Producer: Melbourne House
Retail Price: £7.95
Author: Lever and Jones

This one sees itself as a real life adventure, which doesn't mean much until you consider the previous Lever/Jones releases: Hampstead, which lampooned the desire among many of the capital's residents to move up to the suburb where living in London makes some sense, and Terrormolinos, which showed where you'd end up if you couldn't quite make it. Well, with this game here we take a further tumble down the socio-economic ladder, to those who would be on the bottom rung were it not for their ingenuity. In short, these are the folks who got on their bikes and made off with your video recorder.

In Hampstead, your task was social advancement from a UB40 to a turbo UB40 (a government salaried job?), and in many ways this game plays much the same - except that the definition of social advancement here is a much more immediate and tangible concept. Thieving is the usual way of life for these crooks, but the character you control, just released from prison after serving three years for his part in the Long Dittos Spaghetti Caper, is also preoccupied with the little business of dealing with the grass who set him up, and landed him with a two year sentence (he got an extra year for bad behaviour).

The object is to find yourself a nice little earner which will see you alright on the Costa Brava, safe from the prying eyes of Her Majesty's Government. To do this you must first get a gang together - this composes much of the first part of the adventure. The second part involves the robbery itself, and lets you see how well your selected villains operate 'on the job.'

To be totally honest, my first impressions of this game were not good. The adventure was developed on The Quill, and then reprogrammed by ASHMINSTER COMPUTING. Departures from the usual Quilled program format include the 'longer than one line' entry, but the game shows no airs and graces by keeping to the R for Redescribe.

Unfortunately, ASHMINSTER have not done a good job (with the Spectrum version at least) as the input routine is nothing short of diabolical. Letters get repeated all over the place when a series is entered at normal typing speeds. Even when just putting in one letter for a direction, for example S for South, pressing ENTER gives you another S - this is frustrating enough to introduce a vicar to the delights of blasphemy!

The authors' work is no masterpiece either, as the presentation is flat, with short, uninteresting location descriptions which are mostly made up of directions to adjacent locations - for instance, "St Judas Road. To the north-east is Pork Pie Parade, and to the south, Terminal Street. A winding lane leads southwest." Although such constructions are superb for mapping purposes, they leave something to be desired in terms of creating a riveting atmosphere.

The program can be quite 'out to lunch' at times, with a lack of response that leaves the player cold: RECRUIT GEORGE, CONTACT GEORGE, and KILL GEORGE all give the same reply - absolutely nothing! Surely when you try and kill a guy there should be some sort of response.

Just to round off this whingeing and moaning section, it sometimes happens that a description of some import is whipped off the screen before you have had time to read it, and all you're left with is a new game and the feeling that something or someone must have wiped you out. Do not despair though, this game does grow on you - once you take the time to get to know it a little better.

On the simple level, the character set has been attractively redesigned with round Hobbit-like runes (although the input W looks almost exactly like the U): while on the more fundamental level, a time element has been introduced with the HANG ABOUT command - a means of zipping through Friday night and into Saturday morning if you should so wish. One reason why you might want to alter time is to fast forward to when the pubs we open, pubs being a good place to meet dodgy geezers for so one would have thought - the game isn't quite that easy).

The poster descriptions which can be brought up onto the screen (READ POSTER) are inspired. These give an opportunity to learn more about your peers - and a chance for the Lever/Jones humour to shine through. With these descriptions its best to go straight to the crook's nickname, as here lies the clue to how the character earns a living in the seedy London underworld. Jack Bolter is Cracker, has a nervous twitch, and only three fingers on his left hand due to an explosion. Arson in 1980 left him with three years arson around - in prison. Septimus Griffin is Little Ken (of Terrormolinos fame?) who is cheerful and friendly, and has scarred buttocks as a result of a childhood holiday accident. He is an experienced cat burglar and suspected of 312 separate thefts of rare cats. But the crook with whom we can have the most sympathy is one Nbedele Jogo (Mr High-Score or Video in the Mr Men parlance) who has highly cultured tastes, a PhD (Cantab) in Computer Science, but who fell foul of the Tax Inspector and unwittingly began a life of crime with a 1980 sentence for tax evasion.

