WATCHING OUT FOR GREMLINS

Richard Price finds something nasty in the blender and goes to El Dorado.

Publisher: Sentient Software
Memory: 48K
Price: £2.99

The other games are The Crystal Frog and The Amulet. The first is set in a familiar magical world and you must seek out the priceless carved gem of the title. Eerie castles, stalking murderers and enraged animals will dog your tracks and the atmosphere is enhanced by effective descriptions and an attention to detail.

It's lucky that good titles don't necessarily mean good games, and bad titles, bad games. If they did, then this game would have rated as terrible!

The Crystal Frog is a Quilled game, in which the object is to find "the fabulously valuable crystal frog and return it intact".

The text locations in Frog are so long and verbose that it had me imagining I was playing an Infocom game! Most descriptions take about three-quarters of the screen and the prose is so utterly believable that once or twice I thought that I could actually smell an apple in the orchard - an excellent example of what is actually possible using the Quill.

Some of the objects are rather strange. A spade, fur coat and apple seem to be in the right period of time, but what is a gas mask doing here? As I have so far only completed 25% of the game, you will have to bear with me, but I hope to find out soon!

Of all the locations I visited, the three most infuriating are a hut with salt in which, for the life of me, I can't take; a cave with a bear which is driving me insane; and, to top it all, there is a nutcase in the local castle who keeps killing me! The only thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that there is another 75% to play and judging by the first 25% this should be good! I can't wait to delve into the rest of it!

The game has a very large vocabulary and contains most of the words that I wanted to use. The response speed is very good, but that, of course, is the main advantage of using the Quill. As is usual with Adventure games these days, the HELP command is most unhelpful and I would like to see the publishers offer hint sheets. If they decide to do so, perhaps they could send me one?

Crystal Frog is from Kerian UK Ltd, and available for the 48k Spectrum and Commodore 64. If you have trouble finding it, then send off to Kerian at 29 Gisbum Road, Hessle, Hull. If any game deserves to be a best seller, then this one does!