Reality Hacker

The Games Machine

Overall 56%

Rob Steel 56%

Spectrum Cassette: £2.99 A two-part adventure, Reality Hacker concerns a teenage boy called Tim who tries to break into a bank's computer system and add a few noughts to his personal account. Part one is the quest to find the Reality Inc building and steal codes vital for hacking into the system. Tim - the player - must wait until his domineering Granny has gone to sleep and sneak out of the house. And once he's in the village he must avoid his parents, who are busy painting the town red, and get safely back to the house before them. Part two (loaded separately) involves the actual hacking and is slightly different from a conventional adventure - it incorporates menus and most input is telephone numbers and codes. Both parts have a time limit. Reality Hacker was written with PAW, the best commercial adventure-creator money can buy. But there are some glitches, such as a 24-hour computer shop which 'luckily is open all night', the very obscure 'use the boomerang to get the key' puzzle, and some illogical directional moves (going north from a particular location does not necessarily allow a move south to return). And the program behaves very oddly, crashing and flashing at regular intervals and informing you that previously accepted inputs were invalid. I lost interest quite quickly and loaded up another Visual Dimensions game...