ASSIGNMENT EAST BERLIN
Sterling Software
Memory: 48K
Price: £5.95

At Checkpoint Charlie only the swirling mists of the sub-Le Carre spy thriller show any signs of life. Checkpoint Charlie is the crossover point from West to East Berlin. It is also the starting point for Assignment East Berlin from Sterling Software.

Your job is to bring back the plans for LOBOT, a brain-numbingly important radio transmitter, and you are to achieve your patriotic objective in the conventional North-South-Get-Rope-You-Are-Dead style of text adventures.

Unfortunately many of the conventional commands such as Inventory or Take are not supported, and consequently fiddling around trying to discover the correct words takes even longer than usual. Although the game is atmospheric, some of the detail is sloppy - what, for example, is a Russian guard doing manning an East German border post?

There is also a tendency to make problems unrealistic; the 'small book' turns out to be your passport, something you would know perfectly well in real life. Such tricks spoil the illusion of involvement in an adventure.

Unattractively presented on-screen, and slow to respond, the game is less good than it should be. The story is not at all bad, and the ever-present threat of capture adds to the tension.

It makes no sense therefore to spoil things by lumbering the user with a poor vocabulary and slow interpreter.

BERLIN GAME

MAKER: Sterling
FORMAT: cassette
PRICE: £5.95

Atmospheric secret agent text adventure with many good points and one major irritant. As Magnus Steele, the Ice-Man, you start from Checkpoint Charlie and roam the desolate ill-lit streets of East Berlin in search of seven items.

There are 70-plus locations of which about half are significant and a few extremely hazardous. The polizei rumble you early on and come looking, sirens blaring, with orders to shoot on sight.

Between avoiding them, some combinations of which are extra-valuable, the pressure is really on. If you don't complete within a time limit, the program self-destructs!

An excellent, pacey and gripping game, but where has programmer Reg Beale been these last few years? Apart from a handful of basic commands, you have to type in whole words, 'examine' rather than 'exam', 'briefcase' rather than 'brie' and so on which will annoy seasoned adventurers who type in the first four letters as a matter of course, and is especially aggravating on a Spectrum non-plus. Another oddity is that if there's an adjective, 'old', 'small', 'long' or whatever, that's what the program recognises, rather than the item described. Some high on imagination, low on technique.