Producer: US Gold
Retail Price: £8.99
Author: Adventuresoft

This is a major release in the adventuring world - it's one of the 27 Fighting Fantasy Gamebook titles. (Other titles released as computer games so far are Seas of Blood and Rebel Planet.)

After a usually-well-written fantasy piece to set the adventure, the books lead you through a magical world by setting you tasks and puzzles as in a computer adventure - but the different paths you can follow are indicated by page references.

These references lead onto other paragraphs, constructed so that a player can follow many different paths toward completing the game. That's why they're called 'gamebooks' - reading them page by page in order wouldn't make sense, as the conclusion of the game is just as likely to be at the beginning of the book as at the end!

Seas of Blood was true to the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks - it employed a combat system - whereas Rebel Planet and Temple Of Terror are straightforward adventures.

The monster encounter boxes with their Skill, Stamina, Luck, Spell and Provisions entries add tremendous character to the books, and the omission of their counterparts from the computer games is a letdown.

But, as with all Fighting Fantasy-inspired software, there's a superb story line.

The background given on the inlay comes directly from the book, comprising the introduction plus the first two noncommittal moves.

Born under a full moon and abandoned by his mother, Malbordus grew up in the Darkwood Forest in the care of the Darkside Elves. He was taught the Elves' wicked ways, but in order to receive instruction in the arcane and evil magic of the Elf Lords he had to pass a test. He was ordered to journey south to the Desert Of Skulls to find the lost city of Vatos.

In the city were hidden five dragon artefacts which Malbordus had to collect. A simple incantation would bring the dragons to life, and he would then instruct them to fly him back to Darkwood Forest and the army assembling there. He would receive the ancient powers and lead the hordes in an unstoppable wave of death and destruction.

But on the edge of Darkwood lived an eccentric old wizard who became aware of these plans. The wizard travelled to Stonebridge to tell of the impending doom and to seek a volunteer for the quest: to stop Malbordus collecting the dragons of Vatos.

You, naturally, volunteer and the adventure begins when the wizard's guiding crow leaves you at the banks of the Catfish River.

The computer game has you start at this river, by a rope bridge. Crossing it would seem the only way forward - but if you go down to the nearby jetty you won't be welcomed by the drunken pirates. So GO BOAT is a rather uninspiring start!

Instead, go onto the bridge. Unfortunately here the game doesn't tell you which of the two options, NORTH and SOUTH, takes you away from the chasing pirates. You just have to guess.

Checking your possessions with INVEN (I is not enough), you discover the spell book given you by Yaztromos, a sword and a trident. Reading the book reveals the four spells to help you through your thankless task: sleep, dart, incendiary, and shrinking.

Each spell can only be used once, so blowing all on the Harpy you meet early on isn't such a good idea, especially as the very useful BOM (Back One Move) won't restore these spells if you get kilted.

The first of the enemies you can take on are the Dark Elves, encountered by a burning hut. Trying to kill them with the sword seems to do the trick with the report 'Your opponent is dead; but there were two elves so this report isn't quite convincing (still, the location description does report two dead Dark Elves).

Trying to examine or search the body that materialises now comes to naught. But there's some advance to the south, where if you examine everything you find and try things in a different order you might progress.

The vocabulary might seem as a little unfriendly, but it would be more accurate to say it's precise. When you're reading a note, for instance, only the word MESSAGE is accepted because this is the term used in the location description where newly-found items are installed.

Temple Of Terror is quite an attractive illustrated adventure. Adventuresoft still use a white background which limits text colour options (and indeed there are no text highlights), but at least with the bright pictures the surrounds don't glare as much as they might. The pictures themselves are not unattractive, though they have a sparse look.

The adventure clearly has a good background with its Fighting Fantasy story, but I can't help but get annoyed at the strangely inappropriate programming, the curious stutters and the lack of finesse in communication and presentation. Why don't Adventuresoft overhaul the whole system?

COMMENTS

DIFFICULTY: easy to begin
GRAPHICS: average to quite good
INPUT FACILITY: verb/noun with little extras
RESPONSE: reasonable

FAX BOX
Title: The Temple of Terror
Publisher: Adventuresoft/US Gold
Price: £8.99

A fighting fantasy adventure? Ian I presume. And quite right, too. With his writing and ideas partner, Livingstone, Steve Jackson, he penned this originally as book 14 in the Penguin Fighting Fantasy series of Gamesbooks, though if Penguin put as many faults into its books as software houses do into their games then it would have gone out of business long ago.

But first the story. Malbordus is the evil one, who "could make plants wither and die simply by snapping his fingers; he could make animals obey him with his piercing gaze." Sounds just like the Ex-Ed. Needless to say, you're the poor sap who's volunteered to do him in (Malbordus, that is), with a bit of help from the old wizard Yaztromo. He gives you a spell book containing four of his greatest hits; the spells of Sleep, Dart. Shrinking and Incendiary (or Incendary as the program spells the spell). Each can be summoned by using the command CAST, and can be used once only.

The screen will look very familiar if you've seen an Adventuresoft game before (and who hasn't?), but after the complexities of Rebel Planet and Kayleth we're back to the more linear type of adventure here. There's the now-familiar instant problem when you're set down at the start by the Catfish River with some pirates in immediate pursuit, but it shouldn't take you more than a few moves to shake them off.

Many of the commands listed on the instructions don't work, such as GET ALL, DROP ALL and even the simple LOOK, or I for inventory. One command that does, though, and it's welcome, is BOM, or Back One Move, which at least gives you more than one go at those problems needing fairly quick solutions.

