Valhalla

Sinclair User

Graham Taylor

OLD GOLD? One of the ways software publishers have breathed new life into old titles ie. more than six months since release, is to shove a few of them together on a tape for ten quid or so and call it something like 'Now that's what I call Software Solid Gold Hits II'. The truth about compilation tapes is that there are usually one or two goodish old games on them and a lot of dross. Elite has launched a new range called Classics which gets around this problem by rereleasing the old games, singly, at a budget price - £2.99. Elite is releasing one title a week, beginning on July 21, for the foreseeable future. Mostly they are old titles but there are a few new games thrown in here and there. Elite says the Classics label will feature only those of 'top quality'. Looking at the first titles on Elite's release schedule I'd say they weren't entirely defined by the term but there are no absolute dodos and quite a few real bargains. The first four titles due between now and mid-August are all winners and well worth picking up if you missed them the first time round, or, as with Valhalla found them too pricey. VALHALLA One of the most controversial games ever released. For a time it looked like the start of something big for Legend, who developed it. Loved by some, hated by others, Valhalla was the first conscious attempt at a computer movie with animated figures representing different characters in a mythological saga of magical powers and bloody deeds. You can communicate with each character in a form of conventional English syntax, telling them to pick up objects or give them to other characters, or go in a certain direction, or even start a fight. The response you get to your instructions may partly depend on your previous actions and the personality involved. Though the backgrounds have a certain sort of stylish coldness about them the foreground characters look rather simple being quite small and simply animated. Nevertheless, I would say playing Valhalla is a unique sort of experience. You do get a feeling a little as though you are 'playing a movie', which after all was the intention. Others, however, would declare the whole thing utterly tedious. At £2.99 you can at last afford to form your own opinions - the original cost being £14.95 so whatever else it has to be a bargain.

Sinclair User

The second breakthrough in adventures following The Hobbit, Valhalla set new standards for the interaction of graphics and characters. You are a minor Norse deity, and you must embark on a series of quests for special ritual objects. A large range of gods, godesses, giants, dwarfs and the like are also involved, represented on the screen as moving figures, fighting, eating and drinking. Each character may support good or evil with degrees of intelligence and strength, and to win their support you must convince them or your good - or bad - intentions. A sophisticated text interpreter and a strong plot rounds off a most unusual game. Position 4/50

Big K

Steve Keaton

LAME GAMES INCORPORATING DUFF ROMS OF THE WESTERN WORLD AND ALL MANNER OF GUFFWARE, NAFFWARE AND BARFWARE. Once in a while, a computer game arrives at the Big K offices that is so splendid, formidable and exquisitely designed that we sink to our knees in awe before dashing off to pen a rave review. Then there's the other kind... Connoisseurs of the Infinite: Steve Keaton, Richard Burton, Nicky Xikluna, Kim Aldis and Tony Tyler. VALHALLA Legend This highly hyped, over-rated, over-priced turkey is clearly a classic example of the Emperor's new clothes. Despite being hugely uninteresting and AGONISINGLY SLOW to play it's managed to gross over 2 million pounds! It's enough to make you weep. We're told it's a 'computer movie'. That characters do pretty much what they like. What we're not told is that the graphics are so poor these figures are nigh on unrecognisable. They just shuffle back and forth across the screen like minuscule roaches. The guests are equally naff, being both pointless and boring What on earth (or in Asgard) is the attraction? Game of the year? Pshaw! If you ask me it should be placed in a chest and left in Hell.

Crash

Overall 82%

Producer: Legend, 48K £14.95 (1) Valhalla is much too lengthy and complicated to go into in a brief review. It boasts the best animated graphics in an adventure yet, numerous locations, lots and lots of inter-reactive characters who carry on with or without you, and kill each other off all over the place. Interrupt-operated text input allows you to type in commands while other actions are taking place and the program accepts quite complicated sentences. There are six separate but linked quests, although much fun may be had just living life as it comes in Valhalla. Accompanied by an excellent book which tells you all you need to know in no-nonsense language. Expensive but worth it, although there were mixed feelings about the ultimate value of the game's central objectives. Overall CRASH rating 82% M/C.

Read it at Crash - The Online Edition

Crash

Overall 82%

Producer: Legend, 48K £14.95 (1) Valhalla is much too lengthy and complicated to go into in a brief review. It boasts the best animated graphics in an adventure yet, numerous locations, lots and lots of inter-reactive characters who carry on with or without you, and kill each other off all over the place. Interrupt-operated text input allows you to type in commands while other actions are taking place and the program accepts quite complicated sentences. There are six separate but linked quests, although much fun may be had just living life as it comes in Valhalla. Accompanied by an excellent book which tells you all you need to know in no-nonsense language. Expensive but worth it, although there were mixed feelings about the ultimate value of the game's central objectives. Overall CRASH rating 82% M/C.

