Time Quest

Crash

Atmosphere 6/10

Vocabulary 7/10

Logic 6/10

Addictive Quality 6/10

Overall 6/10

Derek Brewster 6/10

DEREK BREWSTER'S ADVENTURE TRAIL PULL THE OTHER ONE It's hard to get through any day without having a laugh. Humour comes from reading the strip cartoon in the newspaper on a morning, hearing the gossip in the pub at lunchtime, or perhaps simply chuckling in wonderment at how someone can keep churning out a program so fundamentally boring as Newsnight every evening and get away with it. In software, humour is the flavour of the moment. Arcade games with flapping toilet seats have given way to the medium where humour can have full rein, within the copious text of the adventure. I suppose the first humorous adventures came from Runesoft (with Spoof) and Delta 4 with Return of the Joystick. Denis Through the Drinking Glass was an hilarious send up of the PM's hubby while a little later the Lever & Jones team were serving up their first satire entitled Hampstead, noteworthy for its cutting humour. Their follow up, Terrormolinos, describing a less than fun-packed package holiday in the sun, wasn't as subtle but still got all its digs in at the right places. It seems more and more people were looking for something beyond the cliched dragon bashing and universe saving. Fergus McNeil's Delta 4 had a chart success with his Silversoft-marketed Bored of the Rings, a spoof on Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Adrian Mole has the sharpest comments of them all, and what's more, is very well-written having borrowed much from the super book by Sue Townsend. 1986 will bring along a lot more humour, of that we can be sure. NOT SO FAST An increasing number of companies are using their own loading systems for Spectrum games. The aim of these systems is to make the program almost impossible to copy. A system in common use at the moment is centered around the idea that programs which load at high speeds are more difficult to copy. The sad point about this idea is that the programs are also more difficult to load (and for precisely the same reasons). One of the beauties of the Spectrum is its tolerance towards all manner of programs when it comes to loading. Any average cassette player can do the job. Not so with these new fast loader programs; a player needs fine tuning facilities to load them. Recent examples of games using curious loading systems are Never Ending Story, Mindshadow, Runestone and Lord of the Rings. The first three use fast loaders while Lord of the Rings has a curious system whereby it does use the normal Spectrum loading speed but the first six parts are irrelevant it seems, and the computer must ignore three sections before the program actually starts to load. The least you would expect is a warning yet all you get is a directive to consult the Spectrum manual. Do this and you would conclude the game wasn't loading. If my experiences are anything to go by I can see these companies suffering from a high number of returns. TIME QUEST Producer: Scorpio Retail Price: £1.99 Language: Quill Author: B J Curtis It is the year 2997 and the world has become dependent upon nuclear energy. Vast banks of computers negotiate the world's business. People are relaxed and carefree and work of a manual nature is a thing of the past. The nations are united and there is no Nuclear Threat. Long ago man removed nuclear weapons and hid them in the corridors of time, their location a total secret. Those who knew of the secret location of these weapons in time have long since died but one man now seeks to disrupt the world's tranquillity. He seeks the awesome weapons to hold the world to ransom keeping the peoples of the world under a dark veil of fear. This man, a former top NASA scientist, has created a machine to negotiate the frontiers of time. Edmund Madison, the name behind the threat, has already commenced his search for the hidden weapons of war and it is up to you, armed with a so far untried Time Pursuit Vehicle, to stop him. Your task, therefore, is to search the frontiers of time and locate Madison and his craft. Needless to say, the above drivel wasn't written by me; you can expect to see these instructions on loading up the first part. I must admit, although the writing style isn't so hot, the story-line is at least coherent. Gamesplay consists of shooting around four time zones imaginatively labelled A, B, C, and D, which have a more than familiar ring to them having played the likes of Eureka! (which you can now pick up a bit cheaper for obvious reasons). The most striking features of this game are the abysmally poor pictures squeezed into a small area at the top of the screen. Fair enough, this program retails at £1.99 but it's almost as if someone had gone out of their way to design some really disappointing and worthless representations of your current location. Honestly, it would be better to leave graphics out if they are going to be as poor as this. Not all is hopeless, however, as the program makes good use of the Spectrum colours and the problems are no better or worse than many types I have witnessed in more expensive games. Not bad for £1.99 - but remember to pick up the laser gun lying in the Time Lab as it seems to disappear after a warp if you don't. COMMENTS Difficulty: easy Graphics: abysmal Presentation: colourful text Input facility: verb/noun Response: very fast, as all Quilled games