A few moves into the scrubland and I encountered a Harpy. A Harpy? What's this, one of the Marx Brothers or one of the seven dwarves? "The razor sharp claws of the Harpy slash the air above your head." Maybe not one of the dwarves after all, but straightforward violence saw this creature off, and several of the early encounters are sorted out in this rather unsatisfactory way: one opponent falls to the sword but not the bow and arrow, another to the trident but not the sword, so there's quite a bit of boring guesswork involved.

The first few genuine problems are quite neatly done, though, and drew me into the game... there's a location sneakily hidden in the scrubland, and a burning hut that sheds some light elsewhere, along with a golden eagle rescue service, a battle with a 'terodactyl', a thirst-making desert, a basilisk with a petrifying stare and a meeting with Abjul the nomad who has a whole range of tempting goodies for sale.

The game has more bugs than the insect house at London Zoo, though. The first time I tried to CAST DART I was told both that the spell worked and that I had already used it. There are others, along with spelling mistakes such as a new variation on the it's/its confusion: 'The spear pierces its' flesh' and 'its' nocturnal habits'.

But having said all that, I enjoyed the adventure more than most and it passed the test of "Will I want to go back to it again?" That's why the personal rating's higher than the marks for the adventure's different aspects. But will someone at Adventuresoft please buy a dictionary?

Label: US Gold
Price: £8.99
Joystick: n/a
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: {INDECIPHERABLE}

Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone have been cleaning up for quite a number of years with their Fighting Fantasy books regularly entering the best seller charts, much to the annoyance of many 'proper' authors.

Basically, Fighting Fantasy books are solo dungeons (of the type pioneered by the Tunnels and Trolls system) in a paperback book. You are given the scenario, then a number of decision choices. Pick one, and you turn to page seven, pick another and it's page 31, and so on. A bit like an extended flow-diagram. Therefore a perfect target for putting on computer... and US Gold has both the money and sense to do it.

Temple of Terror, then, is based on an old FF book of the same name circa 1982, but made into an adventure with some graphics by Adventuresoft. And the result isn't bad, if a little bland.

Chief baddie Malbordus has been brought up by the Elves (not a pleasant experience at the best of times), and has been picking up tips on how to be naughty during his formative years. Lacking a caring social worker, he's gone bad, and has decided to pay a visit to the city of Vatos, across the Desert of Skulls (second on the right past the newsagents). If he finds the five Dragon artefacts therein, the known world is in big trouble, right?

Luckily, the pet crow of the kindly Wizard Yaztromo (yes, people were paid money to write this plot) overheard these plans, and he hot-footed it from his bachelor pad in the Darkwood to get help.

You volunteered, and you start off at the lip of a rope bridge, just about to be captured by pirates.

It's a 'solve this puzzle in four moves or you're dead' adventure beginning. Not that it's difficult, but I prefer a little more introduction to my adventures.

And so it goes on. The presentation is good (new character set, nice graphics with each location) but it's the content that bothers me. The problems are not going to keep you held up forever if you are an experienced pixie, the location descriptions are far from verbose and the parser, although adequate, is nothing special. One annoying thing, the Get All command, although documented in the instructions, is not implemented in the game itself. Slapped wrists. The book was about a couple of quid, the program's over three times that. Think before buying.

MACHINE: C64, Spectrum, Amstrad, BBC (text only)
SUPPLIER: US Gold/Adventure Soft
PRICE: £9.99 (cass), £14.95 (disk)

Temple Of Terror is another in the Fighting Fantasy series of adventures, based on the Puffin paperback of the same name by Ian Livingstone.

Starting at the shore of a river, you ore immediately threatened by the drunken crew of a nearby boat. Prudence suggests making off over the rope bridge conveniently nearby, but the adventurers instinct warns that there must be something useful aboard the boat.

A trip across scrubland, and a welcome rescue by a helpful eagle, leads you to the desert. With parched throat, you arrive eventually at the gates of the city of Vatos, where your quest really starts.

Here you must find five dragon artifacts, before the evil Malbordus gets there.

But first you must get in, and here is a problem with a serpent guard, which exemplifies a limitation in the game's vocabulary, and poses one of those problems where the solution is not hinted at, has to be plucked out of the blue, and is most unlikely to be hit upon by the player, even though simple.

It's such an unfair problem, that I will break a rule, and tell you outright that the answer is KICK SAND AT SERPENT.

In the context, GUARD is the noun and SERPENT the adjective, yet only the adjective is recognised, and sand, although obviously present in a desert, is not mentioned.

A lock of alternative vocabulary is also apparent back at the boot and bridge - ENTER and GO are the respective command verbs, with no alternatives of BOARD and CROSS allowed.

The guard problem would have been unforgiveable had there been no BOM (back one move) and QSAVE facilities, as one false move causes instant death.

However, these rather unfair difficulties are somewhat mitigated by the fact that different approaches can be tried time and again using BOM, with very little effort.

On into the city, and exploring the labyrinth of underground corridors, where you'll encounter a variety of monsters.

The instant graphics that accompany each location are quite effective here, portraying the creatures in a colourful fashion.

The text, on the other hand, is somewhat lacking, and not always logical. "Not a visible exit" is a phrase all too often seen when, quite clearly, either there is such an exit, or one can be seen!

For example, it is entirely artificial to bar exits in this way in the middle of a (visible) desert, and in a chamber in which "a ladder leads up", CLIMB LADDER moves you up, whilst U itself is not allowed.

There are a mixture of problems in Temple Of Terror. Some are easy, some are not so simple, whilst others require pot luck. Many are of the hack and slash variety - simply finding methods of killing the nasties outright, whilst others require a little more thought and bit of plotting.

Altogether, this is not a bad adventure, but it lacks that subtlety and cryptic quality seen recently from Adventure Soft in Rebel Planet and Kayleth.

Marred, but not ruined, by the sort of shortcomings reviewers have been complaining about for years. Temple is not up to the standard we've come to expect from those masters of adventure at Adventure Soft.