Crash

Use of Computer 94%

Graphics 95%

Playability 90%

Getting Started 95%

Addictive Qualities 60%

Value For Money 55%

Overall 81.5%

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Producer: Legend Memory Required: 48K Recommended Retail Price: £14.95 Language: machine code Before you can start playing Valhalla it's worth ploughing through the readable instruction booklet, not only to find out what you can do, when and where, but also to meet some of the more important characters who partake of your adventure. The book tells you that you can have great fun simply watching Valhalla, and issuing commands to the characters. This turns out to be true in part. Life in the Nordic haven carries on much like Coronation Street with the inhabitants quarreling, fighting each other, offering food and generally behaving as if they were in the Rover's Return. But in the end this palls and you feel itchy to get into the action. There are six quests to find special objects; ofnir (a key), drapnir (a ring), skornir (a shield), skalir (a sword), Felstrong (an axe) and frimnir (a helmet). Finding these magical objects is not simple, and some, if discovered, must be deposited safely as you can't carry all of them together. Added to that, if you die, which happens easily enough, you are sent to Hell (not to 'would you like another game') which turns out to be a location or two away from the more ordinary delights of Asgaard of whatever. Unfortunately if you go to Hell most of the things you've collected are removed from you and distributed randomly around the various locations, so you have to start all over. When this is seen in the context of coping with large numbers of beings who are either well or badly disposed towards you, you begin to realise the complexity of even surviving in Valhalla, let alone finding the hidden objects. Getting on with our fellow Valhallans is surprisingly realistic. Unlike The Hobbit you can't type in 'Say hello to Elrond,' and expect a happy response but you can offer food or wine (which abounds - all over the floor), you can offer to sell or buy objects since you have money, swords, axes, shields etc. These are merely ordinary ones, not those you are questing for. And you can start fights only too easily. All this activity is clearly visible in the remarkable graphics. Well drawn and highly detailed backgrounds form the scene in which the animated characters move around. If you type in, 'drink the wine', you will see 'yourself' raise the flagon to 'your' lips. At times it can be like Piccadilly Circus on a weekend as characters arrive and exit by the bus load. Moving from location to location is simply a question of entering the compass point direction and a WHERE command will always supply the visible exits if you have forgotten them. Moving around within a location is done by the use of 'l' and 'r'. In some locations there are celestial undergrounds. If you have managed to pick up a ring (ordinary type) you can use these ringways to get to another location. Although if you're drawing a map of Valhalla, this can be less than useful, since you don't know where you are when you get there. GENERAL Valhalla comes complete with very good instructions. Loading time is four minutes. Keyboard response is fast, and a useful function is that you can type in commands at any time. If an action of some sort is taking place the computer waits and then processes your command when ready. COMMENTS Keyboard play: excellent Use of colour: subtle and complex, excellent Graphics: excellent Sound: average

Stunning graphics in Asgard.

C&VG (Computer & Video Games)

Keith Campbell

KEEPING MARY AMUSED! And now for something completely different! A graphics adventure where the action is played out before your very eyes! Valhalla loads in a Spectrum under a striking title page and offers you six quests. These are to find special hidden objects: Ofnir (key), Drapnir (ring), Skornir (shield), Skalir (sword), Felstrong (axe) and Grimnir (helmet). These obnirs can only be discovronged in the above ordir. The gameworld has a cast of dozens, and at any location you may expect to meet and perhaps cross swords with a range of gods and goddesses (including Mary), giants, dwarfs, wolves and dragons, of varying temperaments and abilities. In search of the foreign objects, you move around issuing the usual Adventure commands, but may also play a 'wild card' by jumping on to a ringway if one is present. This is a magical method of transportation rather than a continuous urban dual carriageway, and to travel one you must be carrying, of course, a ring! Where Valhalla is different from other graphical Adventures is in its display format - the screen is split into three bands. On arrival at a location, the top half displays an excellent hi-res picture, drawn very quickly. I got the impression that these graphics were composed of modules, re-arranged to give many combinations of picture from the same blocks. Next, the lower 25% shows the text replies, whilst the final band rather too slowly draws the characters and objects present. The centre band therefore appears to form a continuous picture with the top band, like a stage. In some ways, this game is like Hobbit, for all the characters have a mind of their own, and appear, disappear, drop things and attack you and each other according to their whims. But unlike Hobbit, they actually move. Their little legs walk, they jump about whilst fighting, and lift their wine to their heads when they drink. As this happens, so a text commentary is written below. If you want to pick up an object, then your figure will walk across the screen and get it. Of course, all this slows down the rate of play, but if you like watching it all happen, then you'll put up with that. Valhalla has a range of special commands. WHO will list the characters in the text area, with an arrow pointing upwards to each image. WHAT will do the same for objects, HOW will tell you your current strength and so on. Should you type in anything untoward, you will be told Mary is not amused. A little fellow will walk on-stage, and in a very determined way approach you to remonstrate. This will cause your figure to blush severely! Valhalla is written in Basic with some machine code routines. A look at the listing won't reveal much in the way of clues. And despite protection against looking at the listing, it is easy because, despite all the ballyhoo preceding its arrival, and a seven-strong production team, Valhalla has at least one bug, which will cause the program to stop and you to reload. But will YOU discover the words that crash the game? Valhalla is from Legend, overpriced and overrated at £14.95. Reviewer: Keith Campbell

