Waxworks

C&VG (Computer & Video Games)

Keith Campbell

Meanwhile, Waxworks is the last in the series of Mysterious Adventures and comes from the keyboard of Brian Howarth and Cliff Ogden. The setting is a waxworks, complete with hall mirrors, in which you have dozed off and awake to find yourself locked in. Being locked in after closing time means you have the freedom to wander around behind the scenes. It pays to examine things closely as you do. Guy Fawkes, Hillary and Tensing, and Jacques Cousteau are among the exhibits and you are posed questions by them as you wander past. If you get them right, it may be to your advantage later, but discovering how is part of the game! I visited a toilet and washroom which revealed an unexpected and sinister secret. But I thought it was a bit off, being called a rapscallion for trying to make use of the facilities! How you deal with the sewer rats, how you survive a rather large fish and what use is a vandalised telephone are among the many questions you'll have to find answers for on your quest to leave the premises. I played on a BBC micro which had split screen display with coloured text and a fast response speed. Waxworks is available or many micros, some versions with graphics, and costs £9.95, The game is supplied by Digital Fantasia for BBC and Spectrum versions and by Channel 8 Software for others.

Personal Computer News

Bob Chappell

ADVENTURES CAPITAL Bob Chappell surveys the scene to evaluate the influence of new crop of innovative adventures. Melbourne House's The Hobbit and Legend's Valhalla were both important watersheds in the development of the adventure, but how much has the adventure moved on since their launch? Like them or not, these two games set new standards in two fields, most obviously in graphics, but also in popularising semi-intelligent characters (in addition to the one usually found sitting at the keyboard). So, post Hobbit and Valhalla, you might have expected the floodgates to open for a new breed of adventures. A look at a representative sample of some of the latest releases should give us an indication of the state of this particular art. FANTASIA DIAMOND Spectrum £8.95 Hewson Consultants, [redacted] This one is Hewson's follow-up to Quest. The plot is hardly original, being littered with stolen treasure, elves, castles and the like, but there's no doubt that Fantasia Diamond is one of the most sophisticated of the current wave. It shows clear signs of the influence the Hobbit has had on the genre. The command analyser is powerful, allowing the player to enter compound commands such as 'OPEN THE DOOR AND GO EAST', 'GET THE FOOD AND THE WINE' or 'LOOK THROUGH THE WOODEN DOOR'. You can also communicate with the various characters in the adventure with the syntax 'SAY TO THE GNOME "GET THE ROD"'. The characters themselves lead separate lives, and will go about their business as you go about yours. Many of the locations also include simple graphics, and if you know the Hobbit, they will seem fairly familiar. Hewson has obviously taken the lessons of the Hobbit to heart by combining a powerful command parser, character communication, independent characters, graphics and a large scale mission. The end result is a fantasy adventure that is both sophisticated and stimulating, and offers a great challenge. WAXWORKS Commodore 64 and others £9.95 Channel 8, [redacted] Fresh from the fertile mind of Brian Howarth comes yet another in the popular Mysterious Adventure series. Originally these adventures were text only, but they've been updated, in keeping with the trend towards graphically depicted locations. One excellent feature of this particular series - apart from the fact that it is available for a wide range of micros - is that you can switch the graphics on or off at any time during the adventure. Waxworks follows a theme beloved of devotees of spook stories. You've been visiting a waxworks museum and you've fallen asleep - in this respect it's a bit like visiting the House of Lords - and you wake up to find you've been locked in