Favourites of yesteryear

THE ZX-81 may leave much to be desired as an arcade games machine but it is perfect if you want to play adventures. A good keyboard is not necessary and high-resolution colour graphics is not an integral part of adventures which are, in most cases, text only. The ZX-81 also has 16K of usable memory, so a programmer is not restricted by RAM requirements.

It is not surprising therefore that many good adventures have been developed for the machine. One of the first to be produced was Ship of Doom from Artic Computing. It has a text-only format and follows the usual space plot where your player-character is stranded on a strange and alien ship which you have gone to investigate. You have to suffer the perils of ice and metal rooms while trying to find the key to the control room of the spaceship.

As one of the first adventures it was accepted with glee by the addicts. Few people have managed to solve it, although it is one of the easiest adventures in the Artic series.

Ship of Doom can be obtained from Artic Computing.

The area of graphics adventures has not been left unexplored by eager programmers. Carnell Software was the first to exploit that field with Volcanic Dungeon. The major part of that adventure consisted of text but the player is given a map of the caverns in which play takes place. The map is not very helpful and it is all too easy to be burned to a crisp, frozen, or blasted by the evil witch Magra and her denizens.

Play in the dungeon is undemanding, as nearly every turn is taken up with fighting monsters. The monster conflicts are so random that one of every three or four is likely to end your life and leave you waiting for the game to be initialised again. The game is slow in execution - most of it is written in Basic - and death is always too swift. It is as if the computer is playing the player and not the other way around. Our experience shows that Magra gets the better of an adventurer. The Volcanic Dungeon is available from Carnell Software.

Pimania is another graphics adventure from Automata. The graphics are short intervals between moving or solving problems, but they contain some important clues as to how to solve the central problem and find the Golden Sundial of PI.

The Pi-man is an irritating little character who appears at seemingly random moments during the adventure or when you ask for help. In return for some favour, he will give you a clue as either a riddle or a jig which he dances in classic cartoon style.

You might feel as if you could do without the Pi-man but he is necessary for the completion of the adventure, so you should keep on the right side of him.

Pimania is a clever and classic graphic adventure. Whether you want to buy it is another matter. You might be drawn by the prize in the competition but is a game which could take more than two years to solve worth playing?

The Trader Trilogy, from Quicksilva, could be loosely termed a graphics adventure. In the set of three games you are in charge of a spaceship which roams the galaxy in search of adventure. You are a trader and in your planet-hopping experiences you meet many types of alien creature. The monsters include a fluff-ball which survives on your brainwaves, a whole population 'high' on a drug with effects like Mescalin, and robots giving way to rust.

On the first run of the adventure, which has to be played in a sequential format, the graphics and plot are entertaining and you will keep playing until you are killed or find sufficient supplies to make a profit. On the second and succeeding runs you will become less pleased with the game.

The Trader Trilogy may be of some interest to children but even they, if they are discriminating, will grow tired of always answering the same mathematical problems to find cargo. The trilogy is the least promising of Quicksilva games for any machine and deserves to be zapped into space.

Continuing the coverage of strategy games, Football Manager from Addictive Games puts you into the seat of a team manager looking for success or, on the other hand, failure, on the pitch and bankruptcy.

There are seven skill levels, although we found the first three difficult enough. You have to make sure that your team moves from the division in which it starts to the first division and make sure that you are not relegated.

Dallas is another strategy game but more down-to-earth than the others in the roundup. As you might expect, it contains all the elements necessary to turn you into an oil baron who wants to take over the Ewing empire. You have to prospect for the best land and build a pipeline and production plant on it.

All kinds of problems will crop up including tornados, heavy rain and earthquakes. If you are not quick enough you will find the Ewings have taken over your little empire.

Dallas is an excellent strategy-simulation which improves the more you play it. The game is addictive, which is a comment which could not be applied to many games of its type. If you fancy a trip into the world of the Ewings, Dallas can be obtained from Cases Computer Simulations.

Sinclair User
June 1984