Personal Computer GamesPCG Hit

Graphics 7/10

Sound 0/10

Ease Of Use 8/10

Originality 10/10

Lasting Interest 9/10

Overall 8/10

Chris Anderson 8/10

MACHINE: Spectrum 48K JOYSTICK: No CATEGORY: Animated Adventure SUPPLIER: Legend PRICE: £14.95 Valhalla is perhaps the most ambitious games program yet released for the Spectrum. Once upon a time we had ordinary text adventures. Then programmers began including graphics to illustrate the various locations. Next, they began improving the traditional two-word mode of communication. The Hobbit took things a stage further with the introduction of characters which adopted a slightly different role each time the game was played. Valhalla has all these features, but also shows the various characters on the screen doing the things described in the text. If you enter the command GET HELMET, you will see the little stick character (which is you) walk across to the helmet. Similarly, fights between different characters are shown, albeit in somewhat repetitive form. Although this is extremely impressive, it has meant a sharp reduction in the number of different actions a character can perform. There's little more than moving, getting and dropping objects, eating and drinking, opening chests or cupboards, and attacking. There isn't any climbing, listening, running, shouting, or tapping. This doesn't mean to say Valhalla is simple. It's extremely complex, mainly because there are 36 different characters involved, each with a different personality. The world is that of the Nordic legends, and your task is to locate six special objects - a key, a ring, a shield, a sword, an axe, and a helmet. There are a number of different locations, each of them shown in colour. Unfortunately, many of the pictures look similar, and I preferred the beautiful line drawings featured in The Hobbit. I think The Hobbit also scores over Valhalla in the former's handling of language. Certainly Valhalla will accept some reasonably complex sentences such as: SELL HELMET TO MISTRA FOR 20 CROWNS or THROW LIGHTNINGS AT KLEPTO. But The Hobbit was even more impressive in this respect. However, Valhalla gives more of the impression that it's being played in real time. If you don't do anything, other characters will - right before your eyes. So you can't afford to wait around for too long. One word of warning. Valhalla is a difficult, daunting game - perhaps more so than other adventures. But if you're an experienced adventurer (and if you can afford the money) Valhalla will offer you many hours of novel and intriguing challenge.

