The Paradise Connection

Sinclair User

Overall 4/5

Gary Rook 4/5

Label: Birdseed, [redacted] Price: £3.99 Memory: 48K/128K Reviewer: Gary Rook It must be my lucky day - another independent adventure which displays a heap of wit and intelligence! And great graphics, too... Paradise Connection is another Quilled and Illustrated adventure, this time from a company called Birdseed Software. The plot is original and highly amusing: America faces a financial crisis so bad even the President has had to try to think about it. The FBI and the CIA, even with massive amounts spent on market research, the cassette label informs you, have failed to find out where all the dollars are disappearing to. Anyway, to cut a long introduction short, you, Kid Capello, the FBI's worst agent (a sort of Washington version of Inspector Clouseau, no doubt) have been sent to the little town of Brandis Reef, somewhere in Latin America, to find out who's nicking the President's dollars and just how they're doing it. The graphics are excellent - cartoon-like drawings of people, you in a trench coat and trilby hat looking like something out of an old 'B' movie. So far, I've been to about 20 locations, but I haven't found much to do yet. I suspect I should be talking to all the people I meet, but right at the moment I'm more interested in sight-seeing. I've avoided getting killed in quicksand by the simple expedient of taking notice of the warning sign, I've been swept off to a desert island by a freak wave, and I've been humiliated after trying to kill an arab who seems to spend his time dancing on the table-top in his seedy night club. 'What a plonker - I'm no Rambo'sneered the screen before telling me that I'd been killed by said Arab. My only objection to the program is that it's possible to see it as just the teeniest bit racist. Personally, I think that's rather objectionable - but it doesn't detract too much from the rest of the game. So long as you don't mind the rather cardboard stereotype funny foreigners, a good game that should offer quite a few decent puzzles. It's certainly good to see someone trying to create an original plot, rather than copying everyone else. It just proves that, with tools like the Quill, it's the ideas that are important.- and anybody can have good ideas, regardless of programming skill.