for the night. The adventure breaks no new ground in terms of technical development - apart from the graphics it's a traditional verb/ noun command driven game - but, nevertheless, like its predecessors it's a thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining adventure. GENESIS II Spectrum £6.95 Mikro-Gen, [redacted] Since the days of Noah, 'ark' has generally been what passes for intelligent conversation among ravens. But no more: MikroGen's Genesis II is the biblical tale of survival on board a galactic Noah's ark. It has a good analyser, instant response and graphics, and a vocabulary of some 300 words. There are over 100 locations to explore, and 60 objects to play around with - more than enough to satisfy the most inquisitive and acquisitive of explorers. What next, one asks? Exodus II, where the children of Israel pass through a black hole into the promised galaxy? The sky quite clearly isn't the limit ... THE INFERNO Spectrum £6.50 RIchard Shepherd, [redacted] Moving right along, we fall like Lucifer into - with apologies to Richard Shepherd Software - the pits. This latest from the Shepherd stable also exhibits signs of progress. It has a command analyser which allows the entry of compound commands, communication and interaction with the characters, and has graphics which can be switched on or off. The plot is unusual, being modeled around a plan of Dante's vision of Hell, with the adventurer having to pass through nine circles of Hell to reach the centre and escape. The theme is unusual, and overall it's an attractively presented adventure. SPOOF Spectrum £6.95 Runesoft, [redacted] Program generators are just starting to have an effect on the market, and Gilsoft's Quill is certainly the most popular of them. Since its appearance the Quill has been used to produce a goodly number of commercial adventures for the Spectrum. With its release on the Commodore 64, we can expect to see a similar outpouring of adventures for that machine. Spoof is a Quill-generated adventure, but what makes it worth special attention is its humour. There are already of a number of humorous adventures to be had, the most notable being Supersoft's Streets of London (Commodore 64), Salamander's similar Cricklewood incident (Dragon) and Infocom's superb Planetfall (various micros). But Spoof stands out from these because it is a parody of the standard adventure. In it you will come across such exotic locations as the Obligatory Mountains, the Secret Mysterious Hidden Cavern (clearly signposted) and the Necessary Forest. You will also encounter a three-headed vulture who wants a bit more than the usual food to let you pass. If you happen to have on you a bottle of wart remover, the dress of a princess, a magic rope and the ring from a pig's nose, you're in business. AFRICA GARDENS Spectrum Gilsoft, [redacted] This is one of Gilsoft's own Quill-produced adventures, marketed under the title of The Gold Collection. It's a particularly good example of the series, and is set in a mysterious hotel. It's reasonably detailed and its atmospheric text descriptions ensure the player's imagination is caught. MINDBENDER Africa Gardens, Mindbender Spectrum £5.95 Gilsoft, [redacted] The Gold Collection's contribution to mind-bending is named, aptly enough, Mindbender. It's crammed with testing puzzles and action, and starts as it means to go on by forcing you to stretch your imagination if you want to progress beyond the first couple of locations. A good sense of humour in the text helps keep you from biting the carpet when you're stuck - great stuff. WHAT'S NEXT? Certainly adventures have improved in the long term, but as yet it doesn't seem that there have been any material developments since the Hobbit and Valhalla. The standard of these two is, however, being matched regularly. And as if Movisoft (the graphics system used by Valhalla) wasn't enough, Legend is currently working on Movisoft 2 for the follow-up, to be called The Great Space Race, and due for release later in the year. The next great leap forward? We'll see...