Sinclair User

Gilbert Factor 7/10

Quentin Heath 7/10

NEW PATHS EXPLORED IN NORSE ADVENTURE Quentin Heath's latest round-up. There is a change in direction for adventure games. The path taken so far by authors has been through text-only displays, which left a great deal to the imagination, through graphics adventures which looked like board games and then on to animated games. The progression was by necessity rather than design. The first adventures were produced on large mainframe computers. The original Adventure, written by Crowther and Woods, occupied most of the memory capacity of one of those giant machines and included more than 200 locations. A micro version of the game is available from CP Software, Syrtis Software and Abersoft. The reason it was text-only is that 10 years ago computers communicated mostly using teletypewriters or line printers. There was no room for graphics on those relatively primitive machines. The arrival of the microcomputer and its reliance on fairly inexpensive television sets or visual display units gave adventure authors the opportunity for which they had been waiting. Few people, however, accepted the challenge of adding graphics to adventures. There was a gap of at least two years before authors began to use the full potential of the machines. Until then users of micros had to tolerate text-only creations, such as the Artic adventures for the ZX-81 and the Spectrum. The next step was into software which generated still pictures of some of the locations which could be visited during the game. That type included The Hobbit from Melbourne House, the Mysterious Adventures from Digital Fantasia and the illustrated games, such as Magic Mountain and Greedy Gulch from Phipps Associates. A progression of the technique followed a few months later with the bunch of the Carnell Software Black Crystal for the ZX-81 and Spectrum. It is like a board game as it uses several maps of the terrain on which the player moves. In the proper circumstances the player can move into a castle on one of the maps and on to another map showing the castle interior. Not content with that limited form of moving graphics adventure, some companies decided to go a step further and produce something which was a cross between the Hungry Horace cartoons and the original adventure game concept. The two companies to the fore of this move are Legend and Doric Computer Services. Doric has produced Oracle's Cave, the Spectrum version of a ZX-81 game which bears some resemblance to the Wumpus-hunt type of adventures which were, at one time, all the rage in the ZX-81 market. It involves your player-character who has decided to explore a cave system in which an evil oracle stands guard over some treasure. The exceptional aspects of the game include a set time limit of five game-days and the sprite animated graphics which depict your character and the monsters. As you move through the cave system the scenery scrolls up, down or sideways, depending on where you are going. Valhalla from Legend, which is proving as popular as The Hobbit for many people, also uses animation. It is, however, closer to the original adventure goal of completing certain logical tests or solving some puzzles. Unlike Oracle's Cave, Valhalla also allows you to use English sentence structures to give commands to the characters. Every scene in the adventure is shown graphically and when you ask a character to perform an action that character will move on the screen. In many respects the game is more technically-advanced than The Hobbit, although much of the code is written in Basic. The graphics are drawn more quickly than those of The Hobbit and the characters taking part seem to have more independence. Through a kind of time-sharing system between the gamer and the program it is possible for a player to be entering a command and for the computer to be moving one of the characters across the screen. The author has used a novel command entry system. If part of the command is not in the command recognition database, or is unintelligible, the computer will mark it in red and not accept the command. It may, however, allow it to be entered and then make no reply to the player or forget about the last command. The plot of Valhalla, in essence, is like that of Oracle's Cave. There are several quests you have to complete before you can go to the Norse warrior's Hell and live out the rest of your death. You have to get a series of sacred objects, including a key, a helmet and an axe which will give you certain powers. To do so you have the help and the hindrance of the characters of Norse mythology including Thor, Odin and Loki. During the quest you have to eat and drink to stay alive. The authors have not been content just to make your characters pick up food or drink on the screen. You can watch them put the bottle or meat to their mouths, mimicking the act of drinking or eating. Next month I will be looking at Circus, an adventure from Digital Fantasia, and launching into the first part of the Penguin Korth Trilogy, Escape From Arkaron.

HINTS AND TIPS It is unwise to travel ring roads when you are a novice. You could get lost. It may seem as if there are two sides to every coin. Only one side will help you win and evil is in its way. To gain the first objective, you will need to gain a friendship.

Micro Adventurer

Graham Taylor

LEGEND LIVES UP TO ITS NAME MICRO: Spectrum 48K PRICE: £14.95 FORMAT: Cassette SUPPLIER: Legend, [redacted] About this time last year The Hobbit arrived and single handedly set the standard for adventure games to come, with its sophisticated mixture of advanced language analysis and beautifully detailed graphics. Now we have Valhalla. Valhalla is undoubtedly a technical advance over its distinguished predecessor. Its characters exhibit far more independent life - who you choose as friends and who you help really does matter, in fact you won't even solve the first of Valhalla's six quests unless you have made one particular friend who I will leave you to guess. Whether you regard Valhalla as superior to The Hobbit as a game will depend rather on your expectations. Valhalla is, in many important respects, quite different. There is no question in Valhalla of spending hours trying to rephrase the same command until the computer understands it, as there is with both Hobbit and the classic text adventures. A syntax editor would not allow you to enter anything the computer didn't have in its vocabulary which is listed for you in the manual. Valhalla's problems are solved only by living in its world, making friends and enemies with the other 30 significant characters and learning from mistakes - maybe you will find Ofnir, the first quest object, but if Klepto is around... well that isn't his name by accident! I finally managed to find the first object, Ofnir, after a) cheating (Legend, the game's makers gave me some clues) and b) spending around two hours trying to persuade one of the characters to do something - Valhalla is compulsive. The most immediately remarkable aspect of Valhalla I have left until last: the graphics are animated. Every command you give, that isn't refused, has visual results. If you tell your character to drink he will pick up a wine jug and drink. I recommend Valhalla without reservation. It makes some other programs look Neanderthal. The only point I would make is that you should not expect the equivalent of a standard text adventure with moving graphics. Valhalla is not like anything that has gone before. One last thing, Valhalla has the funniest swear routine I've ever seen.

