Producer: Artic Computing
Retail Price: £6.95
Author: Simon Wadsworth

Artic Computing are the most experienced adventurers in the microcomputer business and produce some of the most popular adventure games. Eye of Bain is Adventure F in their famous series and it says much of their lasting appeal when adventure mailbags still contain a great proportion of queries solely concerned with their games. Eye of Bain breaks from the text-only tradition of the earlier members of the series with full screen, colourful graphics at every location. These are simple so as not to hold up the proceedings, and further, are only switched on when desired with L for LOOK and cancelled with ENTER. Artic adventures take so long to play there is little time left to actually write the review.

You find yourself in a hut with no obvious release from your predicament but plenty around to keep you thinking. This first problem strikes me as very Artic, either you solve the puzzle fairly quickly or you just give in - you don't even need the computer once you have digested the problem, as it is easily remembered, haunting you until it is solved. I suppose the idea is that one day you are sitting on the 25 bus and leap to your feet shouting, Eureka! I've got it! The annoying thing is - when you get home and load up - you haven't! You'll kick yourself when you do arrive at the solution as it requires no lateral thinking or intense brainstorming.

The vocabulary is verb/noun except for DRINK WATER which is not accepted while DRINK alone is. Strange. The input routine is as sure as it could possibly be and this programming competence adds tremendously to the slick professional feel of the game. Another feature which is indicative of Artic's vast experience is the invaluable GET ALL which smartly wraps up the first scene. GO or ENTER HOLE can be used to leave the hut but strangely GO HOLE won't take you back - GO HUT does. Shortly after, you enter the crossroads where it's best to be compassionate to the chap you find there. In return he says 'The blade and the hilt together do make, the downfall of the really big snake.' Utter gibberish presently, this will no doubt make some sense later on.

How to get free from your shackles is the first pressing problem after the hut. Very soon you run into the shapeless beast guarding a hole down a well, an ape up a tree whose usefulness is only realised later on, a pile of wood which, again, appears useless at first and, a very common problem in adventures, how to cross the desert without being fried to a fritter. One aspect that struck me as strange is the way in which the dense undergrowth at the well turned up nothing on examination. Is this a deliberate contrivance?

The Eye of Bain has a style and charm familiar to the thousands whose introductions to adventures was by playing the famous A-D Series. is latest addition, F, also displays fine graphics, making it a super adventure to play but, coming from Artic, difficult to play well.

COMMENTS

Difficulty: contains many ingenious and logical problems like all Artic games
Graphics: full screen on every location and quite good too
Presentation: average
Input facility: instantaneous
Response: limited to verb/noun

Ross: The task set in Artic's Eye of Bain is to locate and hang on to a priceless emerald. You don't, however, start off in the easiest of circumstances. At first you seem to be in a hut, and typing 'Look' will instigate the drawing of a full screen picture of your surroundings. It's not until you start to try and move around that you're told a chain is clamped to your leg - which in turn is attached to a pole. To free yourself you have to type in two absolutely correct words. This problem of syntax and vocabulary is one that I find very annoying with adventures in general and Eye of Bain's no exception. For example, words that are used to describe objects at a location are not recognised if you try to use them yourself.

All the locations I visited had an associated picture and most had some useful objects, or tasks that needed to be performed. The top few lines of the screen are devoted to describing the location... its exits and objects. This is quite useful but my more hardened adventuring friends suggested that it detracted from the atmosphere of the game.

A reasonable adventure, but I got stuck because I hadn't quite got the language right. 2/5 MISS

Dave: It took me about ten minutes to get started and I'm nowhere near finished yet. The game is interesting enough for me to keep on trying. 3/5 HIT

Roger: Tarl the mighty warrior turned out to be a bit of a wimp thanks to my erratic, misspelt or incomplete commandments. Adventurers should have patience with the lame lexicon, though, because I haven't declared the sacred emerald on my tax return yet... 3/5 HIT

NOW GET OUT OF THAT

Memory: 48K
Price: £6.95

Right from the beginning you realise you are up against it in Eye of Bain, the new Artic text adventure.

