Winter Wonderland

Your Sinclair

Graphics 8/10

Text 7/10

Value For Money 6/10

Personal Rating 7/10

Overall 7/10

Mike Gerrard 7/10

FAX BOX Title: Winter Wonderland Publisher: Incentive Price: £7.95 Reviewer: Mike Gerrard Hot on the heels, or should that be cold on the heels, of Apache Gold comes Incentive's other Medallion Graphic Adventure, Winter Wonderland. The scene-setting in this one is terrific, with you playing the part of an anthropologist who's plunged, in the manner of Harrison Ford (Yummy! Ed), into a tale of adventure and discovery. You receive a telegram from a Russian archaeologist friend working in Tibet who tells you to get your anthropological self over there at once. He's found evidence of a civilisation that's advanced at the same rate as the rest of mankind, but totally independent of it. On the last leg of your journey in the Himalayas, your Cessna aircraft is forced down by bad weather, and as you dive into the snow you're sure you get a glimpse in the distance of sunlight reflecting on glass. Can this be true in this deserted landscape? Well of course it can, otherwise there'd be no adventure. You begin the game by the wreckage of your aircraft, with a fur coat and a pair of snowshoes. "Welcome to Winter Wonderland" the radio crackles, before expiring. Better wear the fur coat before you do the same. I made two moves east and died an instant death, falling through thin ice. Not my favourite way to start a game, as regular readers will know. I wandered elsewhere, found a gun, saw off a grizzly, then got myself stuck at the bottom of a rocky crevasse, having discovered a rope and ice-pick down there. I tried for ages to get out, but having gone SOUTH to get in I couldn't return NORTH, or go in any other direction, including UP or DOWN. I couldn't DIG, couldn't THROW ROPE, couldn't do anything. Eventually I ran through the directions again, and discovered the program recognised U but not UP. Bad programming, methinks. Having sorted that out, I entered at last the world of Shangri-la, a strange world and not at all like you'd imagine. I mean to say, the Milton Walk Shopping Centre? Here were pet shops selling hamsters, florists selling roses, and the inevitable bookshop too. If only I'd had some money I would've had a good time. All I got instead was some kid continually throwing snowballs at me. I wouldn't mind, but I wasn't allowed to throw any back at him. And I thought it a bit much when he followed me into the health food shop and bombarded me there. The game itself doesn't quite live up to the expectations created by the scenario, but I'd be happy to go back to it and I reckon it's just got the edge on Apache Gold. Shame about the price.

Read it at Your Sinclair Rock'n'Roll Years

C&VG (Computer & Video Games)

Vocabulary 5/10

Atmosphere 7/10

Personal 5/10

Value 5/10

Keith Campbell 5/10

SUPPLIER: Incentive Software MACHINE: CBM 64/Spectrum 48K/Amstrad CPC PRICE: £7.95 Your Cessna light aircraft crash lands near the Himalayas, and after managing to free yourself, you struggle across the frozen waste in search of help. Your mission had been to meet a Professor of Archeology, who sought your opinion on evidence he had discovered of lost Tibetan civilisation. Before long, in your efforts to find help and shelter, you stumble across it. This is the setting for a seasonal piece of rather contrived puzzles, set amidst ice and snow. As you walk about the paths in the town, an attempt to convey the atmosphere is made by apparently random messages like: "A id throws a snowball at you." and "Some skiers walk by." But if you try any form of interaction with them, it falls flat. Visiting the different shops, you notice items for sale which could prove very useful later on, but it is apparent that you have no money. Being in possession of a rare egg, and bumping into a Professor of Ornithology, I felt it worth trying for some cash. Unfortunately, every way I tried to interest the Prof in the egg, showed him to be a very wooden figure indeed. This is the second game in Incentive's Medallion series, and has plenty of nice snowy graphics, although many of them are very similar to each other. Not a bad game overall, but I found it difficult to get on the same wavelength, and reached a personal maximum at 14 percent.

