for here was an opportunity too good to miss. Nigel set off to visit the two firms, to ascertain projected sales figures and likely returns, and negotiate the contracts. When I visited Smart Egg for a progress report, Ross demonstrated his graphics in a preview of Rigel's Revenge, they were truly impressive in concept. But for Nigel and Said, there was something of a crisis in the air. The Mastertronic contract deadline for the Spectrum version was two days hence. It was ever so nearly ready, but Said was booked on on evening flight from Gatwick the following day, for a fortnight's holiday in Yugoslavia. Said worked all through that night - a 25-hour stint in all - and failed to complete the game! Just to unsettle Nigel a little further, he sent him a postcard towards the end of this holiday saying: "Decided to stay on for another fortnight." He was joking, of course! It was now mid-May and with "Adventure" on the market for a good few months, the quarterly royalty payment from Interceptor was well overdue. Phone call after phone call elicited a multiplicity of reasons, excuses, and procrastination. Nigel was getting bitter about it: "I begin to see now how people in the computer games business become millionaires - by not paying any royalties!" It took a lot of chasing, and Nigel really had to make a nuisance of himself, before he got a cheque - for a mere £183. "I know they've sold more copies than that, but they now say their policy is not to pay until they have been paid by the distributor." Nigel has become very knowledgeable about the form different companies' contracts can take, and what to look for in them, as a result of his experiences. "Can you see the day when you will be able to live on the business?" I asked, knowing that any time now, the Enterprise scheme allowances would be running out. Nigel was philosophical. "No business can really expect to make a profit in its first year," he said, "It takes time." Patience and a modest financial investment certainly seem to have paid off for Smart Egg. After a year or so establishing themselves in the Adventure world, things do at last seem to be gathering momentum for them.