Se-Kaa of Assiah

Personal Computer News

Bob Chappell

[ZXSR: Empire of Karn is not a review for the Spectrum version, but the C64's. Spectrum Heroes of Karn was reviewed at the same time and shares the exact same text, plus the C64 review could equally describe the Spectrum version. No scores are present for either review so would not cause score-skewing.] HEROES' REINKARNATION The hero returns in the second instalment of Interceptor's Karn series, but some of the pizzazz has gone out of the puzzles, says Bob Chappell. Fans of Heroes of Karn should be pleased to hear of its sequel, Empire of Karn, whose style stays pretty faithful to the original's. The program, from Interceptor, runs on the Commodore 64 and costs £7. Empire follows the current fashion for blending graphics and text. Each location is presented pictorially in the top half of the screen when you first arrive. Thereafter, the picture disappears but can be recalled easily. The graphics are fair, and swiftly drawn but add little to the game itself. BRIEF ENCOUNTER The text is spartan, merely a terse description (two short sentences at most) and a list of any objects. In fact, the music that flares up at the beginning and at certain points thereafter is definitely the best feature. ' What made the original Heroes of Karn so successful was the volume of puzzles to be solved. In Empire, this element is sadly lacking. In fact, I managed to score over 70 per cent quickly, and with little imaginative effort. Whether the tough stuff has been saved for last remains to be seen. SHIPPING LIST A sword was waiting right at the starting gate but a magical force prevented me from taking it. An inventory (LIST is the unconventional command used in this game) revealed that Darin, one of the heroes from the previous adventure, was with me. If I was too weedy to take the sword, Darin certainly wasn't. I grabbed myself a nearby Egan and tinderbox, and clambered aboard a conveniently moored ship. A wedged chest, powder keg, bottle of rum, date (edible) and a cat were obviously going to come in handy but where was the trusty lantern? You always find a lamp of some sort early on, so where was it? Aha! Way up in the crow's nest. Drat! It was nailed to the mast and no amount of pulling, pushing, kicking or swearing would budge it. After one or two unsuccessful launches, I piloted the ship to a sandy beach and thence to a desert. Not far away was a bazaar which housed, among its shops and stalls, a weaver, fortune teller, apothecary and belligerent widow. A nomad's tent was home for one Krizcokz the minstrel - the music in the game was supplied by Chris Cox. A trapdoor and a crack in a pyramid presented problems, as did a snake in a basket. But even without cracking those or extracting any joy from the weaver, apothecary and for, tune teller, my score indicated that I was almost three-quarters of the way through. WIPE OUT I didn't much like the Save routine either. If you opt to save a game straight to disk (which you can do only by first quitting the game), you can't name the saved file. This means that any previously saved game will automatically be overwritten. Tough luck if you've saved yourself in a room with no way out - you'll just have to start again from scratch. The only way round this is to tie up several of your disks in a, grandfather, father, son type rotation. Empire of Kara simply isn't as nourishing as its predecessor. The few exceptions to the general mundaneness of the puzzles just prove the rule. It's mostly a question of trudging around collecting bits and pieces, and no atmosphere prevails, mainly due to the impoverished text. Enjoyable enough in it's own right but I think Karn fans will be disappointed. HEROES RETURN A Spectrum version of Heroes of Karn, for £5.50, has also been released by Interceptor, with an Amstrad version imminent. The number of graphically depicted locations is restricted on the Spectrum, but those that remain are far, far superior in quality to those on the 64, thanks to the efforts of graphics designer Terry Greer. The pictures are pleasing to the eye and definitely add to the adventure. Terry Greer also did the excellent graphics for Interceptor's earlier Jewels of Babylon. The command format has been tidied up, too. Instead of LIST, good old I (for inventory) is back, and you can address Darin directly. Heroes of Kern can still be confidently recommended, with its bags of puzzles spread evenly throughout. Shame the music's gone but the improved command analyser and the superb graphics more than make up for the loss. CHEAP THRILL Just room for a brief mention of Se-kaa of Assiali, a text and graphics adventure from Mastervision. This is a two-part 48K Spectrum adventure, all on the one cassette, featuring over 170 instantly illustrated locations. Many of the graphics are similar and simple, but colourful and effective, particularly those inside the castle where flickering torches deck the walls. Your mission as Se-Kaa is twofold. You must discover the whereabouts, within the Castle of the Dead, of three great artifacts and restore them to their rightful resting places. Although the adventure breaks no new ground and is fairly straightforward, it only costs £2.99, so must be considered a bargain.