Crash

Atmosphere 89%

Vocabulary 81%

Logic 80%

Addictive Quality 92%

Overall 89%

Derek Brewster 89%

DEREK BREWSTER'S ADVENTURE TRAIL INTO THE NEW YEAR, VALIANTLY... Anyone who knows anything about adventuring will have heard of Level 9 - Jewels of Darkness was the name given to Rainbird's recent release of their three adventure classics wrapped up as one, comprising Colossal Adventure, Adventure Quest and Dungeon Adventure. January should have seen the release of another trilogy, Silicon Dreams. This package has Snowball (Crash July 84). Return to Eden (Dec 84) and The Worm in Paradise (March 86) all together for the very reasonable asking price of £14.95. The package includes a full play-guide plus Eden Song, a novella by Peter McBride. Incentive have just released a Paper Management System in the form of a designer pad which aids the development of GAC-produced adventures. Each pad has over 200 double-sided pages of A4, which makes it a rather weighty package, but Incentive have agreed to send it out by post for £1.25 - the package itself costs £7.95 so that's £9.20 in all. The address for orders is iNCENTIVE, [redacted]. This months reviews are made up of Dodgy Geezers, a Lever/Jones satire (remember Hampstead and Terrormolinos?) put out by Melbourne House. Apache Gold and Winter Wonderland, two GAC adventures from the firm that gave you the Graphic Adventure Creator, Incentive, Landfall on Rollus, the second Clwyd Adventure Software game to be reviewed in The Trail (the first was Futurezoo), and Forgotten City, a game from a new outfit called Hawk, which is a very good first release. Marks given in The Trail have hovered around the eighty mark in recent months, and there is a good reason for this. At one time I liked to review a cross-section of arrivals, but recently I've thrown the poor ones aside and only reviewed the more worthy releases. Perhaps I'll include a 'howler' in the coming months just to balance things up a bit! An interesting-looking Book of the Dead, submitted by The Essential Myth, was accompanied by superb playing notes but unfortunately wouldn't load. Any company submitting reasonable quality material to The Trail and wondering why it hasn't appeared would do well to re-submit a copy which is sure to load. I hear that Dodgy Geezers is to be the last release from the Lever/Jones partnership. This will be sad news to all those who have laughed their way through the couple's mirth-filled satires. The Trail would like to take this opportunity to wish them both the best of luck in the future. WINTER WONDERLAND Producer: Incentive Retail Price: £7.95 Author: Tim Walsha & Simon Lipscomb Let's say straight away that I liked this one. It's the second release from INCENTIVE's MEDALLION label, and deals with a theme which should be familiar - even to those who aren't off on one of those Easter skiing expeditions. The program is well-proportioned and nicely balanced, both in terns of story and difficulty. You begin, standing by your crashed Cessna light aircraft in the snow-covered Himalayas, but how did you get there? That's a long story. Having studied and practised anthropology (bothering people, to you) for over ten years, you had all but given up on your dreams of making some great discovery that would put your name in the anthropology books. That is, until you received a Telex from your Russian Archeologist friend, Sergb Kirov, currently working in Tibet. His message related his discovery of a civilisation as advanced as Mankind, yet totally independent of it. Sergio requests you leave for Tibet immediately, to give the kind of advice which has given you the title of the man who takes the apology out of anthropology. Sergio is nowhere to be found when you land at Lhasa airport, but one of the locals tells you that he left a message requesting you to meet him at the dig site. Although the airstrip was on the lower slopes of the Himalayas it was relatively accessible and you were thought a competent pilot. You hired a run-down but functioning Cessna and crash-landed right into the first location. Just before you baled out, you could have sworn you saw the glint of sunlight on a glass building - but surely not out here in the middle of nowhere? If all goes well, you should negotiate the ferocious bear, having previously equipped yourself for the conditions by picking up the fur coat and snowshoes from the Cessna. Picking up the coat has you wearing it, which is just as well, as the program does not understand the verb WEAR. An unlucky pot-holer sees your next advance; you profit from the fact he's as stiff as a plank and won't be needing his equipment, which is precious to you in your predicament. Following things through in a fairly simple manner you will come upon a small round ice cave where a frozen waterfall hangs down from the ceiling, and a ledge hangs high up on the east wall. Here lies one of my few moans about this game; the program does not comprehend THROW ROPE but accepts CLIMB ROPE - without you first throwing it or otherwise tethering it to something. I don't know about you, but to me this somehow doesn't feel right. However, such inconsistencies are rare, and on the whole the program is reasonably intelligent - and sometimes quite innovative, as with the icicle which melts on entering the warm environs of the hotel. Winter Wonderland is in the same sort of ballpark as Apache Gold when it comes to difficulty of play; both games are popularist and will appeal to beginner and devotee alike. In the entertainment stakes, again, there is not much between the games - it really depends upon which theme appeals the most. Winter Wonderlands location descriptions are never particularly long, but they are always well-constructed, imaginative pieces with clues as to how you might proceed. A good example of what INCENTIVE's Graphic Adventure Creator can do. COMMENTS Difficulty: not difficult Graphics: quite good in places Presentation: alright Input facility: includes AND, THEN and IT Response: fast

