FAX BOX
Title: Gnome Ranger
Publisher: Level 9, PO Box 39, Weston-super-mare, Avon BS24 9UR
Reviewer: Mike Gerrard

You're not actually told what the aim of this game is, as far as I could see, so it's a case of find the problems... and solve them. To do so will need the cooperation of some of the other characters from time to time, so let s begin with a look at the splendiferous new Level 9 parser. The other characters wander around the place doing this and that but not , I'm sure, the other, and you talk to them by saying something like NYMPH, GIVE ME THE FLOWER.

Commands new to Spectrum adventurers will be those like FIND, GOTO, RUN TO, FOLLOW and WAIT FOR. FIND sends Ingrid off in search of another character or object, so that if you've dropped the nugget somewhere but can't remember where, you can just FIND NUGGET. GO TO and RUN TO a location are similar, they both get you where you want to go, but RUN TO takes you instantly while GO TO plots the quickest route and you see the various locations printed on-screen as you pass by. You can always interrupt a lengthy command by pressing any key when you'll be given the option to stop or resume the interrupted command. WAIT FOR keeps you in the same location till the awaited character turns up - useful provided you know that the character does actually come that way, otherwise it can be a bit of a lengthy wait! FOLLOW allows Ingrid to trot along after another character (on her little trotters) and this command is also the way of escaping one of the early hazards... but I won't spoil it by telling you which one.

You begin the game outside a sturdy little shop, and straight away you've got to get used to the gnome language, which just means that everywhere there's a letter 'n' it's turned into 'gn', so that you can 'go gnorth', or 'gnot gnow' , that kind of thing. I found this irritating rather than amusing, like hearing the same feeble joke repeated three million times, but eventually you start to ignore it.

The parser isn't perfect, of course. The instructions tell you that you should try high-level commands like CENTAUR, TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF, but if you try that you just get the response, "Really, how gnice." This might cause you to swear, and the response to that is drily amusing, as is much of the humour in the game... you tend to get a screenful of flowery language, which is then debunked.

Sometimes the screen is too full, as when you meet the centaur's aunt, the witch, who sees you off in no uncertain fashion. When this happens you get a flurry of words which scrolls instantly up the screen, disappears off the top and leaves you with the end of a sentence about statues and Cleethorpes Corporation. Yes, well, quite. But I can forgive KAOS's minor katastrophes.

You have to konverse - rats - converse with the characters to get some veiled clues about places to go and things to find, and a WAIT in one location will be worth your while. You're bound to find yourself in the middle of the marsh at some stage, where there's a nugget and an interesting looking fungus, but the trouble is that you can't get out of the marsh while you're carrying any objects. Or can you? Course you can! Eventually.

The first part of Gnome Ranger, shown here, is meant to be a fairly easy introduction to the game and the adventure system, before things hot up later on, but I'm still finding my way round and slowly building up my score... and enjoying every minute of it. Speccy owners are lucky, as Gnome Ranger's a better game then Knight Orc, and gives you a chance to at last sample Level 9's new open-plan adventures. For 48K owners who've been deprived of The Pawn, it should be an essential purchase as it gives you the flavour of the size and scope of disk-based games. Definitely mega-KAOS!

THE GNOMES AT HOME

Bottomlow by name and Bottomlow by nature, that's Ingrid, the gnome who's at home on Gnome Ranger. Well she's not at home when you start reading the 48-page Gnome Diary that comes with the game and sets the scene, she's a student. At the institute of Gnome Economics, of course. (You see this is really a gnome-groan adventure). When she leaves the institute she sets off for her home at Gnettlefield Farm, and at the coach station she's greeted by the family servant, Arback. He's not a Bottomlow, Ingrid points out, he's a Garden. Arback Garden.

Ingrid meets her mum and dad, Gnora and Gnoah, not to mention her brothers, Bumpy, Dimple, Gnoggin and Jonah. And with names like that it's probably best not to mention them. The Bottomlows wouldn't exactly qualify for Mastermind. Take Dimple. When one of the bantams is killed by a fox in the night, Ingrid asks Dimple if he left the door open. He says he didn't have to, as there's a big hole in the back of the coop. Ingrid doesn't get a very warm welcome, as she's a bit of a bossy-boots, a sort-of cross between Miss Piggy and Mrs Thatcher. With qualities like that, it's not surprising she's soon banished to the wilderness. Watch out monsters!

Label: Level 9
Author: In-house
Price: £9.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: Not applicable
Reviewer: Tony Bridge

Come on, admit it - you thought I'd drag out all the (gn..) puns, didn't you? Well, gno way am I... Oophs.

You'll have to have a strong stomach for such wit to play Level 9's new adventure Gnome Ranger - its first for ages. Level 9 manages to squeeze every ounce of life (or death) out of the joke.

The player's role is that of Ingrid Bottomlow of Gnettlefield. After attending the institute of Gnome Economics (I did warn you), she returns home in time to be given the order of the Gnomic Boot in the best Gnome tradition, that is by receiving a Magic Scroll which has the effect of teleporting her many, many leagues from Gnettlefield...