Crash

Atmosphere 4/10

Vocabulary 5/10

Logic 4/10

Debugging 8/10

Overall Value 5/10

Derek Brewster 5/10

DEREK BREWSTER'S ADVENTURE TRAIL THERE IS A FAULT, PLEASE ADJUST YOUR SETS I read George Orwell's book way before 1984 but found it strange the way everyone last year went to great lengths to point out how modern society bore little relationship to the one portrayed in the novel. I was one of the few people to take the opposing view. If I remember rightly, and it is a long time since I read Orwell (at Primary school - it was slotted in between the Red and Orange Books and Peter and Jane go Ferreting) the book tells of how telescreens impose a highly ritualised life-style on the island's inhabitants. Statistics were used to show how things were getting better when it was plain things couldn't get much worse. What of our society? During the last cold winter the electricity board met with very high demands on electricity, supplying in excess of 45,000 megawatts. Although this demand, brought on by the severe temperatures, was exceptional it was exceeded by the confluence of the end of a final episode of a BBC television series and a commercial break in a film on ITV. What this tells us about society is startling and leads me to think the power wielded by television is out of all proportion to its authority. To give Orwell's novel renewed topicality, simply substitute the word telescreen with the word television. Or to paraphrase a learned Canadian, if the medium is the message then I'm afraid the news isn't good. So what has all this got to do with software? Well let's first take newspapers as an example. The light-weights of Fleet Street would have little to do with TV during its infancy yet now find it profitable to devote up to two-thirds of their space to the gogglebox and its plethora of soap operas and petit politics. The crucial point with software is not that tie-ins with programmes is a bad thing in itself, it's just that, if TV is not quite Big Brother, it is large enough to intimidate anyone with the idea of buying rights to a TV programme into parting with a considerable amount of money. The point is, big business, delightfully absent in the early days of software, scares me an awful lot because big business needs a big turnover to realise big profits to get even bigger. It can get to the ridiculous stage where you either buy what they tell you to or you buy nothing at all. (If you don't think things could ever get that bad try buying a decent pair of shoes in the High Street). Remember, you can't beat the imagination of one lone programmer or a small team huddled in deep thought around a project and also, TV seldom comes up with new ideas itself but in almost every case relies on a steady stream from books, stories, newspapers or the good old radio. It would be nice to think that we could choose what we particularly like from books, comics etc, rather than wait for some comfy TV people to decide this for us. And I would hope the same could be true for software. SEE-KAA OF ASSIAH Producer: Mastervision Retail Price: £3.99 Language: Basic with some machine code Author: Les Hogarth and Clive Wilson See-Kaa of Assiah comes from Mastervision, famous for their takeover of the Wrath of Magra project and its subsequent marketing. I didn't think Wrath of Magra was a game which was developed to its full commercial potential, but alas Se-Kaa of Assiah has even less to offer the prospective purchaser. In fact it is so run-of-the-mill, and with so little creative invention, one wonders when Mastervision will stop floundering among the dead men and begin to realise that only quality will succeed in today's marketplace. Unlike music sales, software sales are not governed so much by taste - there is a definite good and a definite bad, despite what some magazines might lead us to believe. When the Wise Ones ruled the land, produce was plentiful and the people happy. But then came the Dark Hordes, a mutated race of evil beings who wreaked havoc and destruction throughout the realm and stole the Great Artefacts of the Wise Ones. These were the Rod of Light, the Hammer of Vib-ra and the Casket of Vib-ra. Your quest is twofold: first you must endeavour to find the whereabouts of the Great Artefacts which have been hidden within the grim Castle of the Dead in the lands of Assiah; second, you must escape from the castle and locate the resting places of the Artefacts so that you can return them. Once the Artefacts are in their rightful place, the Wise Ones regain their lost powers and can defeat the Dark Hordes, restoring peace and contentment to the land. Access to the second part of the adventure is conditional upon successful completion of the first section. The game accepts full English sentences such as TAKE THE CASKET OF VIB-RA, and multiple commands are allowed using AND, so GET THE CASKET OF VIB-RA AND GO NORTH is accepted. Some special commands are TAKE ALL or GET ALL, and DROP ALL. There is a pause option and you can repeat your last command. The two 48K programs have over 170 illustrated locations. So far, so good - so what's wrong? The first major irritation is the input routine. An input routine is as fundamental to an adventure as graphics are to an arcade game. The routine used in this case repeats a key amazingly quickly, so it is almost beyond the fidelity of a rubber keyboard to get an error-free input, even if it is a single character - in tests, nine out often 'E's (for EAST) came up as 'EE'. The locations suffer from feeble descriptions and the graphics, far from making up for this shortfall, are often uninteresting and of poor design. There aren't many problems, and those that can be found are illogical and their solutions arbitrary. After wandering for hours I finally found a way to kill the Guardian, only to find that no gain had been made, no new avenues to explore and no new objects - just one Guardian down. Although two programs for £3.99 appears good value, I felt this package lacked any addictive quality. The first game largely consists of one long maze. It is not a game I will be returning to; 'nough said? COMMENTS Difficulty: rather difficult, owing to lack of logic Graphics: on all locations; unfortunately they replace text Presentation: rather poor Input Facility: awful auto repeat Response: touch slow Special Features: played in real time

