IN THE DEEP MIDWINTER

Richard Price takes on an icy foe...

The software business seems to suffer as much from the silly season as your average daily newspaper. Everyone goes off to Ibiza, Crete or Terrormolinos for the whole of August, while the companies all tuck their software aces up their sleeves ready for the Christmas onslaught on your teetering bank balance.

Then, in late summer, when everyone has returned invigorated from their steamy holiday haunts, comes the time of the Great Gathering. Tribes of PR persons, hardware salesmen, ashen-faced advertising reps and regiments of over-tired journalists throng excitedly into the bars at Olympia for the mighty PCW Show. Such scenes may well convince you that there is such a thing as a free lunch.

This is the place, you might think, where new adventures will surface in all their glory to compete with the skimpily clad go-go dancers in their effect on four pulse-rate. Not so. This years show produced a dearth of adventure material and the vagaries of magazine print means that this famine works its way through to the reader round about now.

Publisher: Bignose Software
Price: £5.95
Memory: 48K

Lastly there's The Pay-Off from Bignose Software, another company encountered at the PCW show. This is a very plain text adventure, apparently licensed from the Atari Corporation - I suspect at some time in the more remote past.

There's this hood Luigi, see, and you're into him for 40 grand in gambling debts. There's also a large and fancy gemstone deposited in a vault somewhere in the Big Apple - or New Jersey if that's any different. The rock is worth 40 grand too, so all you gotta do to stay cool is to find it and fence it. OK?

The location descriptions are slim, if not emaciated, and are more like names with a list of objects present. That might not necessarily be a big disadvantage if the screen display and response times weren't so slow. As it is, the presentation and speed are reminiscent of ZX-81 and very early Spectrum games. At the asking price of £5.95 that is simply not good enough - especially when you recall that you can pick up fast and complex bargain games for less than that.