Personal Computer Games

Complexity 7/10

Atmosphere 6/10

Interest 5/10

Value 6/10

Steve Cooke

MACHINE: Spectrum 48K, BBC, Oric, Atari, Dragon PRICE: £9.95 (BBC £9.95; Oric £9.95; Atari £9.95; Dragon £9.95) Waxworks is the new mysterious adventure distributed by Digital Fantasia and Channel 8, and available on most machines for £9.95. It's the latest in a long series that includes Arrow of Death, Circus, and The Wizard Akyrz. In Waxworks, you wake up to find yourself locked inside the building - but you are not alone.! Good graphics which you can skip if you want to - just as well because they take a while to draw. Your commands are entered on a scrolling text window as in The Hobbit, and the responses are nice and fast. Waxworks looks like becoming as much of a favourite as the other titles in the series. There are a couple of tricky mazes to negotiate, so the White Wizard advises you to stock up with as many useless items as possible. You can then drop them in the mazes and use them as landmarks to find your way about.

Waxworks.

Crash

Difficulty 7/10

Atmosphere 7/10

Vocabulary 7/10

Logic 7/10

Debugging 10/10

Overall Value 7/10

Derek Brewster 7/10

DEREK BREWSTER'S ADVENTURE TRAIL This month Derek Brewster takes a close look at a space adventure and some games for girls among others. But before that, he discusses some points on presentation... PRESENTING THE ADVENTURE The format an adventure uses for display is important since it shows you where you are, what items and monsters you see, and how you might leave a location. It is surprising when well-coded games involving many hours of concerted effort are let down by a cluttered display with all the information jumbled together in a confusing way. An untidy, scrolling list of mixed description and input barely separated from the last location's mess is hardly the manner in which to present a complex adventure. An improved format can make use of different colours for objects you come across, the monsters you meet, and especially when in a rush, the exits. Similarly, capital letters, BRIGHT and FLASH could be used more for emphasis. Temple of Vran has gone some way in tackling these problems with neatly boxed-in location descriptions presented upon a freshly cleared screen and your input bearing a different colour. These are simple changes indeed yet add much to your enjoyment of the game. The more complicated and involved the game the more important the input routine. Snowball has a very poor, sluggish input routine which hinders fast typing and has no audible confirmation of key depressions; this in an otherwise highly sophisticated game. Many adventures only use delete when it would be a simple matter to use the Spectrum input routine that allows full cursor control. A game with a broad and friendly language that goes beyond simple verb/noun couplings needs to make full use of the editing facilities of the Spectrum. It would be a useful feature, particularly with those games requiring long, intricate inputs, to enable the rescue of an incorrect input line so it can be brought back on to the screen and corrected. Fantasia Diamond and The Hobbit don't allow cursor movement through the input characters - only delete is used, in a more straightforward verb/noun adventure this would not be such a drawback but certainly is when dealing with the highly complex sentence analyses featured in these games. Long sentences are often used when communicating with other characters; it would be useful to recall the previous input were it not understood. Valhalla has complex syntax checking which commendably doesn't allow the entry of sentence structures It doesn't understand. Before leading you through the maze of this month's adventures let me just point out the simplest advance in presentation - white, or even better yellow, text on a black background which is much easier on the eyes around midnight! WAXWORKS Producer: Digital Fantasia Memory Required: 48K Retail Price: £9.95 Author: B. Howarth and C. Ogden A large box houses this Mysterious Adventure; a sticker tells you have the right version - it requires a ZX Spectrum 48K rame and one cassette recorder. Inside you find a booklet filled mostly with general hints on solving adventures which, leaving aside the exercise in speed reading, wil not warrant much attention from experienced adventurers. Conversely, fresh adventurers may learn something of the creed. By far the most useful information is on the first page where you see the Spectrum Version has some special features (don't say the BBC looses out again!). Pressing ENTER gives you a pictorial view of your current location and pressing again puts back the text. The story line tells of a day at the seaside spent stuffing yourself with junk food whereupon you are in need of a long snooze in the cool and quiet of the waxworks. You endeavour to escape the nightmare that ensues. The screen is split into two areas. The upper hall displays what you see graphically, or in words with the name of the location and a fist of the items there. The lower has prompts, input and brief comments. You're in the leisure lounge of the waxworks and moving north gives you the washroom. Examining the toilet door and reading the bottom half of the screen you are informed of an object. If you're used to playing the adventures I've been playing (lots!) you may be caught out since the identity of the object is inserted, almost hidden, amongst the list of items in the top half of the screen. This can be a little disorientating at first but what is more, had you been in graphics mode - and who could blame you as the graphics are superb -you would not notice the identity of the object at all. Not necessarily a bad thing, I point it out only because it strikes me as non-standard. Set within the washroom floor is a grid but after unlocking it you can't simply go down and it is quite a struggle to find the right words. The vocabulary is not far removed from Verb/Noun (take off gloves must be entered remove gloves) but combines the surefootedness of this style with some noteworthy flexibility. Commas are used as in 'QUICKLY GET THE LAMP, SWORD, CLOAK AND STAFF' and the word THEN or a full stop is used as in 'GO NORTH THEN CLIMB THE TREE. EXAMINE HOLE THEN GO DOWN.' Single word entries include help, score, quit, save, inventory, run, jump, shout and the increasingly popular wait. The eccentricity of the language often adds to the game but one solution is only invoked with the curious command 'GO AIRLOCK'. The examine command must be used with care. Examining the jacket reveals nothing - until it is picked up. One innovative feature is found on searching the pile of junk in the workshop which is well worth examining twice. The waxworks of your dreams can become tricky to map and the solutions to some of the problems, perhaps in keeping with this theme, are a little unreal. Rising from the treehouse takes you into the main hall but no matter how you descend leads you back into the leisure room. Indeed, in many places the game sends you back to this main area. In the grand hall, up from the leisure room, north gives you the Everest and west the Undersea World display. If you answer the display bedecked with Jacques Cousteau and his scuba gear correctly the aqualung decides to appear in the hall of mirrors. It's worth noting that when answering these questions you must type 'SAY ANSWER' and not just the answer. There are two mazes in the game - one being easily enough for my tastes - in the hall of mirrors and the other in the sewer (both six location mazes) which is painstakingly mapped out for the sake of a rat-trap. Waxworks has excellent graphics and a good vocabulary and has all the makings of a good adventure. The absence of long location descriptions is more than compensated by the detailed pictures.