THE SANDMAN COMETH
Star Dreams
Memory: 48K
Price: £10.95

Are you lying comfortably? A little sand in your eyes and across the border of sleep you go.

The Sandman Cometh takes you into the shifting regions of the unconscious. Freud, Lewis Carroll and Herman Hesse are thrown together with liberal helpings of humour and fantasy to offer you a journey in search of the Hourglass of Infinity. Ghost trains, spies, gunslingers and perplexing puzzles await you in the palace of dreams.

The game is a standard text adventure with unobtrusive location graphics. Unusually, you are provided with the full vocabulary of the game if you care to ask for it. There are two 48K games on the cassette but you must obtain your 'ticket number' from the first to get into the second.

The adventure is attractively presented and the difficulty of the tasks and problems is progressive, so much so that you will soon find your head swimming. The concept is imaginative and allows the game to contain a number of different settings. Each is self-contained but you will need items from one scenario to help you in another.

I STARRED IN A DREAM

I was in a corridor lined with doors. Each bore an inscription hinting at what might lie on the other side. 'All the fun of...' read the first, so I went through and found myself in a fairground with the sound of calliope music. I tried my hand in the shooting gallery, won an unexpected prize, then took a ride on a very realistic ghost train.

Back up the corridor I tried a few more doors - there was no shortage - and variously found myself lying on a pin table with a steel ball hurtling towards me, trying to play croquet and fighting an army of toy soldiers. Other doors led to... that would be telling!

I was playing The Sandman Cometh, the first major Adventure from Star Dreams who, until recently, were known only for their successful Spectrum Toolkit. Since then, Mike Turner, their games designer, has become known for his Quilled Adventure Aural Quest which has been released cassette version of the Stranglers' new album, Aural Sculpture.

Sandman starts with a fairly unoriginal puzzle but develops into an Adventure full of variety and not a little humour. Knowing that you are likely to have visited a sundial and been through a door marked "Ah! Diddums", this game then pitches you into the Star Dreams offices, where the floor is covered with lawsuit papers!

Sandman has graphics at every location and the picture occupies the top left-hand corner of the screen, with its description written to the right of it. The graphics display very quickly and are therefore no nuisance to the text adventurer. What is more, the pictures are original in design and attractive, sometimes even striking.

Sandman comes packaged in a video style case, and the whole presentation, including on-screen titles, is designed to masquerade as a movie. The game really requires a 96k Spectrum but, since there is no such beast, it is split into two 48k parts. The successful completion of Part 1 means that during the intermission you get your ticket for Part 2 and you will certainly need some clues from Part 1 to be successful.

It is not an over-difficult game (so far!) but is highly entertaining. In exploring the corridor, it is tempting to enter each new door as you come to it - after all, why not? That doesn't mean this sequence is the correct one, if indeed there is a correct one.

The trouble is, there is such a wealth of objects, that the inventory limit is hit all too soon. As a result, I left the countryside littered with my old rubbish as I found each new toy and wanted to carry it!

The Sandman Cometh is from Star Dreams for 48k Spectrum, priced £10.95.

PRICE: £10.95
GAME TYPE: Adventure

Mystic spiel, filled with references to the subconscious and the answer to life is always a good way to begin an adventure program. The Sandman cometh, with its intriguing title and cover sleeve sounds exciting and faintly mysterious. Unfortunately, the mystery rests mainly in finding the correct phrases.

You begin the adventure at the top of a flight of stairs. At the bottom of the stairs is a locked door. As you do not carry a key, this proves to be a tricky start to the game, until you notice the welcome mat on the ground in front of you. On the other side of the front door is a series of doors, each of which leads to a different scenario. The graphics are good, the locations are varied, but the vocabulary is painfully limited.

The VOCAB command lists all verbs available to you. Even this limited list speeds up the adventure only marginally, as the program seems oblivious to the concept of synonyms, and, for example, allows you to struggle with GO EAST, OPEN DOOR, IN, ENTER ROOM, PULL DOOR, PUSH DOOR, before finally conceding that the answer is THROUGH DOOR.