The three-part adventure concerns your efforts, as Ingrid, to return home.

In each part, there's a different problem to be solved, as well as a different overall theme. In the first, the Evil Witch's Cottage blocks the way home, so she must be defeated. The theme here is Animal.

The second part is Vegetable, and so vegetables play a large part in solving the Riddle of the Shrinking Teaplant, while the third part is mineral, involving the return of precious stones.

Each part is fairly small. In the first story, for example, I've counted 30-odd locations, and many of these are described with little more than 'a grass plain'. Level 9 has used a favourite device to increase the apparent size of the map, and included circular exits in some locations which will keep returning players to the same location. There is also the obligatory maze.

'Pseudo intelligent characters', are a heavily advertised feature of the adventure.

Though not so much of an original feature as Level 9 would like us to believe, you'll have to enlist the services of most of these characters to solve the puzzles, and it pays to think deeply about the attributes of each creature.

I didn't find these creatures particularly intelligent - they are there when you need them, react as they should once you know what they want (and they'll usually tell you) and wander about the landscape. Poor old Thorin was doing all that, many years ago.

Commands are comprehensive - all the usual ones like Examine and Inventory are present along with Again, which repeats a command. Wait (a certain number of moves) and Brief and Verbose, which control the amount of text description you see.

The 128K version contains others like Ramsave and Oops (take back the last command).

Neither version has the digitised graphics which adorn some other machine versions.

The puzzles are in fact not very complex, consisting largely of the traditional object manipulating.

Despite the fact that the atmosphere in the adventure is largely conjured up by all the puzzle solving rather than any scene-setting, all the juggling with objects and characters tends to hide this fact, hoodwinking the player into believing that more is going on than is actually the case.

Despite some minor niggles it's great to have an all-new Level 9 title at last - displaying the same sense of gentle humour, plays on words and situation setting that made the earlier games so captivating. And it's certainly been a long time coming.

It's not the best thing Level 9's ever done. It's not any major step forward for adventure game technology, either.

But it's great to have them back.

Level 9 launch Ingrid Bottomlow...

This is the second game to use Level 9's new 'interactive character' system - and things are definitely looking up. Knight Orc failed to stir the Pilg's blood to any great extent, though it was - by most companies' standards - a good enough program. There were an awful lot of unnecessary computer-controlled character in the game and this - in conjunction with the lack of information about what was really going on - I for one found rather unsettling.

However, Level 9's new Managing Director, Ingrid Bottomlow, has obviously been throwing her weight around because Gnome Ranger puts right a lot of things that were wrong with Knight Orc, and does it with a sense of humour and some clever puzzles.

Some time ago, Pete Austin of Level 9 told the Pilgrim that the only way forward for adventures (he believed) was in the construction of multi-character puzzles. The days when you could just find a rod and wave it over a chasm were past and for there to be any real originality in an adventure the puzzles were going to have to involve other NPCs (non-player characters).

Look at most of the successful games of recent months and you'll see that there's a lot of truth in this. Characters pop up in games with greater frequency than ever, and more often than not you'll have to co-operate with them, or recruit them in some way to gain your objectives.

Knight Orc implemented this policy with a vengeance, and one of the game's problems was that it went too far. Some of the puzzles require several characters to solve, and some of them are VERY difficult indeed. Enter Gnome Ranger...

The plot of the game is really pretty basic. Young Ms Bottomlow starts the game a long way from home, having been whisked away from her family by a 'faulty' teleport scroll. There is just the faintest suggestion that the affair was a deliberate ploy on behalf of her family to get rid of her, but we'll let that pass and it doesn't seem to have any bearing on the gameplay!

The game is in three parts and unlike Knight Orc you can't move between the parts at will - each part is a separate game unto itself and you have to solve them in order, gaining access to the next episode only when you have completed the current one.

In the first part you find yourself outside a shop, surrounded by a grassy plain. One of the Pilg's criticisms of Knight Orc was that there were a lot of locations which served no useful purpose. OK, so you can GO TO in Level 9's new system, but why bother to include a location if you're just going to pass through it on your way to somewhere else? No problems like that in Gnome Ranger, there aren't that many locations in each section and you can easily move about them at the start, getting your bearings before using the GO TO command later.

IN PARTNERSHIP

All the puzzles in the first part of the game involve other characters. You can make very little headway without, at the very least, recruiting the gnymph and you will also encounter a rather charming swarm of dogs, who reminded the Pilg of the latest Winalot advert. And then there's the llama (who doesn't seem particularly important), the eagle (who is), the unicorn the centaur, and so on. Each of these characters has certain attributes that will enable you to succeed in your initial quest, which is to destroy the power of a wicked witch who has developed a world-wide commercial empire based on stone gnomes.

If you succeed in breaking the witch's wand and shattering her power, you're through to the second part of the game Whereas the first part centres exclusively around character puzzles and cooperation, the second part involves manipulating the ingredients for a series of magical potions. For Ingrid to continue on her journey home, she must just resurrect the Alchemist's tea plant, which for some reason shrivels up at the beginning of the game when Ingrid innocently picks a leaf from it to brew a pot of char for the old gent. The answer, of course, is a fertilising potion, but the ingredients (or one of them, at least) are extremely difficult to come by.