There you are, tied to a pole in some stinking hovel, praying to every god you have ever heard of in the hope you will escape before the natives decide to have a snack between meals.

Being a fairly mighty warrior you have travelled to this awful place in search of a fabulously huge sacred emerald. The gem is called the Eye of Bain and lies hidden in the temple, somewhere near that loathsome village.

Life is not going to be easy. Once you have escaped you will have to avoid endless perils and solve numerous tricky puzzles to reach the holy precincts. Crooked pirates, nasty nomads and killer bees are merely a few of the problems you will encounter - and have you ever tried to persuade an ape to give you a spot of help?

The adventure follows the usual Artic format though if you 'Look' you will be shown a picture of your location. That is a sensible approach to graphics as no time need be wasted unless you feel like it.

Input is in the standard verb/noun combination but multiple entries can be made by putting a full stop between each instruction. That can save time but the interpreter responds very quickly anyway.

Artic seems to adopt a no-frills approach to their adventures. You may not get animated graphics or the chance to enter full sentences but you can be fairly sure of facing constant challenges and original problems. Eye of Bain continues this tradition and should provide many hours of solid entertainment. Great value.

KEN'S EYE!

I have never really thought much of the Artic Adventure series, especially the first four, which tend to have very tortuous verb/noun combinations, like SWITCH SWITCH, POINT SONIC and PUT BRANCH.

There is no doubt, however, that A-D have proved very popular, perhaps because they were among the first Adventures available for the massively popular Spectrum. It has always struck me as strange that E, which is probably the best, seems to have proved the least popular. That could be explained by the far greater competition that it has had to face.

Way back in the March 1983 issue, I reviewed A-D and said I thought they got progressively better. After Golden Apple comes - The Eye of Bain and this continues the trend. The scenario is written by regular C&VG reader Ken Gosling who has been writing to Helpline since the year 0001 CVG!

Not only is Ken's plot excellent, Bain performs well both in program and execution and in the implementation of the plot. It has a split screen, instantaneous display, its own character set that fits more than 32 characters across the screen AND no bugs or spelling/typing errors that I have yet detected!

I was about to describe Bain as a text Adventure until I typed LOOK AROUND, when - lo and behold - I got a picture! There's one for every location, but they just sit there modestly, waiting to be called up!

It took me quite a while to escape the first location and even longer to escape it safely. The latter was because I hadn't used my eyes and the experience alerted my sense as I continued to play.

The setting is Alvania, a desert and, where as the mighty warrior Tarl you must escape with the emerald Bain. You start off shackled to a pole in a grass but with no HELP command worth mentioning. Once on your way, you may well meet up with a nasty nomad (shades of Pyramid of Doom!) and must survive the desert heat and various other hazards.

Well done, Artic - you've produced a first class Adventure at last. Well done, Ken, for the plot and don't let success stop you writing to the Helpline! Well done, Simon Wadsworth, some excellent programming!

Eye of the Bain is from Artic Computing for 48k Spectrum and Commodore 64, priced £6.95. I played the Spectrum version.

MACHINE: Spectrum 48K
PRICE: £6.95

A JEWEL FROM ARTIC

Artic, famed for their long line of text-only games, have finally broken with tradition and released a graphics adventure for the Spectrum. Eye of Bain throws you right in at the deep end. You're inside a native hut and about to have your ribs tickled by the sacrificial knife as a punishment for offending the local god. There are no obvious exits and you soon discover that you're chained to a pole...

From that moment on it's Artic at their best as you set about trying to escape. There's plenty of locations to be explored and you'll have to think very carefully indeed it you're to avoid dying of thirst in the desert, plunging into ravines, or simply being cut to mouth-size pieces by the local inhabitants.

ATMOSPHERE

Artic haven't exactly thrust the graphics upon you. In fact you can play the entire game without seeing a single picture. However, enter 'Look' and you get a full-screen display of your current location.

The graphics aren't, sadly, much to write home about and they're a tiny bit slow on the draw, but they all add to the atmosphere of a game that should give a real test to all but the most skilled adventurers.

