Rainbird/Magnetic Scrolls
£15.95 disk only

From Kerovnia and The Guild of Thieves to Aquitania and the magician of Turani - Magnetic Scrolls' latest adventure deals with a land in which luck is running out. The good fortune of Aquitania depends on the safekeeping of the bracelet created by its wise magician. The bracelet and its five lucky charms have become separated through the machinations of the notorious Green Witches in a bid for control of the kingdom. Meanwhile, in households everywhere, the odds are stacked in favour of misfortune: the land is jinxed.

Finding the right bus home seems an unusual stroke of luck - until you get run over disembarking. You recover your senses and realise that only a guardian angel could have prevented you from dying. Seconds later the Guardian (certainly not an angel by the looks of his sleazy herringbone overcoat) appears before you. In between bites of a cheese sandwich he hands you a memo and tells you that you have been chosen to recover the charms and use the bracelet to defeat the witches. Mission accomplished, he promptly disappears.

Although you begin on home ground outside your own front gate, a little exploration soon takes you to more exotic locations. Snorkelling, mouse-catching, negotiating artificial waterfalls and underground passages are skills which must be acquired in the course of the adventure. The descriptions are well crafted and absorbing to read. A great deal of work has gone into including even more details than in previous Magnetic Scrolls adventures; the EXAMINE command almost always yields an atmospheric and humorous reply.

Aquitania's characters are depicted realistically. Burly bakers and prim postmistresses are oblivious to the seriousness of your quest - they're far too busy with their own lives. To get them to break off and pay attention it is necessary to project your imagination towards their needs rather than your own. Interaction is often a matter of tactful co-operation.

Object orientated puzzles are of more than average difficulty but none of them are insolubly obscure. There are often several ways of completing a puzzle and all of them are logical, though some may require activation of more than the average number of brain cells. What seems obvious at first often turns out to be a red herring; the game has a nasty sense of humour.

Death is an impossibility (an innovative feature in an adventure game) as the Guardian always appears in time to save you. This makes the game accessible to beginners as well as seasoned adventurers and does nothing to reduce the element of risk: false moves early on can still cripple progress later in the game. Fortunately there is a SAVE (though no RAMSAVE) option.

Magnetic Scrolls' parsing improves with every game, and Jinxter accepts most complex sentences and synonyms. Surprisingly, the GO TO command introduced in The Guild of Thieves is absent, possibly because the complexity of the landscape would have made it too difficult to implement.

One small drawback, noticeable because it's practically the only one, is the longwindedness of some necessary game procedures. You may be standing by a door with the relevant key in your hand yet you still have to type in several commands if you want to go through it (UNLOCK DOOR WITH RUSTY KEY, OPEN DOOR, ENTER). The process is even more laborious where complex actions, for example striking a match, are concerned. No special skill is required to work out how to open a box of matches and take out a match, so why the need for a series of pedantic commands? A feature which allows the program to perform the action for you would have been a welcome addition to an otherwise excellent game.

The Pawn was open to charges of obscurity; The Guild of Thieves improved on that and Jinxter shows even further improvements. Its quality is apparent from packaging to plot and can only leave you wondering what weird and wonderful developments the future holds.

FAX BOX
Title: Jinxter
Publisher: Rainbird
Price: £15.95
Reviewer: Mike Gerrard

Three megagames in a row for Magnetic Scrolls, but hardly surprising as this is definitely top-of-the-range Spectrum adventure stuff with only the likes of Gnome Ranger and Knight Orc as rivals. Plus-3 owners will be able to gloat at now having Guild Of Thieves and Jinxter, both unavailable for the kid brother machines.

Inside the bright blue box, which reminds us that 'Every Silver Lining Has A Cloud', what do we find? We find a 3" disk with a game on it. We find a beer mat advertising Moose Bolter beer, and a compo that gives four people the chance to win every Magnetic Scrolls game for life. We find some simple instructions, a sealed envelope and a copy of The Independent Guardian, essential reading for Guardians everywhere, with news and views of leading Guardians like Len Pouch, Len Pisht, Len Moron and Len Wossname.

Len Wossname is very concerned about the level of luck in the land of Aquitania. If the charms of Turani aren't reunited soon with the legendary Bracelet of Turani then luck could completely run out, the Green Witches will take power, there'd be plagues of bats and we might even see the collapse of the ferg. So what's he doing about it? Well, here's looking at you, kid!

