Confidential

Your Computer

Overall 3/5

Spectrum Radar Games £6.95 Another Quilled adventure, Confidential casts you in the role of a private investigator in a small coastal town. The adventure has some neat touches. The persistent ringing tone in your office - the Craig Adams Detective Agency - at the start of the game is one. Others include the attractively presented text, with use of some small graphics, and the inclusion of a detailed street map. You are called out to the home of a woman who badly needs your assistance. Getting there is not too difficult provided you don't try to walk the eight or so miles. Once you've arrived at the distraught lady's house, you'll discover that this is going to be a search for a missing husband.

Crash

Atmosphere 7/10

Vocabulary 6/10

Logic 7/10

Addictive Quality 7/10

Overall Value 7/10

Derek Brewster 7/10

DEREK BREWSTER'S ADVENTURE TRAIL DON'T BLAME ME I'M ONLY THE PROGR.... One good rule in life is 'never boast about anything until you have seen it through'. And the other pearl of wisdom you tend to hear is 'things are always more difficult than they look'. Taking the first rule, I think we can safely say there have been many companies who, in retrospect, would have done well to take heed of it. You don't have to look too far for examples of games which demonstrated this rule; here are a few of the notables: Sherlock, The Great Space Race, Swords and Sorcery, and, of course, Psyclapse and Bandersnatch. Big things were expected of these games, not because of previews generating interest but on account of rather large advertising campaigns. Their high public profiles suggested that an enormous expenditure on hype could only possibly indicate a similar expenditure in time and effort on the program itself. Which leads me on to the second rule.... Things are always more difficult than they look but in the case of programming, things become nigh-on impossible. Take the balance between speed and length. The number of moving graphics will determine how quickly a game will play: too many moving graphics and all will be reduced to a snail's pace. If the graphics are stored in a compact form then the code to decipher them may well slow the game appreciably. The length of code becomes critical if the graphics are stored in the form to be displayed on screen, as a vast amount of memory is required. It is difficult to know how this balance between speed and memory will work out until the project is well under way. Indeed, it may only be at this later stage when it is discovered the whole programming project was too ambitious in the first place. This problem besets all programmers but will affect those who work on orders from above to a greater extent. Every software house worth its free publicity has a whole menagerie of Managing Directors, Marketing Managers, Public Relations Officers, Secretaries, Graphic Artists, Games Designers, Cover Artists and someone to make the tea (teaperson). This is a considerable number of people - even if the 's' signifies at the very most two people with each job title, and there is much overlapping of roles eg a Marketing Manager may make the tea, while Public Relations ensure each cup has the correct amount of sugar in it. The problem is that the orders from above can come down so thick and fast, that they soon form a heavy overburden which begins to exert a significant pressure on the poor guy at the bottom - who is none other than our poor little programmer, struggling with the implications of our second rule. He may be having difficulty implementing some big idea from above, perhaps a film/TV/superstar endorsement, and and be desperate to get the game finished knowing how much the software house paid to secure the rights. Don't get me wrong. The marketing, graphic and design skills are a very important part of the new mega-game blockbuster. All I am saying is spare some resources for the people actually programming - it may well pay off. CONFIDENTIAL Producer: Radar Games Retail Price: £6.95 Language: Quill Author: D Healey and C Guest Confidential is undoubtedly from a small software concern, but the effort expended in making this an interesting game to play is evidenced in the extensive literature which accompanies the cassette. As well as the super (and accurate) map and notebook which every player receives, I had a good read of the Confidential File hints list, without which I would have found the going rather difficult to say the least. The supporting literature makes much of this game finding its setting in the real world with real streets, bank, shops, nightclubs