The potion system in part two deserves a mention. Each mixture requires four ingredients, and each ingredient is classified by nature, colour, smell/taste, and texture. Thus if you have a leaf, a yellow berry, a sweet fruit, and a hairy berry you could brew up the same potion as you could with a leaf, a yellow fruit, a sweet berry, and a hairy caterpillar. The recipes for different potions are not difficult to find, though some are rather cryptically expressed.

Once you've resurrected the tea-plant, you're on your way to part three and the final stretch. At this stage you will find yourself sorting out peoples problems in a world dominated by mineral themes, thus completing the 'animal, vegetable, mineral' sequence. Penguins, yetis, and war between the fire people and the ice people will be your chief concerns before finally arriving home.

Gnome Ranger has improved on Knight Orc in the puzzle stakes (more logical and enjoyable), the atmosphere (more enjoyable and less confusing), the plot (more comprehensible), and the characters (more interesting). You can't ask for much more than that, except that perhaps Level 9's next game could give us more of the same. It would be good to see a slightly bigger game, in terms of locations and puzzles, but for the time being this will do gnicely.

RELEASE BOX
All versions should be available by the time you read this. A word of warning to graphics fans, however - 8-bit cassette versions will be text-only. This doesn't worry the Pilg unduly - I'll still be playing my Spectrum version, pics or no pics.

C64/128, £9.95cs, £9.95dk
Spec, £9.95cs
Atari ST, £14.95dk
Amiga, £14.95dk
IBM PC, £14.95dk
Mac, £14.95dk
AMS, £9.95, £14.95dk

Amiga Diskette: £14.95
Atari ST Diskette: £14.95
Commodore 64 Diskette: £9.95, Cassette: £9.95
Amstrad CPC Diskette: £9.95, Cassette: £9.95
Atari XE, 800XL Diskette: £9.95, Cassette: £9.95
MSX 64K £9.95
Spectrum Cassette: £9.95

Level 9 is one of the original UK games houses, remaining an independent partnership for many years, it has produced some 15 adventures in all. Through the years their products have become more and more sophisticated progressing from the verb/noun input to the modern versatile parsers. The size of the games has greatly increased as has their complexity, now they include multi-player puzzles, RAM save/restore, Undo and digitised graphics. But are the story lines any better? The Level 9 greats such as Snowball, Adventure Quest and Lords Of Time are hard acts to follow, regardless of the advanced writing utilities used nowadays (Kaos is the preferred Austin tool at present) and sometime one gets the feeling that these prestigious games will never be bested.

Gnome Ranger, their latest offering, is actually released on their own label again, rather than through Rainbird. Using all the adventure writing skills and technology the Austins have mastered over the years, is this the quest to end all quests?

The story concerns a gnome by the name of Ingrid Bottom low who has got to find her way back home after being accidentally teleported to a strange and wonderful land. Set in three parts, it includes all the hi-tech features mentioned earlier: go to, follow, run to, find, RAM save/restore, undo (not on the Spectrum 48K version), digitised pictures on the Amiga, Atari ST, IMB PC, CBM 64 and Amstrad diskettes and an auto-play feature for demo purposes is included in the ST version.

ADVANCE PARSER

The parser in all cases is very advanced with the capability of accepting intricate input. There are other characters within the game which Ingrid may come across on her travels who can be recruited and given fairly complex orders to carry out, for example, 'Nymph, go to Llama and get the flower then find me and give the flower to me.' Impressive isn't it?

The digitised pictures are very pretty with the ones on the Commodore 64 being the most impressive, given that it is only an 8-bit machine. Gnome Ranger is immediately playable, consisting of no sudden deaths and a huge area to explore. Interaction with the game is quite easy as displays any words it doesn't understand and is quite lenient as to how certain actions required may be phrased.

UNHUMAN

Having said all this I'm not sure I like running all over the place, true it may be more lifelike but it smacks of gimmickry and doesn't add anything to the game except speed of play. Commands such as FOLLOW and WAIT FOR are useful, as is the way other characters may be ordered about, but there seems to be something missing. Perhaps its the plot, it is so far out of context with reality that it cannot possibly be believed and therefore fails to inspire the feeling of being involved. I realise that many adventures are 'unreal' yet they at least either maintain some sort of human element or a semblance of reality via the game style. Gnome Ranger is defunct of humans and because every word that normally starts with 'N' is substituted by one spelled with a GN' (NORTH becomes GNORTH and so on) reality is lost; the Llama doesn't help the case either.

Escapism is fine as long as there is a thin strand included in it which will lead the player back to reality or at least remind him that it not too far away. From a personal point of view Gnome Ranger is very well implemented, but getting through it became nothing less than an arduous task. Eventually I could care less about the fate of Ingrid and indeed it was not too long before the digitised pictures faded to a blank screen.

Level 9 began their downhill slide with Worm in Paradise and have not yet produced a game good enough to drag them back up to the good old verb/noun days. I have added a Lastability rating to this review, a one-off as I feel it is important.