Personal Computer News

PC MICROPEDIA VOL 13 PART 3 SOFTWARE Christmas Software Buyers Guide SOFTWARE BUYERS GUIDE SOFTWARE SELECTION Whether you've just bought a personal computer, had one for some time or are expecting one on Christmas Day, one thing you'll be looking for is some good software to ease the digestion of the Christmas fare or to stave off boredom during the re-runs of old films on the TV. In this Micropaedia we'll give details of how to select the best value programs for your money, as well as a list of the best games we've reviewed in our pages this year. The first thing to do is look carefully at your needs. Software can be divided roughly into a number of areas such as: applications, utilities educational and games. This list is not comprehensive and there are bound to be some overlaps. Applications: This covers word processing, database, accounting programs and so on. These are designed to take the slog out of paper work, it you're looking to make typing easier then you must bear in mind that there's no point buying a word processor unless you have a printer. You should also ask: - Does the program give an adequate screen size, ie between 40 and 80 characters? - Does it respond quickly when a word runs off the end of a line? How easy is it to use and is the documentation clear? - Will it verity your text once you've saved it onto cassette? - Can you print more than one copy of the text easily? Databases: If you've reached the stage where you've got so many cassettes or records that you can't keep track of them, then you might consider looking at some database packages. If all you need is a simple card index, then you might be better off buying just that. Databases on micros can be misapplied quite easily. The problem with a card index is that you can retrieve the information in one of two ways: by picking a card from its main heading or by searching the entire set from start to finish. A card box is good for people's names and addresses etc, but no good if, for example, you wish to find out which of these people live in a given town. The main advantage of a computer database is that you can select cards ('records') on a number of criteria. For example. If you run a club you could pick out all the members who are late with subscriptions and who live in a certain town. The main limitation of computer databases is that you can't usually keep more than 300 cards at a time. If you have a cassette-based program you will have to SAVE and VERIFY the database every time you alter it - this can be a real pain. The questions to ask here are, will it really save you time and effort? What is the maximum number of records you can keep on it at any one time? How many separate pieces of information can each 'card' hold? (eg product description, code value, number in stock, reorder limit.) How many characters (letters) are you limited to for each record? Accounts: It's at this time of year that you are most likely to be feeling the pinch, financially. Investment in a home accounting or bookkeeping package may help with the management of money matters. In this area you will also find programs that help you calculate heat losses which may help you save money by proper insulation. As with the database programs, the most important question relates to your needs - will the program really save you time and effort? Would it be easier, quicker and cheaper to use a calculator, pen and paper? Utilities: These are programs for the more serious hobbyists, who enjoy developing their own programs and finding out more about their machines. Perhaps the first thing you should consider in this area is another language. Basic is a good language for learning about programming but it shouldn't be the only string to your bow. Forth is now available on most micros which allows you to write arcade games which run very fast indeed. Pascal is becoming increasingly popular on a variety of micros and most versions will give you a good grounding in this structured language. Rarer but just as interesting are, Logo, Lisp and Prolog. If you want your programs to go faster but don't want to learn another language you should shop around for a compiler. This is a program that will convert your Basic into machine code. This has the advantage of speeding up the program and making sure other people can't steal those routines that took you hours to code up. Certainly one thing most programmers will find of enormous use is a 'toolbox' of some kind. There are as yet only a few of these about due to their immense value more are being launched every week. Toolkits generally include REM strippers - to take out all the REM lines needed during program development. This can make for great memory savings if space is tight. If you're lucky a toolkit may also have a packing routine which takes out all unnecessary spaces and in some cases joins lines up to save space. An 'unpacker' should also be provided. If you're interested in working at the heart of the computer, you'll be looking to machine code. In that case you'll need an assembler at least. This saves you the slog of having to convert op-codes to hex, or calculate branches and offsets. A disassembler does the opposite - takes the hex codes from memory and shows you the op-codes. You'll need both of these for getting right down to it and so it is probably worth considering a full monitor system. A good monitor should combine an assembler and disassembler and provide a machine code toolkit with such facilities as, block moves of memory, trace functions, break point settings and so on. The more functions the monitor has the more useful it will be... and the more expensive. Education: In the last few months most of the major educational publishers have launched educational programs. These include, Heinemann, Griffin and George, Macmillan Longman and so on. There is also a lot of software being produced by smaller companies like Chalksoft and Widgit Software. The standard of software in