Searching for the answer to a puzzle is one thing, having to fight to make even the simplest move is another. And why, oh why, did the programmer omit the word TAKE? See the key, type in TAKE KEY, and the computer proclaims its inability to do any such thing. Your mind turns to invisible force-fields or strange spells protecting the key, before it becomes apparent that the answer is to GET the key.

The graphics are clear and useful, the imagination used in the creation of many of the locations is obviously great. A pity, then, that the programmer elected to make this game so hostile to users.

The Sandman Cometh is produced for the Spectrum by Star Dreams, 17 Barn Close, Seaford, East Sussex.

CATHY FOOT LOOKS AT SPIDERMAN, THE LATEST IN THE QUESTPROBE SERIES, AND THE SANDMAN COMETH, FROM STARDREAMS.

There is another category of adventures - the "too clever by half" school and, unfortunately, it is here that The Sandman Cometh belongs. Sure, once you discover what is going on, everything makes sense, but so what?

It took me ages to get into The Sandman Cometh. I get a distinct feeling rhat they were impressed by Mindbender from Gilsoft - so was I - but this program is too complicated for my liking, if only because I found no satisfaction in solving any of the problems set.

I must admire the SCREEN$. When that came up I quivered with anticipation, if the program was as titillating I was in for something really good. I could hardly wait! Then came a string of disappointments; first one of my cats walked across the keyboard while I was out of the room, and, in so doing, broke into the program for me. I have no idea how it was done all I know is that it CAN be broken into. Next I could not get through the door. It took me ages to find the key - I forgot I had been told where to find it - "tmcdq sgd lzs." If you also need to know, move the letters in that phrase on by one.

On the other side of the door lies a corridor with rooms off it on either side. These rooms are best tackled in the order that you come to them, as they get progressively more difficult and, while it is not too obvious at the start, if you have not coped with the first one, you lack the information, etc., to tackle subsequent ones.

The first time I went through I was just browsing, with the result that the only thing that happened in the Cheddar Cat's room was that I picked up some items and the life-jacket disappeared in a puff of smoke, but I got out asleep. I was shot dead by the gunslinger in the third room, and woke up, and could do nothing at all in the 007 cell. There, before I awoke, I was told that I had tackled this room out of turn and in a state of unpreparedness, which was true enough, but rather depressing.

Then the universe folds itself. I have crossed this point, but some things should be left undisclosed.

Let us go more fully into what lies beyond the first door, on which is written "All The Fun Of." Inside you are looking at a fairground. There are only two routes you can take. It would appear that you are not allowed to walk on the grass, so take the paths and use the compass given; but before you do, pick up the mallet and stake, you do need them.

I would suggest you then take a trip on the Ghost Train, which offers a better than average ride - all the way to Transylvania where, as you can guess, you find a use for the mallet and stake. You cannot take the round trip by train, but there is a way through if you don't mind getting wet which takes you back to the fairground and your next problem - the Shooting Gallery .

Best of luck , and keep calm.

I think it fair to say that if you enjoy games like Mindbender, and can cope with the lateral thinking and variable vocabularies without too much frustration, you may well enjoy this game - I did not.

The Sandman Cometh is produced by Star Dreams, 17 Barn Close, Seaford, East Sussex and costs £10.95.

48K Spectrum
£10.95
Star Dreams

This text and graphics adventure has a novel theme - it takes you through a sequence of dreams, the puzzles and clues getting tougher as you progress. It comes in two parts, one on each side of the cassette.

I began by walking down some stairs to a locked door. Having found a brass key, I could only get past the door with the unusual command combination of Use Brass - "Use Key" didn't work - then Through Door. It wasn't long before I was exploring a fairground, being challenged by a gunslinger, locked in a cell and confronted by the Cheddar - no, not Cheshire - cat.

Quite enjoyable, even though some of the commands are strange. At least a Vocab command supplies you with a list of verbs while the Help command sometimes does just that.