But what is a Guardian anyway? Play the game and you'll soon find out. Hardly will you have got off (or been thrown off) the bus in Neverending Lane than you'll encounter the Guardian and be given your task. Neverending Lane seems to be just that, incidentally. I've walked about 64 locations in both directions and still not come to the end of it. How did they do that? Back to the Guardian, though. Don't expect a cloaked figure with a black pointed hat and a touch of the scrolls. This one wears a herringbone overcoat (a red herringbone?), complains about the wife and kids and is given to philosophical mutterings like "What's the point of wossname, immortality, if you can't get a decent bit of cheese in your sandwich, narmean?"

The text of Jinxter's been written by that very funny Punch writer, Michael Bywater who had a hand in Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and is also working on another adventure for Infocom. So you can expect a lorra lorra laughs, many of them in incidental routines and in answers to some of the weirder inputs you might try. But even ordinary responses can raise a smile too. Examine the key-ring and you're told it's a clever little device that allows you to lose all your keys at once instead of one at a time. One location is Dead Fly Wood, so now you know where all the flies go in the wintertime.

From Neverending Lane you can enter your house, and a good search here is essential. You can find a sock lying around, and you know that sooner or later you're just going to have to put a sock in it, whatever 'it' is. Try playing with the dragon in the bath, too. It's not long before the phone rings and it sounds like your neighbour's in a spot of bother. So you rush round to his house, but of course he's not there. So instead you have a good nose round, discover the foul cheese in the basement and the fly bath in the garden (like a smaller bird bath).

The first major problem, assuming you can sort out a few minor ones early on, is the canoe in the boat-house. If you can plug the hole, you can paddle your own canoe on the lagoon, and even cross to the village green and visit the pub and the baker's. It was round here I started to get a bit stuck after a couple of hours of pleasurable adventuring, but one feature of this game is that if you need a bit of help then in certain locations you can summon up the Guardian and he will solve a problem for you! This does of course leave you with another problem in its place (remember, Every Silver Lining Has A Cloud), which is that you're not told how the problem's been solved and you also feel your luck dropping - and you can't finish the game unless your luck is at the maximum level, but at least it means that if you're getting frustrated by a problem you can get past it, explore a bit more of the game, then go back to it later.

The Jinxter parser will be familiar to fans, although in fact it's lost one or two features from Guild. It'll still cope with most inputs - and then leave you frustrated 'cos it doesn't understand something simple. That doesn't happen often, though. What does happen often is that Jinxter leaves you laughing and scratching your head simultaneously. Yet another essential purchase for Spectrum adventure lovers - there's never been a better time for it. Nor for playing Spectrum adventures either. Narmean?

Label: Rainbird
Author: Magnetic Scrolls
Price: £15.95
Memory: 128K (+3 only)
Joystick: None
Reviewer: Tony Dillon

Shame on you, all of you who claim that the Spectrum software scene's days are numbered. I spit on you and I spit in your gravy. I agree with you that in some areas, maybe there aren't as many technical breakthroughs as there were before, especially in the arcade games market, but remember that small though they are, they are still there to be seen.

In the adventure area, however, the breakthroughs are coming thick and fast now, as finally, as Sir Clive expected, the full power of the 128K machines is being utilised. To show you what I mean, let's jog gently backward through our mind to a time when Bug Byte released good games and Jim Douglas had a parting like mine. The hot adventures at that time were those written by Melbourne House. Titles such as Sherlock and The Hobbit filled the charts and even now, people are still stuck in the goblin's dungeon.

Then a group of programmers who called themselves Level 9 wrote some very good and very successful adventures with improved 128K versions.

Finally, Magnetic Scrolls released what was to be (I think) the future of adventures, The Pawn. It boasted a very big vocabulary and probably the most intelligent parser ever seen on the Spectrum. Sadly, the game was 128K only.

It was followed by Guild of Thieves, which contained more of the same, plus one bonus. Freebies. The large American-style packaging contained all kinds of goodies related to the game such as a GOT credit card and a magazine and such stuff. And now there's Jinxter, a massive improvement, if that is possible, over the previous two games and even better freebies, but more on those later.

So, wotcha gotta do then? Well, as the game says, you have to find the bits of the wossname and put them together so that the thingumebobs - don't carry on wossnameing. Why the use of wossnawossaname? Apparently, everyone in the world of Aquitania is amazingly absent-minded and they keep forgetting things like where they left their cheese sandwiches. If you haven't guessed, everyone eats cheese sandwiches as well, which you find if you read the free newspaper which accompanies the game.

To translate the first sentence into English, you have to find various segments of a bracelet which will put an end to the reign of the witches. The witches are draining away everyone's luck and good fortune, which the bracelet, if completed, will restore. Not much of a storyline, but wow, what an adventure.