this field is probably more variable than in other areas, some is dreadful, some excellent. Five-Ways is a software company that has produced programs for both Heinemann and Macmillan. Its programs have set the standard by which others should be judged, so try to see them. They are available on Spectrum, BBC and RML380 from retailers, who should be prepared to demonstrate any programs in stock. Games: There used to be a clear division between adventure and arcade-type games. This has been blurred over the last few months by programs which use ideas and techniques from the two types. Arcade-type games can be subdivided into those that mimic the 'real-thing', games like Invaders/Galaxians, Phoenix, Pac-Man, Defender/Scramble, Kong, Asteroids, Berserk and so on. The main differences between these games ties in how you move relative to the background. There has been a move of late toward 3D games. These seek to produce the illusion of three dimensions on the screen, so that things don't just move left-right and up-down, but can appear to move into the distance as well. Some of these have tried to use the brain's capacity for giving this impression from the different information obtained from the two eyes. They do this by using two coloured pictures of the same image on the screen and you have to wear coloured glasses to get the effect. These are worth looking at, but they don't always work well on all TVs. Other games use perspective transformations to get a similar effect. These seem to be pointing the way to a new and exciting direction in games. Of particular note here are Lunar Crabs and Ant Attack. The main point about arcade-type games is the use of sound and colour graphics on the machine. Don't be misled by the packaging. Sometimes the cassette cover gives the impression that the game uses stupendous graphics, but you'll find that this may be an artist's impression of the title and bear no relation at all to the pictures on the screen. To avoid this, look in the magazines to find reviews accompanied by a 'screen-shot' - a photograph of the game being played. Sometimes you'll find one of these on the inside cover of the cassette. Adventure games are often 'text-only'. This means that there are no pictures at all. In these you have to type in instructions such as 'go west', 'get rifle', 'open door' and so on. The idea is that you have to complete a quest which might involve finding some secret treasure or simply finding your way out of a labyrinth of rooms and corridors without being killed by some unsavoury thug. Often you need to have picked up items before you can proceed very far - for example, you may not be able to read a crucial message (or even be told it's there) before picking up and/or using a torch. The best of the strictly text-only adventures should have a very large vocabulary. The program should recognise ten verbs as a rock-bottom minimum and at least twice as many objects. There should also be many locations to move to and from. The best way to find out about these is, again, to read through reviews of the programs or to look at the cover or instruction manual. The problem with this is that some suppliers deliberately include very little detail about the words you can use, or the objects. One of the main points about an adventure game is that you are supposed to work out all this information for yourself. There have been a number of games released recently which might be termed 'extended adventure' games. In these you get a picture on the screen of the room you're in and possibly some extra information at the foot or to one side of the screen. Of particular note here are games like Valhalla. In this, you play the role of a wanderer in the Norse Gods' kingdom. The screen is split into two sections - the top shows your location, yourself and who/whatever might be present. The characters move around rather like those in a cartoon. The lower screen is used for entering commands and getting information about who's who or what's what. The point is that the characters have lives of their own and will move around without your doing anything at all! Also in this vein are the Oracle's Cave and the Hobbit. There are more and more games breaking into this new territory every week. One to watch out for will be Alice in Wonderland from Audiogenic for the Commodore 64. Adventure games require more wit than dexterity and it's easy to get addicted to the better ones, rather like getting completely taken up with a film or book. Try to see them in action before buying and bear in mind that the first few times you play them are likely to provide as much frustration as excitement while you're getting familiar with the basic framework. The better games allow you to do more than just enter two words in the usual verb-object pair. Some will even allow you to enter such complex phrases as telling one of the characters to do something for you! General rules: Avoid buying programs on the strength of advertising or covers. Some suppliers can generally be relied on to produce high-quality games, but everyone makes the occasional mistake! Check the top-ten charts in different magazines and look through back issues of magazines for reviews. Ask to see games before you buy, but make sure you know what sort of game you're after, or you'll waste a lot of your own time and that of shop assistants. TRIED AND TESTED FOR THE SPECTRUM NAME: Psst TYPE: Arcade PRICE: £5.50 PUBLISHER: Ultimate FORMAT: Cassette SYSTEM: 16/48K NAME: Jumping Jack TYPE: Arcade PRICE: £5.50 PUBLISHER: Imagine FORMAT: Cassette SYSTEM: 16/48K NAME: Cookie TYPE: Arcade PRICE: £5.50 PUBLISHER: Ultimate FORMAT: Cassette SYSTEM: 16/48K NAME: Magic Mountain TYPE: Arcade PRICE: £4.95 PUBLISHER: Phipps FORMAT: Cassette SYSTEM: 48K NAME: Zzoom TYPE: Arcade PRICE: £5.50 PUBLISHER: Imagine FORMAT: Cassette SYSTEM: 48K NAME: Splat TYPE: Arcade PRICE: £5.50 PUBLISHER: Incentive FORMAT: Cassette SYSTEM: 48K NAME: Football Pools TYPE: Utility PRICE: £5.95 