Sinclair User

Gilbert Factor 3/10

John Gilbert 3/10

SE-KAA OF ASSIAH Mastervision Memory: 48K Price: Evil rules the land - yawn - and only a hero can bring home the bacon by finding the Three Great Artifacts of Power and returning them to their rightful owners. In Se-kaa of Assiah you become the hero of the title - geddit? - and begin your quest in a village close to the dread castle of the Dark Ones. Enter at your peril and brave the forces of darkness. The program is a two-part game which purports to be a text adventure with graphics. After a short foray into the fortress you will soon realise that there is precious little description or supporting text beyond your own input. The inevitable result is a featureless and empty world which fails to grasp the imagination successfully. The graphics are interesting but do not add enough to the very slim story line to hold your attention for very long. In some ways the game might have been more likely to succeed if the programmers had decided to make it into either a graphic monster maze type game or a pure text adventure. The concentration on slick pictures has clearly reduced the power of the interpreter and the space available for words. Although the program is cheap adventurers still have the right to expect more than this for their money.

Read it at Sinclair User Magazine Online

Personal Computer Games

Atmosphere 4/10

Complexity 6/10

Interaction 4/10

Overall 5/10

Steve Cooke 5/10

MACHINE: Spectrum, Commodore 64 PRICE: £2.99 Attention please, penniless adventurers and apprentice Enchanters on low pay, this month sees the beginning of a revolution in adventure software prices. Mastertronics, who have already put the cat among the pigeons with their budget-priced games in the arcade market, are launching a new label 'Master Adventurer'. Their first release, Se-Kaa of Assiah, offers 170 illustrated locations and 'full sentence analysis' in two 48K programs for the mind-blowing price of £2.99! On hearing this news, the White Wizard immediately despatched obedient dwarves to secure a copy of the program. Hmmm... Well, the first thing to point out is that just because a program offers 'full sentence analysis' doesn't mean it's going to be any better at understanding what you type in. After all, 'Examine book' is a 'full sentence', so most games fall into this category. In fact, Se-Kaa of Assiah only checks the first three letters of each word you type in and doesn't have a very large vocabulary. Furthermore, it isn't at all helpful when you get it wrong, saying merely 'Try something else' or 'That will get you nowhere'. Combine these two facts and you'll find that what puzzles there are become fiendishly difficult. The aim of the game, which comes in two parts, is first to collect three legendary treasures and then, in the second part, to restore them to their proper resting places. The program is mostly written in Basic and is slightly slow in responding to the keyboard. Every location has graphics and without these the game would be pretty dire since most locations don't have anything EXCEPT graphics - although there's a lot to look at, there isn't much to find. Unfortunately, although initially attractive, the graphics are rather repetitive and don't contribute much to the game. Even more serious is the fact that you can't save your position without quitting the game. Mastervision, alias Mastertronics, are to be congratulated for bringing out these cheap label games. For people on a budget, Se-Kaa will be a useful purchase, but don't expect too much and be prepared to spend more on something else if you want a really good game.