ZX ComputingZX Computing Glob Minor

Overall Grim

Peter Sweasy Grim

Medallion Graphic Adventures (Incentive) £7.95 each These two adventures are reviewed together because their faults are similar; and they're the first I've seen written with Incentive's Graphic Adventure Creator, so are they better than your average Quilled piece? Apache Gold sees you as cowboy Luke Warm (groan), in search of the treasure buried with an Indian Chief. The writer is Peter Torrance, described as a "fantasy author" on the packaging; in fact a credit arising from his previous successes, Firebird cheapies Subsunk and Seabase Delta. Winter Wonderland casts you as an anthropologist - original at least - who must investigate a Tibetan civilisation, which has never been in contact with the rest of mankind, yet developed at the same rate. Immediately you notice the graphics - appropriately so considering the utility's name - which are faster, bolder and much bigger than in Quilled games, and remain on screen rather than scroll up. The pics are jolly enough in Apache Gold, but poor and repetitive in Winter Wonderland. In neither game are they consistently up to the design standard of The Hobbit from four years ago! The text window is too small, with no border separating it from the graphics. Because everything scrolls out of sight so soon, you have to keep LOOKing, but this causes the picture to draw again on top of itself, with a resulting, unnecessary delay. Text display is black on white (or on blue, deeper into Winter Wonderland), with no redesigned character set. Combined with slightly sluggish printing times, this means that the games don't appear anything like as slick as, for example, The (Quilled) Colour Of Magic. An advantage of GACed games over Quilled ones is the editing facilities: you can enter commands in upper and lower case punctuate, and use cursor keys. Also, these games sometimes require sentences with more than two key words. However, despite their technical superiority, the actual adventures are fairly primitive by today's standards. Description in both is below par, dull in Winter Wonderland and simple almost childish, in Apache Gold. Torrance STILL has an ANNOYING habit of breaking into CAPITALS for no APPARENT reason, and PUNCTUATION problems. Neither game is particularly atmospheric or innovative - just fairly traditional puzzle solving, marred in Winter Wonderland by "instant death locations", a dumb idea which should have died out aeons ago. Torrance gives clues which are laughable for their lack of subtlety. Both games have limited vocabularies and a disappointing lack of responses. And the instructions are too skimpy - nothing on tape storage, or (in Winter Wonderland) on how to communicate with other characters. In short, what we have here are two unremarkable adventures, which could have been written a year or two ago. They would make ideal, indeed particularly entertaining, budget games. However, eight pounds is a ridiculous price for such mediocrity, so steer clear. What I find surprising is that these were the best of the many games Incentive were sent (Medallion is Incentive's own label for such games). Evidently there are no hordes of potential McNeills and Austins out there - unless you can prove otherwise...

Apache Gold.

Sinclair User

Overall 4/5

Label: Incentive Price: £7.95 Memory: 48K/128K Reviewer: Gary Rook Winter Wonderland is the first adventure I've seen that's been produced using Incentive's Graphic Adventure Creator - rival to Gilsoft's Quill. The advantage GAC has over the Quill is that you get everything in one package that you need to write graphic adventures, rather than having (Quill, Illustrator, Patch). As with most adventures written using a commercially available adventure generating package. Winter Wonderland is a bit simple compared to professional stuff from the likes of Level 9. But still it's quite a nice little adventure. You're an anthropologist out to make your name. A Russian colleague has sent you information about a lost civilisation in Tibet. You fly out in you Cessna - and crash on the icy wastes of a snowfield. Your objective: find the lost civilisation before you snuff it - and there are plenty of ways to die in this game. What I've seen of the graphics so far are decent enough - a bit angular, but recognisably what they're meant to be. The program language seems a bit limited - you find a pair of snow-shoes, but it doesn't understand it when you try to wear them. Responses are a bit limited, too - rather too much of the 'that way is blocked' syndrome. Plus just the slightest hint of the sudden death syndrome - you get no creaking and cracking of the ice to warn you it's about to give, just whooosh! and there you are in Bejams. Apart from that, though, it seems cheery enough.