and a taxi office. Of course they aren't actually real in that they exist in the fictitious town of Fox Bay, but considering this game was written some time before last month's editorial it's certainly a welcome change to wander about a town which at least has a street map provided. Confidential is the story of the disappearance of a Mr Richards, a property developer, from the small coastal town of Fox Bay, and the subsequent investigation carried out by the local private detective, Craig Adams. With suitable deference to one or two notables in this area, the game attempts to bring something akin to Cluedo to the adventure world. You find yourself in the Craig Adams Detective Agency and faced with the immediate scourge of any office worker - the ringing telephone. But you are no sedentary 9 to 5 type and this call is a real humdinger, dropping a juicy pomegranate of intrigue right into your trench-coated lap. A Mrs Richards of Dale End, a western suburb of Fox Bay, is worried about her husband who has been missing for 5 days. All she knows is that he left for work as usual at 8.30 am on Monday morning and was to collect a special present for his son's birthday. Your mission is quite simple - find out what has happened to her husband. The game which builds up from around this conversation involves you travelling around (by car when out of town) collecting snippets of information which domino you around the circuitous route followed by the missing man. Your chief allies in this search are a keen ear for those salient facts which point toward the ultimate truths, and the passport discarded in Mr Richard's car which affords the very necessary identification when quizzing store assistants and other suspects who haven't got the foggiest who this Mr Richard is, or was, for that matter. I never did quite play enough to find out what exactly did happen to the guy, though I did begin to fear the worst. Some aspects of the plot are quite complex, and to be honest, I would have found much of it a struggle were it not for the hint sheet kindly supplied by Radar. The vocabulary is not restricted to verb/noun to the extent that phrases like GIVE THE PASSPORT TO THE WOMAN must be entered to do the simplest of things. Since I tend to keep to verb/noun in the interests of time I entered PASSPORT WOMAN - a seemingly illogical statement. On the whole the game is not a friendly one. Which part of a name is accepted? For example, the Club part of Club Tropicana and the Store part of Department Store, but the Richard part of Richard & Ellis Developments, is annoyingly inconsistent - where only one part of a noun is accepted it helps if the program keeps to one approach throughout. There are one or two onerous tasks every player will meet during play. One is the constant need to UNLOCK then ENTER the car when any distance is to be travelled. Another is the task of dropping an item before another can be picked up, made all the more essential by the program's devious construction which ensures there is little option but to do this every time. One curious one-off hitch is the inability to leave the maintenance bay with LEAVE MAINTENANCE. LEAVE GARAGE is needed and so to leave the garage LEAVE GARAGE must be repeated twice, once to leave the bay and the second time to leave the garage proper. Another (one-off!) is the necessity of opening a door in the taxi office which is described as being already open. Incidentally, I very much doubt if I could have got past the taxi office were it not for the hint sheet. A more fundamental irritant is the need to interview suspects in the correct preset order otherwise certain crucial events, like the opening of banks and stores, will simply not occur. Interviewing Mr Ellis, a partner in the missing man's firm, is a particularly crucial stage; missing it could leave you thrashing around the garage or high street to no avail. This interview also marks the time when the local constabulary decide your car would be safer in their car pound. Because of this fundamental constraint on your actions, and the order in which you may carry them out, the adventure takes on that distinctive linear look, where before a problem can be tackled the one before it in the line must be laid to rest. Confidential is a well-presented, attractive, Quilled, text-only adventure. In terms of storyline and plot it is significantly above average and clearly represents a considerable amount of work on the part of the programmer. COMMENTS Difficulty: quite difficult Graphics: none Presentation: quite good Input facility: basically verb/noun Response: instantaneous

