FAX BOX
Title: Silicon Dreams
Publisher: Rainbird
Price: £14.95

"It is dark, you cannot see." Ah yes, I remember it well, that opening to one of my favourite adventures, Snowball. And here it is again, repackaged by Rainbird as part of the Level 9 trilogy that brings it together with its sequels, Return To Eden and The Worm in Paradise. Snowball really benefits from extra text plus new graphics that give us a glimpse into the Snowball ship itself where Kim Kimberley's adventures and misadventures began.

The graphics are a smidgen better than those added to Jewels Of Darkness, possibly even two smidgens, and are far from being the disappointment I was worried they might be. The enhanced text is what makes it all worthwhile, though, and who could resist a response to a plea for HELP that fills a screen with information about the Nightingales and hints about their movements? A comparison with the original screens shows how much adventures have come on since the original Snowball hits the fans.

If you're a text-only addict you can load up the extra-enhanced text version, and as usual the 128K-ers will get the best of both worlds. The dreaded Lenslok has been dropped in favour of a more sensible protection device borrowed from The Pawn, in which to RESTORE a game you'll be asked to find and type in a particular word from the amusing 42-page novella that accompanies the handsome package. Don't just Silicon Dream about it - buy it!

Label: Rainbird
Author: Level 9
Price: £14.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Gary Rook

It's easy to forget that there may be new adventurers out there, who may actually not have heard of Level 9 yet.

So, for the benefit of the uninitiated, a brief aside. Level 9 is the best British adventure house around. The company, run by the Austin family from a decaying mansion outside Weston-super-Mare, has a reputation second to none (except, perhaps, Infocom - and they're American and don't do a lot for the Spectrum).

A long time ago - two or three years, at least - Level 9 put out an adventure called Snowball, which was the first in a series of three games known as the Silicon Dreams trilogy. It was followed by Return To Eden and The Worm in Paradise. All three are excellent adventures, the sort of programming and plot writing that lesser houses can only dream of.

And now, for your delectation and entertainment (plus bafflement), the boys from BT, Rainbird, have brought out all three titles together in one box at the reasonably paltry sum of £14.95.

I'm not going to waste too much time on the plots of any of the games, but here's a very brief rundown.

In Snowball, you are secret agent Kim Kimberley (and yes, Level 9 chose the name deliberately because it can be male or female) and have to save the colonisation starship Snowball from being destroyed by the machinations of the evil traitor...

In Return to Eden, you have saved the Snowball but unfortunately the colonists on the spaceship have (wrongly) decided that you are the traitor. You have escaped to the new world, Eden, at present occupied only by ferocious native flora and fauna, and the robot pioneers sent on ahead to prepare the world for human occupation.

In The Worm in Paradise, you play a citizen of Enoch, Eden's first city. It's a Utopia, with full employment and no crime. It's also very boring, and you might like to liven the place up a bit.

The sort of problems you face in all three adventures are often pretty devious. In Snowball, for example, you have to work out the series of a range of colours - what order do they go in? A little bit of resistance might help you work out the panel puzzle before the Nightingale comes to take you away.

The parser for all three programs is superb, as usual with Level 9 games, and the program will understand and respond to a wide variety of inputs. There are some small problems: right at the start of Snowball, if you try to leave the first location by the trapdoor, you are told that you'll have to stand on something to reach it. Try to stand on something, and you're told - again - that you'll have to stand on something to reach the trapdoor.

The text compression is probably to blame for this and similar strange responses but they're minor problems only. Considering the amount of data Level 9 has managed to pack into a single Load, it's nothing to carp about.

Graphics also add considerably to the game (Snowball didn't have them when I first played it, oh so long ago) and are quickly drawn and atmospheric.

The whole Silicon Dreams game set is an unqualified success for Level 9 and Rainbird. Very definitely worth £14.95 of anybody's money and at only £5 per program it's a real bargain.

Rainbird
£14.95

Following "Jewels of Darkness" last year, this Rainbird offering is another collection of three revamped, repackaged Level 9 adventures. This time the games are in the science-fiction genre, and tell the extraordinary tale of Kim Kimberly. In Snowball, you play Kim and, re-awoken from deep-freeze storage, must save the eponymous spacecraft from crashing into a star. Return to Eden finds you crash landing on the planet of the same name, having been wrongly accused of sabotaging the Snowball. Fight through the alien jungle, then survive the deserted future city of Enoch, built many years ago by advanced robots preparing for the colonists' arrival. It's now in a precarious state and staffed by droids hostile to your intrusion. Worm in Paradise, set a century later, sees you as a citizen of Enoch, an extreme right-wing state run by robots, in which all must conform and Kim is worshipped, Lenin-style. Challenge the system, and save the world!

I searched the box carefully on receipt - surely Telecom haven't finally listened to all the criticisms? Yes they have - to the unending gratitude of adventurers, the dreaded Lenslok has been scrapped! Otherwise, I experienced a powerful feeling of deja vu when reviewing Silicon Dreams. It contains almost exactly the same unnecessary faults as Jewels Of Darkness, as well as that game's good points.

All three adventures are large, and full of ingenious puzzles. One of the games alone would keep most people occupied for months. Vocabulary is large and complex sentences are allowed. A highly readable instruction booklet also includes a novella - "Eden Song', which far from being some overblown epic laden with silly names is unexpectedly humorous, if not entirely in the style of the games.

But the potential for a masterpiece has again been wasted through silly errors: like painting the smile on the Mona Lisa with a blue crayon. First up, my traditional moan: the graphics are truly abysmal. Blotchy, often unrecognisable and, in this collection, so simple in design as to render them even more pointless than in the past. The screenshots here do not do them justice - you have to be close to the screen for the full impact. In the case of Eden, the graphics are worse than those included on its original release! I always thought the Spectrum's attribute problems were to blame for the pics' dreadfulness, but the Atari ST screenshots shown on the packaging are almost as useless. Why Rainbird allow this sloppiness in what is supposed to be the cream of British adventures is beyond me: though at least I see ST users will be getting digitised Geoffrey Dawson graphics on the next joint release. Fortunately, expanded, text-only versions of each adventure are provided. The quality of the text is so much better in these versions that they feel like different adventures. Certainly they are much more atmospheric and they are easier, since the strange technology is explained better.

Presentation is poor: all text is printed in yellow on black in the normal Spectrum character set, which makes an untidy mess. Why no colour, or better spacing and a more readable character set? Still no loading screen either. Instead of an atmospheric picture to set the mood we have "Level 9" printed ' in several different colours - this looked crude even when I first encountered it several years ago.

RAMSAVE/LOAD is standard on Quilled games, so its omission from a major release is disappointing. At least it could have been included in the text only version, using some of the memory freed by removing the graphics, its absence wouldn't be so bad if conventional tape loading was not so drawn out. The security device - giving you a page and line reference from Eden Song and asking you which word it refers to - is not as irksome as Lenslok; however, you have to do this every time you RESTORE from tape, which for most adventurers I suspect will be often, as death lurks round every corner. Why not just ask for a word at certain key points in the game?

As with JOD, I must express how disappointed I am that the potential of these games has not been realised. I sincerely hope Level 9 will take notice of some of the criticisms - they are meant to be constructive. That said, the package offers improved versions of three excellent adventures at half the original cost. Individually they would have been Monster Hits - so together they are, too.