EXCLUSIVE

ACROSS THE Incredibly Flat and Featureless Plain, on the other side of the Impenetrably Thick Forest, just beside the Stream that Dries Up In The Corner of The Map sits the Enchanted Castle.

Haven't we had enough of them, after Avalon, Knight Lore, Dragontorc, and Tir na Nog? OK, so the setting of Fairlight is not promising. There's a wizard locked up in the castle and you have to find a magic book to release him and save the great gizmo from going ape with the wotsit.

Don't worry. When you actually get inside the castle you'll forget about how bored you are with fantasy. Fairlight, from The Edge, a division of Softek, is a quest with a difference.

The difference is largely in the graphics. They are the best we have seen of the two-colour 3D variety, streets ahead of Knight Lore and Alien 8 for variety and elegance of design. There are stairways and catwalks, corridors and chambers, trapdoors and courtyards in the castle; mapping Fairlight is going to be a problem, as the castle is designed like a castle, not a chessboard with a lot of walls between the squares.

Your character is an adventurer, cloaked and armed with a suitably workmanlike orc-sticker for those embarrassing social encounters. The figure moves in four directions and can jump, pick up objects and fight. It does those things a lot faster than Sabreman, whose antics are beginning to look decidedly creaky against this new wave of arcade-adventures.

You can push objects around as well, stack chairs on tables to get at high doors or windows, and generally derange the furniture at your pleasure. But the problems have a more naturalistic quality than usual. Keys tend to fit doors - somewhere - and performing various sequences of action will reveal further depths to the castle as secret doors are opened.

Monsters include guards and trolls, club-wielding heavies who can be fought or outwitted. Realism in the fight sequences includes comparisons of strength.

In fact, every object and character in the game has a weight. Objects carried are displayed on a small scroll tucked away in the corner of the screen, one at a time - the one you have selected to hold. You can carry up to five objects altogether, but the weight is important, and you may only have strength enough for less. Similarly, 300 pounds of gibbering green trollflesh packs a bigger punch than one wimpish little prison guard.

Fairlight is to be the first of a trilogy of games set in the land of Fairlight and future games will take the player into the surrounding countryside.

The secret of the stunning graphics is Grax, a high-powered low-level graphics language developed by Softek. Bo Jangeborg, who is currently putting the finishing touches to Fairlight, uses Grax to develop complex screens which occupy only one or two hundred bytes of memory at most.

Softek originally thought in terms of a 35 screen game but the finished product could contain up to 100, depending on Bo's stamina.

Tim Langdell, manager director of Softek, says Grax uses adapted core routines from The Artist, a graphics package reviewed elsewhere in this issue. But he's thinking about releasing Grax in the shape of an arcade-adventure design package.

Meanwhile, watch out for Fairlight. it's got to be one of the best arcade-adventure quests of the year.

Chris Bourne

EVERY platform game released compares itself, and is compared to, Jet Set Willy. Most, of course, come nowhere near. Dynamite Dan, however, surpasses it.

The plot, as usual, is disposable. For what it's worth, Dan is a secret agent sent to steal the top secret plans of Dr Blitzen's mega ray from a mountain top hideaway.

The house is infested with lethal mobile thingies, and Dan must avoid those as best he can while all the time collecting sticks of dynamite and consuming the scattered munchies. Points are scored for food eaten and objects amassed; test tubes score highly as well as giving extra lives.

A lift will take you to various levels before depositing you above the waters which run below the house. Those can be navigated with a raft, though once on it you must keep walking to stop falling off, and strategic hops are necessary to avoid flying birds and insects.

Dotted around the building are trampolines, useful for reaching inaccessible ledges but decidedly dodgy to negotiate, and teleporters which transport you to other rooms.

Such a straightforward description does little to convey the horrifically addictive nature of the game, but only a few minutes play will have you beyond redemption. The graphics are all they should be; large, colourful and free of flicker. The obligatory irritating music is present too.

Scoring virtually no brownie points for originality, the game is nevertheless well set to be the platform game of the summer. Forget Jet Set Willy II and fork out the folding stuff instead for Dynamite Dan.

IN THE June issue of Sinclair User we reviewed Cats from Artic, a super little maze game based on the alleged musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber.

There were in fact problems we didn't notice. In the first place, the game wasn't going to be called Cats after all because Artic failed to obtain the rights to the theme from Andrew Lloyd Wallet. Secondly, the version we saw was an early development version, and very much easier than the final game was ever intended to be.

You have to travel a giant Sabre Wulf-style maze searching for your 10 lost kittens, and hunting down or avoiding the bully dogs who prowl the midnight streets.

You're armed with fur-balls and stun powder which knocks out the dogs for a short time. Food and ammunition for the fur balls is dotted all around the maze.

The game is certainly a challenge in the final version, and very difficult to beat, even on the easiest of five levels. The graphics are colourful and the theme effective.

MEET Johnny Jones, no relation whatsoever to Indiana. It is clearly coincidence that Johnny also spends his time leaping through the death traps of a forbidden Egyptian temple.