C&VG (Computer & Video Games)

Personal Rating 6/10

Jim Douglas 6/10

Confidential has been written using the Quill and is well presented on-screen with clear colours, plus an interesting folder full of information. The game begins in your office - The Craig Adams Detective Agency. Ooh! What's that noise? I can't stop it! EXAMINE DESK. Ah, there's a phone on it. At the other end of the line is a distraught Mrs Richards who explains that she needs your help urgently. So off you go, or try to go, to her home. As a good private eye, you always keep your important belongings in a safe place. Car keys in the filing cabinet, for example. After the slight problem (and the annoyance of having to OPEN CAR, ENTER CAR all the time) you soon arrive at Mrs Richards house - The Gables. It turns out that hubby has vanished leaving her most upset and the local constabulary totally indifferent. Without any mention of the usual "£200 a day plus expenses", you are thrown headlong into the case! Here I would like to give a warning to anyone considering buying this game and wanting to test it first - don't! You need to spend quite a few hours getting into the case before you begin to enjoy it. I was stuck for days trying to raise my score from zero which can become so frustrating that it almost puts you in a certifiable state! Once this barrier has been broken, it is really quite easy to go from place to place, taking notes and trying to solve whodunnit. A nice touch, I thought, was getting my car impounded for parking on double yellow lines! On the other hand, the input in the bank and department store is so skull-crushingly daft that I can't understand how anyone would guess the correct words! in the bank, for example, there is a clerk behind the counter, and you have to cash a cheque. CASH CHEQUE would have been easy to use with the Quill's "fall through" method of decoding, but the phrase actually needed is CLERK CHEQUE!! The scoring is slightly erratic, as I found when at a score of 55% I stumbled across Mr Richards and it jumped to 100% although there was clearly a good deal of the case unsolved. Incidentally, Radar is offering a prize for the first person who gives the most satisfactory solution to the case. Confidential is for the 48k Spectrum from Radar Games, priced £6.95.

Sinclair User

Overall 4/5

Richard Price 4/5

SLEUTHING BY THE SEA Richard Price unearths a devious detective puzzle. Publisher: Radar Games 48K Spectrum Price: £6.95 The rain dribbled down the grimy windows as I sat at my VDU, listlessly dabbling in some computer saga of wizards and dark castles. The day had been empty of excitement. Suddenly the post boy appeared and threw a package onto my littered desk. I felt a thrill of apprehension as I took the buff folder from the envelope and saw 'Confidential'stamped in red across it. Could this be it, I thought - had some disgruntled civil servant decided to leak the secrets of the nation's war games computer to me? Not quite. The folder held a map of a seaside town called Fox Bay, a detective's notebook and a cassette. After playing for a short time I found I had one of the most entertaining Quilled programs since Hampstead. Confidential is a detective adventure. One of Fox Bay's prominent citizens has disappeared and his wife decides to hire you, Craig Adams, to track him down. From your seedy office you must seek out the man's associates and contacts to build a coherent picture of the facts surrounding the disappearance. This is not a simple matter. Besides gathering information, often from reluctant characters, there are the hazards of day to day life in the town. Holiday caravans moulder on sites which are veritable labyrinths. Your car will run out of petrol if you are not careful. You will leave some office in the town centre smugly thinking how good your interview was only to find a pair of yellow lines where the car had been. All right, stroll up to the local nick to get it back. Have you got your cheque book? You will have to find it then, won't you? Radar Games has used the Quill with some originality and has developed a flair for making you think you're doing well and then bringing you up short with a new twist in the plot. The screen presentation is attractive and makes full use of the various attributes on the Quill. There are small user-defined graphics which add to the professional feel of the game. Movement is based on the road map provided and you are expected to pay close attention to it if you want to get around town successfully. This feature adds considerably to the atmosphere of the game. After a while you will begin to feel like a true, harassed, gumshoe - someone who no-one particularly likes or enjoys talking to. Your problems begin the moment you start playing and there is no real let up. Some of the puzzles are relatively easy but they get tougher as you go along. What's really a change is that the game has continuity in its story line and doesn't simply expect you to be satisfied with just collecting objects or treasure. As far as I know Confidential is only available by mail order - but do not let that put you off. It is far better than a lot of the pap in the chain stores now. Write to: Radar Games, [redacted].

Read it at Sinclair User Magazine Online

Your Spectrum

BRIEF ENCOUNTERS A quick mention for a couple of goodies that came our way this month. The first is Confidential from a new company called Radar Games. You play a character called Craig Adams who's out to solve the case of a missing person. This involves questioning suspects and following up clues. Confidential is written with The Quill and costs £6.95 from Radar Games, [redacted]. The other game is Talisman from Games Workshop. It's not really an adventure, though, more an animated strategy game in which up to four players (either computer or human controlled) search for a legendary source of power that'll give them control of the land. The game's not at all bad but what struck me most was the intelligence of the computer controlled characters. A pretty brainy bunch - while I was playing a demo game with all four characters controlled by the machine, one of them solved the quest!