The object of the game is to find the Eye of Bain, a fabulous jewel guarded by the bad-tempered Alvanians. Entry is in the simple verb-noun format but the program is meticulously careful in telling you exactly which words it doesn't understand. The vocabulary isn't exactly huge but the mechanics of the game are for the most part well thought out and you don't find yourself cursing the program for being unfriendly.

EYE OF BAIN

MICRO: Spectrum 48K
PRICE: £6.95
FORMAT: Cassette
SUPPLIER: Artic Computing

This game loads with a dazzling 'front page', making full use of the Spectrum's limited range of colours, and suggesting an interesting game ahead. After pressing several keys, and just as I had decided the program had failed to load properly, I noticed "Press Enter" tucked away in the middle of the screen (in a speech bubble!) and off I went.

You assume the identity of Tani, a mighty warrior (what else) seeking the legendary Eye of Bain, a priceless treasure hidden in a temple and guarded by a nasty tribe of Alvanians. You have already had one attempt at nicking the jewel, but you tried to enter the temple without the permission of the great god Bain (you're clearly not that mighty!) and the angry villagers tied you up in a hut and left you to rot.

The temple is close to the hut (just through the grass door, in fact) but you are unable to go straight back there because of the fact that the villagers won't let you! Never mind, it would have spoilt the game if they hadn't objected! You therefore have to find some other way out of the hut.

Graphics are optional - to obtain them (there is one for every location) you type DRAW or LOOK, and ENTER to return to the text. It is easy to forget to 'call up' the pictures, or even to purposely avoid doing so to save time, which would be a pity because the graphics are stunning, and easily comparable to games costing over twice as much. They are quickly drawn and painted too, and just as colourful as the loader.

OFF-BEAT

Many companies seem to take an almost sadistic pleasure in deliberately (it seems) ignoring the obvious, commonly-used adventure game terminology and including off-beat, unusual commands of their own. Artic are clearly no exception - on typing OPEN DOOR I was told that this couldn't be done; eventually I realised that I had to input GO DOOR or ENTER DOOR.

However, full marks to Artic for including LIST and INVENTORY. When one is constantly flitting from game to game it is easy to keep typing the wrong command.

The script in the game is different and pleasing to the eye, and the sound effects as you type in your commands are rather nice for once. Another rarely-used feature, which adds to the sense of realism, is the way the objects visible in each location disappear from the text as you TAKE or GET them (again, both commands are accepted).

The program doesn't have a HELP facility, which is irritating (although the word is recognised), neither can you obtain a SCORE. However, none of the problems I have encountered so far are exceptionally complex - the pattern is the usual one of visiting the right places in the right order to obtain certain items to give to certain characters to enable you to receive more items to visit more places (phew!).

Nevertheless, it isn't always easy to work out who wants what - for instance, the ape obviously needs to be given the bunch of bananas, but I have no ideas as yet what the desert nomad with a penchant for slave ladies is after. I was certain it was whatever was hidden in the beehive (would you believe honey?), but after spending some time working out how to stop the bees stinging me to death, and finally crossing the desert with my precious load without dying yet again of dehydration. I was most peeved to discover that this particular nomad at any rate doesn't have a sweet tooth. If he hadn't killed me immediately I would have eaten the infernal stuff myself.

SHAPELESS

I think maybe the black shapeless beast at the bottom of the well probably has whatever it is that the bloodthirsty nomad wants, but I haven't so far discovered what the beast wants either - perhaps the beast wants what the nomad has, or then again, maybe they both want the pile of wood I can't seem to get my hands on then there's the captain of the pirate ship who keeps clasping me in irons and forcing me to remain a galley-slave for evermore...

In the meantime, the black shapeless beast keeps erupting into grey flame and refusing to let me examine his hidey-hole, and the desert nomad continues to lunge at me in a most uncivilised manner with his deadly scimitar perhaps I should introduce them to each other.

In conclusion, a familiar story-line, but with enough interesting variations-on-atheme to make it a worthwhile buy, not least of which for the graphics.