Clearly, Dodgy Geezers isn't the best-programmed adventure I've ever played but that isn't really the issue with a Lever/Jones program. Humour is the name of the game here, and this program offers much amusement to those who either just read the cover, or really get to grips with the intricate plot. There's something about the Lever/Jones style that I really appreciate. Take this example from the starting sequence - "Keep your noses clean, your eyes peeled, and your cheques crossed" , and this advice on leaving prison - "Since you area professional criminal, it should be quite obvious that you must find yourself a crime to commit, and a gang to help you commit it." Recruiting the gang isn't so easy as you must first prove your worth as a leader by negotiating the various intrigues of the underworld. A question which will most certainly exercise your mind on your travels is ... just who is the guy in the white Gucci shoes who seems to lurk in every shadow and doorway?

COMMENTS

Difficulty: easy to wander, not so easy to be a dodgy geezer
Graphics: few and far between; mainly mug-shots in first part
Input facility: AND and IT accommodated
Response: fast

FAX BOX
Title: Dodgy Geezers
Publisher: Melbourne House
Price: £7.95

Here's the one all you villains out there have been waiting for, and I know from my mailbag that lots of you are fans of the Lever-Jones style of adventure writing. I liked Hampstead, but was disappointed by the follow-up, Terrormolinos, so it's good to report that Dodgy Geezers a treat. Must be all those hours I've spent watching Minder, because the lingo in this one is right up Arthur Daley's street, though I'll spare you what every other reviewer will probably do, which is try to cobble together a review full of phrases like 'Leave it out, John', 'Straight up' and 'A nice little earner for Melbourne House.'

You've just done three years at Her Majesty's pleasure and you're back on the loose. Are you still a villain, though? What! is the Pope a Catholic? The first thing you'll want to do is set up a job, ignoring the advice of BulletProof George who's released the same day as you and tells you to go straight. Go straight to Ron Riggs bookies, more like, or the Korner Kaff to see which of the old gang is still around.

You can find out about the lads, or should that be lags, just by examining the wanted posters that are scattered about the place. Lads like Mr Video, Cracker, Tweedle Dee and even Little Ken. It's hard to rate the graphics in this game, as quality's high but quantity's low, though that doesn't matter too much as there's plenty going on in the text to keep you amused... and baffled.

My first piece of advice is to make sure you do your map on a big sheet of paper, and spread the locations out because there are plenty of them and my own map soon started to look like the Spaghetti Junction interchange - pretty apt since the job you were put away for was the famous Long Ditton Spaghetti Caper. The WAIT command has been retitled as HANG ABOUT, and make full use of that as this is the type of game where you've got to be in the right place at the right time and slowly piece together what information you can about what's going on and when in your little patch. For instance, go to a builder's yard at night and all you find is a locked hut, but go in the day and you may be able to provide yourself with a pickaxe left lying around by the workmen. Shops, banks and pubs keep to their regular opening hours, and you're given an update on what time and day it is, though the game isn't very accurate as you can stay in a place like the bank overnight, if you like, while the other characters still go about their business.

Most of the business is predictably dodgy - alarms go off and characters run through the streets laden with videos and the like. The aim of the first part of the game is to piece together a gang that you can take into part two and then pull off the crime. Your progress is impeded by a mysterious man in white Gucci shoes who appears after 200 moves and fills your wellies with cement before suggesting a little late-night swimming. You can check how close you are to that midnight dip by typing TURNS, though that command isn't documented.

SAVE regularly, especially when you reach the tunnel that leads to the dog- track. There you're asked for a tip by Tweedle, and he gets right cheesed off and disappears if you don't pick the right doggie from runners like Dagenham Lad and Arthur's Dream. All good dishonest fun, right down to the Chas and Dave records on the juke box in the Frog and Peach. Buy it and make it a nice little earner for Melbourne House. Sorry! I forgot.