PUBLISHER: Hartland FORMAT: Cassette SYSTEM: 48K NAME: Pimania TYPE: Advent PRICE: £10 PUBLISHER: Automata FORMAT: Cassette SYSTEM: 48K NAME: Horace Goes Skiing TYPE: Arcade PRICE: £5.95 PUBLISHER: Psion FORMAT: Cassette SYSTEM: 16K NAME: Mad Martha TYPE: Arcade PRICE: £5.95 PUBLISHER: Mikrogen FORMAT: Cassette SYSTEM: 48K NAME: Jetpac PRICE: £5.50 PUBLISHER: Ultimate Play The Game, [redacted] SYSTEM: 16K FORMAT: Cassette OUTLETS: WH Smith, John Menzies, Sinclair Dealers, mail order. This is a classic game that tops Space Invaders and Pacman and offers lots of fun. You're the chief test pilot tor Acme interstellar Transport and your job is to go to various planets to assemble rockets. Bits of elements, jewels and gold fall from the sky which you snatch, but the aliens get a bit peeved because you've grabbed their worldly goods without so much as paying the V in VAT. And there's only one way to settle the matter - shoot them with your Quad Photon Laser Phasers. Before you can make a quick getaway, you have to fuel a rocket with six fuel pods which drop from the skies. Each planet has its own share of nasties that try and get you. The first planet has fire-ball type creatures, the second furry creatures, the third vicious bouncing spheres and the fourth some strange looking little insects. With its good graphics and interesting content you'll have plenty to do to fill those free hours. NAME: Valhalla PRICE: £14.95 PUBLISHER: Legend SYSTEM: 48K FORMAT: Cassette OUTLETS: Some retail, mail order from Legend, [redacted] Valhalla is half epic, half cartoon strip and its Norse setting is ideal for those with the fjords in their bloodstream. With 200 crowns and your brains you have to wend your way through Asgard, Midgard and Hell to pick up a key, a ring, a shield, a sword, an axe and a helmet. First of all you need to get yourself well equipped. Armour is a must. So are the bare essentials like food and drink. And as you progress through the adventure the condition of your soul is rated. The graphics are good and varied, and the responses can be slow, but this is because the machine is processing the moves for a number of characters not just you, and the screen features a superb cartoon effect. The program also allows you to stack instructions. For example, you can type in get food, eat food, go north in quick succession then see your character do all these. I won't tell you how to solve the quest. What I will tell you is that Valhalla is well worth the rather substantial cost. NAME: Manic Miner PRICE: £5.95 PUBLISHER: Bug-Byte, [redacted] FORMAT: Cassette OUTLETS: High street shops For superb graphics and sound, humour and overall addiction there's little can beat Manic Miner for the 48K Spectrum. It scored top marks in Gameplay (Issue 23) and subsequently soared to become a bestseller. Using keyboard or joystick, you manoeuvre Miner Willy through caverns in a long-forgotten mine-shaft near Surbiton in Surrey, collecting keys to unlock a great fortune on resurfacing. Press ENTER and you're in Central Cavern beginning the great trek upward. The game needs a lot of thought, practice and timing. Robots, ducks and dozens of other creatures. Including humming penguins patrol the caves, platforms crumble and conveyor belts whisk Willy off in quite the wrong direction if he's not quick. NAME: Rescue PRICE: £5.95 PUBLISHER: Computer Rentals, [redacted] FORMAT: Cassette SYSTEM: 48K OUTLETS: Smiths, Menzies, Boots, Mail order An adventure that has all the ingredients - graphics, variety, plenty of surprises, good plot and ease of play to make it a winner. You have to rescue a princess who is in a castle, and you have four levels of skill from which to choose. You decide how to rescue the princess, you decide what tactics to employ, you decide what objects to use and how to use them. The game is played on a 'board' made up of concentric circles, linked together like a spider's web - and a fresh board is created every time you play. While you play you can keep tabs on the position of your enemies. The two guards keep on the move at the same time as you, and if they catch up with you, you're well and truly dead. NAME: Fantastic Voyage TYPE: Shootout PRICE: £5.95 PUBLISHER: Foilkade, [redacted] FORMAT: Cassette OUTLETS: Mail order MACHINE: ZX81 If you fancy a trip through the veins of a human body, battling against white blood cells - try Fantastic Voyage. You are injected into a right arm and must make your way to the brain by navigating through the body's bloodstream. Your aim is to destroy a bloodclot. On this interesting theme, forget all the medical jargon about veins and arteries you go straight into the scan mode to give a front and side view of the body. You identify your position by a tiny dot which represents a submarine - a strange object to be floating around in a body. Also displayed is your energy level, direction and size, which gets larger the longer you stay in the body. The movement of the submarine is well done, as you see the artery walls moving past you. But destroying white blood cells is none too easy. They jitter about the screen at a rapid rate and you have to use laser power sparingly. This is a very good game with clever programming. There's a good deal to do and you won't get bored. NAME: Adventure 200 TYPE: Adventure PRICE: £5.95 PUBLISHER: Foilkade, [redacted] FORMAT: Cassette OUTLETS: Mail order MACHINE: ZX81 The ingredients are here for a really gripping adventure. Disguised as a peasant you venture into the evil land of Grunlock to recover your King's stolen treasure. And you'd better not come back empty handed or the King will have you killed. Starting west of the palace you give simple commands for directions you want to move. After every move, the ZX81 displays where you are, what's happened, and the obvious paths you can take. During your journey you are offered several things, such as a lamp and a fish. And what you pick up affects your progress. A very interesting adventure.