Spanish software house Dinamic has licensed its successful game to Gremlin Graphics so we too can thrill to purple blob Johnny's attempts to reach the mortuary and free himself from the curse of Ramses II.

We are not told whether he's a purple blob because of the curse or because he was born that way, but who cares? Profanation is a viciously difficult jump-and-dodge game, programmed in vivid graphics which lift it above the usual run of Manic Miner bandwagon passengers.

You will have to be pixel-perfect to surmount some problems. The acidic drops which abound in the cavern complex can usually be jumped if you judge the timing correctly.

If you still can't get past them try getting Johnny right on the edge of the platforms, just out of range of the splash, before you jump.

Later you will discover some really filthy tricks - there are sections of ceiling, two on screen three, where jumping enables you to spider-walk on the roof. Gremlin gives absolutely nothing away in the packaging, and you are in for a real lulu of a brainbuster if you seriously intend to get through all 45 screens.

While there is nothing particularly original about Profanation, it is one of the best we have seen.

GRAPHIC design will never be the same with the arrival of The Artist, a Picasso of utilities.

Its comprehensive and exceptionally powerful design capabilities provide all you need to produce full colour high resolution screen pictures.

The package is rigidly structured using three main, and a number of subsidiary menus.

When first loaded two cursors, a dot and a cross, are shown on the screen. Using the keyboard, or joystick, the dot cursor can be moved around in relation to the cross. If the CAPS SHIFT key is pressed the cross moves to a position over the dot which can then be moved around again. The cross, therefore, acts as a static reference point for any drawing that the dot cursor may do.

The dot cursor represents the brush and its size and drawing texture can be altered using Brush and Brush Pattern options respectively. Text can also be produced by the cursor from eight different fonts.

The second major menu provides basic drawing commands and operations. Unlike other packages on the market, it does all your work for you.

Lines, boxes, arcs, circles and ellipses can be produced with the minimum of fuss using the cross cursor as the first reference point and the dot as the second. Shapes can be filled with a Spectrum designed texture or one created using UDGs.

The shapes must, however, be made up using a complete border. There must be no holes in it or the fill texture will leak out.

Overlay is one of the most powerful, and unique, features of The Artist. It has four functions. The first allows the user to trace a section of a picture, cut it out of that section and transport it to another part of the display. Parts of the picture can also be scaled up and down on the x or y axes.

The author has also included an advanced UDG generator and animator. It uses the eight character sets available through the utility.

Images can also be mirrored and rotated. Once a sequence of frames has been created it can bp animated in a four or six step sequence.

The generator is easy to use and it took me just 10 minutes to produce a four frame animation of a walking figure.

Full screen pictures can take up a lot of RAM memory so the author has included a routine which will hack down the amount of RAM required. The Compressor is a separate routine on the tape. All you have to do is load your picture into it. The program will then optimise storage needs.

The Compressor works at its best and most visibly with complex pictures using colour to the full. It is an intelligent utility and, of course, affects only the memory requirement and not the picture on the screen.

The power of the line generation and pixel commands, coupled with the cut and paste facilities, and not forgetting the UDG generator, makes The Artist one of the most powerful graphics aids.

BEYOND has come up with a cheap package which will prolong the life of the icon-driven adventure Shadowfire by allowing you an infinite variety of changes in the conditions of each game.

There are two ways to use the Tuner - one for cheating and the other to create a totally new game.

To cheat, play Shadowfire as far as you are able, then save your last position on a blank tape. Load in the Tuner and the save position - that only takes a few minutes and is very simple. Now start experimenting. You can give the Enigma team extra strength, agility and anything else you care to bestow on them.

You may want to move them to different positions in Zoff V - the enemy space ship - lock some doors and open others. Kill off some members and make others prisoners. You can even outline the routes the General's troops must patrol and in that way know which areas to avoid.

Once the changes have been made, save them and load up both Shadowfire and the alterations made with the Tuner. Battle commences again, but with the odds stacked in your favour.

Alternatively, the process can be reversed to create a new game from scratch by loading the Tuner, making the desired changes which should be saved and then loaded once Shadowfire is on screen.

The beauty of the Tuner is that any game can be made as complicated or simple as you please. It has been well laid out and is icon driven in the same style as Shadowfire. Once you've got the hang of the instructions it is easy to implement.

IT'S 1996 in downtown New York which could be anywhere since the World Government renamed every city New York. They've also banned spirits. All the cops have become ghostbusters and your job is to rub out the spooks that flitter and lurk about the streets.

That's the Spirit calls itself a graphics adventure without the text. Aside from the cursor keys there are over 20 keypress instructions which let you control objects. The status screen below the action displays items you have collected and when you want to use them you position a frame and key in the required action.

Other indicators show your strength and sanity. Any prolonged contact with a ghost will drive you totally bananas and end the game.

You will find a lot of things strewn around the city. The subway seems a fairly safe place to store them and you can transport yourself to other parts of the city from there. Some items have obvious uses, like the bone to dispose of the phantom dog, but there are lots of odd mechanical bits which you must try to connect up. If you link them in the correct way you may be able to make some decent ghostbusting equipment.