You want to know why this game appeals to me so much? The Pawn was good because of its style of writing and its unusual situations. Jinxter is even better because of its very funny script and the everday situations, such as riding on a bus, and you end up identifying more with the game's character. Now I know it still may not sound much of an adventure, but just sit back and listen, and I'll enlighten you further.

The game is very funny. Text only, and there is a lot of it, it's never boring and even if you find some episodes slightly tedious, you can do anything you want to enlighten the moment. For the first time ever, you have complete control over the objects. The programmers have included heaps of extraneous information about all the game objects, and the parser will respond sensibly - helpfully, even if you try to use the objects in ways the programmers haven't allowed for, which makes Jinxter infinitely less frustrating than most adventures.

The atmosphere in the game is rich, but never heavy, and stereotypes abound. Ring the bell on the bus twice to see what the driver says and you will see what I mean. Also, there is a high amount of human physical interaction. At stages in the game, you will be asked to do something with one of the freebies. Now, no oo-ering, you are only asked to do things relevant to the game. But more on the freebies.

MS has really done itself proud here. Freebies include beer mats and newspapers, not to mention a very grubby staff memo. All look very authentic and very helpful in places. Jinxter gets full marks for presentation, style, wit and fun. One that will keep you up late at night and probably make you miss Neighbours as well.

Charming little number from MAGNETIC SCROLLS

Jinxter is only Magnetic Scrolls' third adventure, but it shows you how little activity there is on the adventure scene (at the professional end of the market) when you realise that they are already approaching the number one slot in the UK.

The game boasts the same excellent graphics as its two predecessors, Guild of Thieves and The Pawn. It also features the usual excellent parsing we've come to expect from Mag Scrolls, but interestingly the company have removed the GO TO command which allowed you to move to a named location. A pity, but perhaps the map layout in Jinxter (which includes several areas of water and other hazards) would have made the command too difficult to implement.

One thing it doesn't have is a RAMSAVE facility, so if you've got a single disk machine you'll have to swap disks every time you want to RESTORE or SAVE, which becomes slightly tiresome as you'll need to go through this process frequently.

The storyline shows an improvement on earlier games as well. The Pawn was altogether too obscure to be really enjoyable as an adventure. Guild of Thieves was much better - a simple treasure hunt with some excellent locations. Jinxter has got the balance just right - it's a treasure hunt again, but with only six items to collect you'll find a lot of lateral thinking and exploration required. You must find five charms and a bracelet which you then reassemble to resurrect the Bracelet of Turani, thereby defeating the power of the wicked Green Witches who are draining the 'luck' from Aquitania.

The design of the game, as mentioned in an earlier ACE article, is innovative in that death is not possible. You have a Guardian who appears when needed to save your skin and let you carry on with the game, but you won't score maximum points that way. This allows some pretty tough puzzles to challenge the experts without putting off less experienced players and adds enormously to the enjoyment of the game. Getting around Jinxter, then is no problem, and as before there are large numbers of encrypted clues in the accompanying documentation if you get stuck.

Sadly there are a couple of minor bugs in the production version - if you've got Version 1.05 (check by typing VERSION) you'll crash the game by going south to the bar in the pub. You will also have difficulty lighting the candle in the Pagoda. However neither of these two actions are necessary to complete the game - if you think you need the candle to illuminate darkness, you should think again - so neither of these bugs is too disastrous.

There's a magical element within the game that induces a new dimension of puzzle solving. Each of the five charms has magical properties, including the ability to change the weather (which plays a significant role in the game), freeze objects, and 'tag' them so that they always return to you if dropped or otherwise removed from your inventory.

Magnetic Scrolls' text style improves with every game and Jinxter has excellent location descriptions and responses. Even trivial objects sometimes carry a carefully crafted description, as in the beer garden

>EXAMINE BENCHES
What you do is sit on the benches and drink a lot of beer and then you fall off the benches. Orthodox, true, but fun.

Jinxter enhances Magnetic Scrolls' reputation still further and confirms their position as one of the country's leading adventure houses. If you fancy a pint of Old Moosebolter in the pub, a swim in the lagoon, a spot of mouse-catching, and some superb graphiccs into the bargain, then splash out without fear of regret.

RELEASE BOX C64128, £19.95dk JAN 88
Spec+3, £15.95dk FEB 88
Ams 6128, £19.95dk JAN 88
IBM PC, £19.95dk JAN 88
Atari ST, £24.95dk OUT NOW
Amiga, £24.95dk JAN 88

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