Countdown to Doom

The Games Machine

Overall 59%

Rob Steel 59%

Spectrum +3 Diskette: £9.95 Doom, a planet famed across the galaxy as a potentially lucrative source of income, holds treasures and mysteries which only the most experienced of adventurers may uncover. Orbiting the planet in your space shop. The scanner just begins to pick up land objects when you come under attack and are forced to make a crash landing. Doom is inhospitable, it s environment changes from frozen wastes to steaming jungles in a matter of yards. The creatures that inhabit the planet are less than friendly and sometimes difficult to comprehend. You have all this to contend with plus the task of repairing your ship before it collapses in a heap of twisted, useless metal. Again the parser does not understand 'Examine', a fact which is more irritating than in Philosopher's Quest due to the strange alien landscape and items therein. However, location and object descriptions are sufficiently detailed to give some hints toward progress. What does ruin Countdown To Doom is the number of instant deaths. At the start it seems a demise lurks around every corner - the only way to become aware of them is to actually die and start again. Thankfully the incentive given to see the game through just outweighs the tedium of these numerous deaths.

Sinclair User

Overall 8/10

Jim Douglas 8/10

Label: Topologika [redacted] Author: Peter Killworth Price: £9.95 (disc only) Memory: 48K/128K Joystick: N/A Reviewer: Jim Douglas I remember trying to work my way past the blobby monster that breathed electricity, trying to get over the steaming stinky swamp with a view to finally assembling all the necessary bits in order to repair, and fly off in, my broken down space ship. Countdown has, it should be said, been around for a very long time, and in the wake of games like Jinxter it can't really be expected to be as smart interpreter-wise. Although you can type in sentences like, "Get the big book", there's no room for the ridiculously convoluted item-handling ("Pick up the blue box and put it into the red one under the table") seen in some of today's games. The game has been extended with lots of sci-fi puzzles and although there is only one lateral solution, you can dash off here and there. No graphics at all, but the text is of such a high quality that shouldn't matter a fig.

Crash

Overall 85%

Kati Hamza 85%

ADVENTURE TRAIL WITH SAMARA Due to popular demand and a sudden influx of cassettes, home-grown software is back. This month's offerings were particularly impressive - if you think you can match their standard don't hesitate to send in your own. I promise to look at them all though I can't guarantee a review. As long as you enclose the relevant postage and packing, however, I'll make sure they're returned... COUNTDOWN TO DOOM Topologika £9.95 disk only Topologika, the Peterborough software house, prides itself on producing British adventure games. Countdown to Doom, a text-only adventure which was first released by Acornsoft, could hardly be set further away from the land of Stilton and budding British businesses... Travelling through space on a routine mission you're in orbit around the long-deserted planet of Doom, blissfully unaware of its efficient automatic defence system. Moments later your craft crash-lands on the inhospitable planet surface. Shaken, but otherwise unhurt, you examine the wreckage and realise that unless you can locate the necessary parts, collecting as much bonus treasure as you can in the process, your ship will corrode away in a mere 400 time units. At close quarters the planet looks even more forbidding than it did from the sky. Its hostile terrain is characterised by extreme changes of climate; murky swamps border leafy jungles, mountain paths lead up to icy glaciers and down into the exhausting heat of a sandy, disorientating desert. The locations are extensive, atmospherically described and, for the most part, extremely hazardous. Striding boldly into the unknown is likely to lead to an early death at the hands of the planet's exotic creatures. Slugs, allodiles, electrically charged blobs, hungry metatermites and rampaging decapods would be easy to avoid if only you knew where they lived... As there's no RAMSAVE option, saving to disk is essential. A large part of the extensive environment is immediately accessible so success depends much more on wandering around and discovering what you have to do than performing a series of specified tasks. Topologika describes the difficulty level as standard; I would venture to say that beginners would find some of the problems, which aren't always logical, harder than that to solve. Timing is of the essence, false moves early on can cripple progress later and no clues, however cryptic, should be ignored. You may find yourself succumbing to the on-line help system (which is very careful not to give too much away) more often than usual. The process is made all the tougher by the absence of an EXAMINE command; most Topologika games assume that you take in everything at first glance. This is more realistic than a laborious search for something you are more than capable of seeing, but it also means that it's impossible to hide clues to the use of a particular object in its description. In some cases, notably a rod which can only be used once, you have to activate the object to find out what it does, then start again to make proper use of it. £9.95 buys you a fairly complex parser which comprehends most complex commands. It is rather choosy, however, about the precise input needed to complete certain actions. This is one area in which the hint system could he more helpful. The wording of a hint itself doesn't always correspond with the phrase the program will accept I still haven't worked out how to pick up an object with a fishing net. The obvious commands GET X WITH NET and CATCH X WITH NET have no visible effect. Still, these aren't typical hiccups and the obvious complexity of Countdown to Doom makes up for the occasional limitations of the parser. Certainly, if you enjoy the sort of game which involves hours of careful exploration, Peter Kilworth has added enough puzzles, hidden pitfalls and encrypted conundrums to make the long and hazardous journey more than just worthwhile. To begin the countdown contact Topologika at [redacted].