You will certainly need it as the ghosts are persistent and troublesome, constantly blocking your way.

Ghostbusting is no doddle - despite having about 15 items stashed away I wasn't able to connect anything up and you will have to experiment long and hard to make link-ups.

That mental worritting raises That's The Spirit above a straight arcade adventure but is still not quite the same as the broader requirements of text adventure.

IT HAD to happen. It was about the only sport hitherto unsullied by the attentions of computer programmers. We refer, of course, to the noble art of the angler, or, to give its title in full spin-off rent-a-celebrity glory, Jack Charlton's Match Fishing.

Any computer version should reflect the numbing boredom so beloved by anglers, and to an extent Match Fishing succeeds. You play with up to eight fishermen, or on your own. You are allocated a 'peg' - a section of water to fish - and must choose the appropriate tackle, rod and bait for the spot and the species you reckon might live there. You also choose how far to cast.

Having chosen your tackle you watch an idyllic screen of lake, mountains and green banks. When a bite is registered, you lunge forward to press the number of your peg, to 'strike' the fish. If in time, a cartoon-like sequence involves a fish swimming towards the line.

As a solitaire game, only the dedicated angler is likely to enjoy Match Fishing. With several players, and the inevitable scramble for keys if fish are biting, the game becomes more fun.

The problem is that if you don't know anything about fishing you won't get much out of the game. And the dedicated angler, who might enjoy the game greatly, is going to be spending his spare time out there with the midges and the stinky maggots and the dead swans and the crate of Newcastle Brown.

WITH remarkable originality Argus has produced a golf game. Not just any golf game, you understand, but Nick Faldo's absolutely faithful Open with stunning 900 screen map.

The screens show the Royal St George's golf course, venue for the 1985 British Open. A close-up of your position is given, with controls for selection of club, direction of shot and strength. There's a picture of the golfer and a portly caddy who hands him the clubs and makes sarcastic comments on your lack of prowess.

All these selections are icon-driven, with a little hand which you move round the screen until it points at the option you want.

The map shows the familiar mildewed carpet of golf simulations, with black fairways and smooth greens.

Approach shots are OK, but when you reach the green, even the magnified view cannot show what is happening. The closer you get to the hole the more difficult it is to judge direction, which is ridiculous.

All your brilliance at gauging wind and whatnot to reach the green in two on a par five hole goes for nothing as you miss five two-foot putts on the trot. It also seems weird that a full-strength putt may not carry to the hole.

It is certainly one of the prettiest and friendly Golf games we have seen, though a real test of player and programmer would be the inclusion of contours and sloping greens.

If you must buy a Golf simulation for ten quid then Argus has a very pleasant game it would love to flog you.

THREE boxing games have been released simultaneously - all based loosely on Punch Out!! which is doing so well in the arcades.

Coming out on top is Frank Bruno's Boxing from Elite, more realistic and enjoyable than both Rocco and Knockout.

You have eight fights, before you are proclaimed world champ, against many top fighters including Andra Puncheredov from USSR and Fling Long Chop from Japan.

The two boxers step into the ring, put their fists up and the fight is on. Ducking, slugging and dodging you have to knock out your opponent three times in a three minute round, before moving onto the next bout. A high score championship table adds excitement to the game and is a feature lacking in the other boxing software contenders.

Rather unfairly, your opponent can throw right hooks and uppercuts at will, whereas you can only throw those when the knockout bell is ringing. When you do deliver a KO the result is spectacular - your opponent staggers then keels over. In comparison, the boxer in Alligata's Knockout merely sits down.

Keyboard control in all three games is more satisfactory than using a joystick, and especially in this game. There are eight separate moves which are difficult to simulate with a joystick, though simple with the keyboard.

The monochrome graphics are inferior to those in Rocco, but are reasonably defined. Of the three, Frank Bruno's Boxing is the most faithful version of the original arcade game, including the same scoring system. As usual your energy decreases for each blow received and marks are scored for every correct punch. When those marks reach the KO bell you can go in for the kill.

It's a pity that Frank Bruno isn't a two player game but if you are into vicarious violence - buy it.

FROM Gremlin comes your second sparring partner, Rocco. Your boxer has his back to the screen and his opponent facing outwards. Blood, sweat or teeth fly - you can't be sure which - every time a punch goes home.

In the first fight, Cimbel-Lin must be knocked out three times before you can move onto Ted Mature. The first bout is easy, but Ted poses a few problems. Next, bludgeon your way past Jansen Sino to take on Fighting Bull - a Mr T lookalike with fists like sledgehammers.

More care has been taken over the graphics in Rocco than in its rivals. They are clearly defined and even the faces are expressive. However, the perspective makes your player look like a dwarf compared with the massive bulk of the contender. That gives you a clearer view, but it does appear to be an unbalanced fight.

It is almost impossible to defend yourself properly using the joystick and not much easier with the keyboard. You can neither dodge from side to side nor duck.

Rocco is not wildly addictive and once you have mastered the controls, it soon loses its initial impact. Very much an also-ran.