Personal Computer News

Lasting Appeal 5/5

Playability 5/5

Use Of Machine 5/5

Overall Value 4/5

John Lettice 4/5

NAME: Valhalla SYSTEM: Spectrum 48K PRICE: £14.95 PUBLISHER: Legend FORMAT: Cassette LANGUAGE: Machine code OTHER VERSIONS: None OUTLETS: Some retail, mail order from Legend, [redacted]. VIKING VOYAGE If you've always fancied yourself as a flaxen haired nordic demigod, but you've found Burton's doesn't stock your size in winged helmets, help is at hand. Valhalla is half epic, half cartoon strip, and its Norse setting is ideal for those with the fjords in their bloodstream. The graphics screen features a sort of strip cartoon, where the characters actually act out the 'screenplay' seen in the text window below. So, if Thor attacks Loki, you'll see Thor stride across the screen towards Loki, and start beating him about the head with an axe. You'll find you tend to sit back and watch this happen, and the other characters are perfectly capable of carrying on without you, but should you feel inclined to actually do something, there are six quests you can be getting on with. OBJECTIVES You have to wend your way through Asgard, Midgard and Hell to pick up a key, a ring, a shield, a sword, an axe and a helmet. In order to do this you'll probably have to pick up a key, a ring, a sword, etc... but you must understand that the quests' objects are actually special versions of the above artefacts. The quests must be performed in order, and are increasingly difficult. They should easily fill in the odd spots of tedium you run into in those long arctic nights. IN PLAY You start off with 200 crowns and your brains. If you want to keep the latter inside your skull it's advisable to get yourself arms and armour fairly sharp-ish. You can buy these from various other characters, but you can also find them lying around. You'll also need food and drink, which is there in abundance to start with, but disappears fairly rapidly as you and the rest of the cast munch through it. You can sometimes induce characters to give you things, particularly if the character in question - Thor, for example - suffers from total eclipse of the brain. Thor in fact found himself on the receiving end of one of my earlier wheezes. First induce Thor to give you the axe, then use the axe to kill an unarmed Thor. I regarded it as a lesson in life for the lad... As far as the condition of your soul is concerned, you start off about half way between good and evil. Your goodness rating changes depending on whether you attack the good characters or the bad characters. Working on the assumption that being good would probably mean not being sneaky, I decided to join the blackguards, it might also have had something to do with an encounter I had with arch goodie Odin, who first extracted 50 crowns out of me for a ring he apparently didn't have, then took a ring from one of his henchgoddesses in order to complete the transaction. Thinking dark thoughts about gods, landlords and pawnbrokers, and feeling practically ruined, I hobbled off in search of a bargain basement sword. Fortunately, shield and helmet were to be found just lying around. Rings were also to he found in abundance, and I got this recurring vision of Odin sitting behind a large leather-topped desk smoking a fat cigar. However, the 50 crown wonder did serve its purpose well enough. Rings - except for Drapnir, which is one of the quest objects and about as useful as a lead hula hoop - give you access to Ringways, which act as teleport/bypasses. So in addition to the usual NORTH, SOUTH type commands you can use 'JUMP', which takes you Club Class to the relevant location. After a bit of hopping around like this, I was well and truly lost. I asked for help, and was told the ringway nearest me led to... El Vinos? Surely not the El Vinos? Could I get a sandwich there? Would they let my editor buy a drink at the bar? Naturally I had to investigate. When I finally got out, I'd drunk all the wine and eaten all the food I'd had with me when I arrived, and had had my wallet lightened considerably by one Alvin, billed in the manual as a dwarf, but clearly some kind of profiteer. I won't tell you about my other attempts at the game, about my attempt to lock away all the food and wine in the universe and sell it to the other characters for huge sums, or about my attempt to sell an axe to a wolf. Nor will I tell you how you finally solve the quest - matter of fact, I'd be grateful if you'd tell me. What I will tell you is that Valhalla is well worth the rather substantial cost. VERDICT I have very little that even approaches a complaint about Valhalla. The graphics are good and varied, and although the responses can be slow, this is because the machine is processing the moves for a number of characters, not just you. Even this minor problem is dealt with by the way the program allows you to stack instructions. For example, you can type in get food, eat food, go north in quick succession, then see your character do all these, it's a good idea to do this, as it lets you get the drop on other characters. Another departure from the traditional format is the way the manual is actually designed to help you win. You get a detailed guide to the characters, a couple of clues, and a list of common words and their accepted syntax. This means you'll get into it straight away, so it's less frustrating than most games, although no less difficult.