Label: Melbourne House
Author: Peter Jones and Trevor Lever
Price: £7.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Gary Rook

Dodgy Geezers is Melbourne House's latest adventure - and it's a bit of a let-down.

You begin in jail, locked up there for your part in the Great Spaghetti Caper. It's all right though because today's the day you get out. Having left Her Majesty's lodgings, you find yourself in a maze of dingy backstreets - you know, the sort of inner city blight that Prince Charles is always wanting people to renew.

Your objective, recounted in a variant of that debased thieves' can't that all TV scriptwriters seem to think is the national language of the East End of London, is to pull off the Big One. To achieve something with your life by committing a crime to remember. Oh, and incidentally, you wouldn't mind getting your revenge on the geezers wot stitched you up over the Spaghetti Caper, know what I mean John, nudge nudge, put a pony in your pocket, get the suitcase from the van...

Problem is, you're not told what that big caper is. You do know, though, that you're going to need the assistance of certain other gentlemen, George the muscle, Mr Video the computer genius, Cracker the safe blower, and others. Obviously, you have to have a way to recruit them somehow.

Plus there's this fella who hides in the shadows a lot - bit stupid really, as his spiffy white Gucci shoes do show up a bit. What's he want?

The game was written - probably should read scripted - by Peter Jones and Trevor Lever, who wrote Hampstead and Terrormolinos for Melbourne House. Both of those games showed wit, intelligence, a wicked sense of fun - call it what you like.

Dodgy Geezers doesn't. It's one of those irritating adventurers where you have to be in the right place at the right time to meet the right person who'll help you if you know the right things to say and are able to give him or her the right thing.

It also betrays its origins as a Quilled program: it may have been polished up by someone, but it still looks pretty Quilly to me.

The parser seems quite limited, although it's difficult to tell sometimes because of the way everything is done in a pseudo Cockney. The responses get a bit repetitive after a while. There is the usual problem of trying to work out just what combination of verb and noun will suffice in a particular situation - you find this a lot with Quilled programs.

If this had been the usual price for a Quilled game, then it would have been pretty decent - but as a full price program from a company like Melbourne House, it's pretty poor. And Lever and Jones can produce better stuff too - Hamstead was really excellent...

SUPPLIER: Melbourne House
MACHINES: Spectrum, C64/128, Amstrad, BBC/Electron
PRICE: £7.95 (Spectrum), £8.95 (C64/128), £8.95 (Amstrad, BBC, Electron)

What kept yer then? Thought you'd be aht of chokey months ago! Oh, I see John. Lost a bit of remission for bad behaviour, eh? Well now yer released, let's see if we can pull off a caper!

Better late than never, the Dodgy Geezers (previewed in C+ VG's October issue) made their first public appearance on the BBC in mid-November.

Newly released from jail you have it in mind to gather a few of the lads together and get onto a nice little earner. First you comb the neighbourhood, visiting all the dodgy places, the dogs, Joe's, and a drinker or two.

Soon the germ of a plan will form in your mind, and you will have to do some careful and detailed observation to set the job up. This may mean playing the game from the start a number of times, and using the "hang about" command to keep an eye on particular places at particular times of the day and night.

Once you have sussed things out you can start all over again and, playing it right, will gradually gather some mates together for the job. Mind you, you might be better off without some of your mates they can be dead dodgy!

I played both the BBC and Spectrum versions - the BBC from choice, as it is so much easier to use, and the Spectrum for the graphics.

These take the form of full-face and profile views of the villains, direct from the police records.

With them comes a rundown of the geezer's character, and a list of convictions. There are a few other pictures as well.

The way you start the game is crucial. If you don't make the correct sequence of moves, you will be disadvantaged without realising it, and make little progress later on.

However, by the time you are ready to make progress, you will almost certainly have replayed the opening sequence so many times, that you will have caught on!

Dodgy Geezers was set up on the Quill by Lever and Jones, who brought you Hampstead and Terrorrmolinos.

Dodgy Geezers outshines them both. The vocabulary and parser is adequate, and there are some amusing messages - all written in Cockney, with a bit of rhyming slang thrown in for good measure!

The game captures the atmosphere of the characters and plot beautifully, and goes to make a very entertaining, and quite difficult. adventure.

Spectrum 48K/CBM64
Melbourne House
Text Adventure
£7.95

After serving three years locked in one of HM prisons for your part in the Long Ditton Spaghetti Caper, it is good to be free again. The first thing in your mind, naturally, is to plan a caper which will not go wrong and then it is off to the Costa Brava for a life of luxury - or at least that is what you hope.

As any budding criminal knows, the first thing to do is to formulate a plan then recruit the various seedy characters needed to operate it. Meeting an odd assortment of people and gleaning information from them will help you in your task. Having recruited your gang, you will he able to load part two and attempt to realise your dream.

So much for the plot but what about the gameplay? Trevor Lever and Peter Jones of Hampstead and Terrormolinos fame have endeavoured to give us something a little different but once again I feel they have fallen into the same rut as other writers. Instead of creating a good atmosphere with interesting text descriptions they have instead opted for a number of meaningless locations and bland graphics. Much of the humour failed to make any impact on me and I soon began to become disenchanted. For those who played the earlier games and enjoyed them, this one should suit you.

Melbourne House
£7.95

So then me old china, will ver latest Lever/Jones comedy be a nice little earner for Melbourne 'ouse? You've just finished your stay at one of Her Majesty's hotels, which you were sent to because someone grassed about your part in the Long Ditton Spaghetti Caper. Now you want to pull off a big job to set you up in the Costa Brava for life; and you can have your revenge in the process. In part one of this multi-loader, you must recruit your gang from the local, East End lowlife - very colourful characters they are too in the second part, you have to pull off the caper itself.

The game was developed on the Quill but has been 'reprogrammed'. In contrast to when Melbourne House have done this in the past, Dodgy Geezers does look very different to your average Quilled game. A noticeable improvement are the few but high quality, instant, cartoon graphics. However, the input routine has been badly programmed, and infuriatingly repeats letters several times if you type at speed. My copy is bugged - you cannot load from tape - which must be corrected before this is released. And the instructions say you can use IT and THEN commands; this is untrue. All not the quality expected from Melbourne House.

The Lever/Jones team gained a good reputation with their wonderful satire Hampstead, and the spoof Terromolinos. I think fans of these two games will be slightly disappointed with Dodgy Geezers. The humour is not so farcical nor obvious. The game is true satire, which means it's less funny than we've grown accustomed to. For example, the twosome point out how the pet shop is stocked with animal food made from other animals, and show us "groups of rosy faced children playing with spent fuel rods" at the nuclear waste dump. This is not a criticism - in fact it's admirable of Lever/Jones to try something different from the new well trodden silly style - but don't expect a laugh a minute. Unless, that is, you find cockney language funny. Melbourne House expect us to - "there's lots of catchy phrases for the kids to pick up" waffles the PR blurb patronisingly - but it isn't used nearly as entertainingly as the Chicago style in that other criminal comedy, Bugsy.

Time plays an important part in the game: it changes through morning, afternoon, evening, night and the days of the week. Certain locations will only be accessible at certain times - so no shopping after dark. The actual adventure has a different style to previous Lever/Jones successes. There's less to solve instead, a lot would seem to depend on being in the right place (not easy - the place is a labyrinth) at the right time having done the right thing earlier on.

As such, Dodgy Geezers is not particularly satisfying to play. The text doesn't liven the game up much, being somewhat sparse; and an unresponsive EXAMINE falls to enhance bare locations. Dodgy Geezers has an original plot and tries something different, but I don't think it's entirely successful.