Producer: Firebird
Retail Price: £1.99
Author: Peter Torrance

Yes it's that Peter Torrence again, he of Subsunk and Seabase Delta fame, following up his first GAC foray with this one here, a trip into your average computer whizzkid's imagination.

You start your trip into fantasy in a most prospic pose - that of you sitting at your computer console, with only the loading of a disc between you and all the horrors that lie in the average adventure. Two immediate irritations soon make themselves felt even this early on: the blinding white background is a sure-fire cert for headaches, while the curious GAC input format, which has your input split asunder (eg D followed by ISC on a new lint) doesn't half look untidy. Further, as I mentioned last month concerning GAC games, there is a tendency to be left with the end of the last description capping the new one - a most unsightly state of affairs. All of this follows the most irritating loading routine imaginable (short squeals, rather like the rhythmic strangling of a chicken), presumably designed to foil those poor souls who can't even afford a £1.99 game, and a loading screen by Fish (I knew Marillion's days were numbered!).

Only a little further on, another irritant proudly introduces itself. Due to the large area of the screen devoted to GAC graphics, LOOK is often needed to flick back up a location description lost by input scrolling it up and off. Unfortunately the universal 'L' is not accepted and LO is mistaken for LOAD. This is a small gripe, but it gets bigger the more often LOOK is called into service! Similarly' I' is insufficient to call up an inventory of your possessions.

Small exceptions out of the way, this really is quite a good trip round pretty familiar themes. The four titles of the games from which to choose say it all: 2002 - a very odd day in space, The Lords of Half Past Nine (a good two and a half hours early!), Panic Miner 9000 90 Niner, and Raid Over Margate. We are told that these games are linked in subtle and amusing ways, and so it turns out, with each game inextricably linked to the other and with items and problems zipping about all over the place.

Imagination is the game's title, but this adventure shows precious little of that commodity when it comes to presentation. This is mostly due to the constraints imposed by any programming utility, in this case marked by a lack of much-needed colour within the text. The Graphic Adventure Creator necessarily limits the size of the text area (due to the large amount of screen devoted to the picture). When no picture accompanies a location, the previous picture scrolls off in an untidy fashion. The text which does occur is not particularly descriptive, but it is sufficient to get some good jokes in (eg the AA time machine box which is decidedly smaller inside than it looks from the outside), and there's enough of a plot to keep even the most casual adventurer entertained. In writing style though, perhaps too many sentences begin with 'You are on/in'. Peter Torrence has made his name in budget adventure, and this one will do his reputation no harm.

COMMENTS

Difficulty: needs some thought
Graphics: sufficient for a budget game
Input Facility: verb/noun
Response: reasonably fast

Label: Firebird
Author: Peter Torrance
Price: £1.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Gary Rook

This is nice! And it's the latest adventure from Peter Torrence, who wrote such notable offerings as Subsunk and Seabase Delta.

It's really four different adventures in one. The plot is loosely based around you finding a dusty old unmarked disc in your local computer shop, and as no one knows from where it came you take it home to find out what is on it.

It starts getting complicated when you boot up the disc and examine the screen, where you find a small menu of game titles: 1) 2002 A Very Odd Day in Space 2) The Lords Of Half Past Nine 3) Panic Miner 9000 and 4) Raid Over Margate. Interesting!

Choosing one of these titles actually throws you into the very game you selected and you find yourself in one of four mini text/graphic adventures.

The Lords of Half Past Nine, is an obvious parody of Mike Singleton's classic, and opens with you standing on frozen wastes, and 'an icy shiver runs up from your feet, sees your head and comes running down again' type humour.

And so it goes, with a fair few locations for each adventure, with a few tricky puzzles thrown in.

The graphics are Level 9ish - which is to say not terrific - and the text description fairly sparse but I must say I found myself enjoying the whole thing enormously.

Firebird
£1.99

With a title like that, Firebird are setting themselves up for criticism. Indeed, I was going to start this review by telling you how utterly devoid this product is of any original and creative thought - but then I discovered an endearing and unique feature, which made the title a little more justified than I first thought.

The game starts with you sitting in front of your computer; you insert an unlabelled disc (somewhat unlikely with the Spectrum but never mind) purchased from a bargain box and are presented with a choice of four games. Choosing one of these - a space adventure, war game ("Raid Over Margate"), a fantasy adventure ("Lords of Half Past Nine") and a platform arcade game - draws you into the screen. (A recap for the confused: this is four mini-adventures in one). Pinching your arm brings you back to reality.

In an age where single games are using several loads in order to provide more gameplay, several games in a single load seemed a strange idea. Necessity of memory means each has only a handful of locations. What prevents me from utterly slating Imagination is that you are not supposed to play each game as an individual adventure, rather move constantly between them, taking objects from one 'game' to another. This gives the problem solving an engaging new angle.

Otherwise, Imagination is unsatisfactory. It's WRITTEN by Peter TORRANCE (Seabase Delta etc) which means the return OF those IRRITATINGLY random CAPITAL letters in the TEXT. It bears all the other hallmarks of his adventures, most notably a sort of childish feel, as if were written by a twelve year old: simplistic text, laughably unsubtle clues, generally weak humour. But Imagination also features the other Torrance trademark; entertaining and sometimes ingenious puzzles. Then again, this plus point may be outweighed for you by a number of further faults. The vocabulary seems painfully small (and there are no single letter abbreviations for LOOK or INVENTORY - virtually inexcusable), and what you can do is limited - largely, only those actions necessary to complete the game emote a response, which I've said countless times before is poor adventuring. But not only are you unable to do much, the messages which tell you so are aggravating and long winded, along the lines of "Well you can IMAGINE that ... but you can't do it."

Like Torrance's Apache Gold, reviewed last month, this is GACed - and I still think Quilled games are far superior. The graphics are mostly dull and do not enhance the game in the least. Of course they might seem better if the presentation was not so dire. Glaring white background with black, normal Spectrum lettering (so the CAPITALS stand out even more), and sloppy looking input lines. GACed games also have more sluggish response times and scrolling.

Imagination is cheap and fun to solve - but it's truly primitive. Surely Spectrum adventures can be more sophisticated than this - even at budget price?

SUPPLIER: Firebird
MACHINE: Commodore 64, Amstrad, Spectrum
PRICE: £1.99

He's at it again! Peter Torrance, that prolific purveyor of adventures, is back already after Apache Gold with yet another offering - this time on the Firebird label once more.

Imagination has you sitting in front of your computer with a disk of unknown contents, which you picked up in a dusty condition from under a pile of old games in the corner of a computer store. Despite the fact that the slightest bit of dust on a disk will render it, and probably the drive, unusable, you insert it, and find a menu offering four games.

Select any one of the titles, and you are into the game of your choice, taking part adventure-style. "Raid Over Margate" puts you in the turret of a tank on an old airfield at Margate. If you choose '2002' you are transported to the inside of a time machine disguised as an AA box. (It is much smaller inside that it is out, and comes complete with a timelord.)

"The Lord Of Half Past Nine" has a scenario very similar to a well-known epic, whilst "Panic Miner" consists of a series of platforms in the form of a maze, where memory guzzling sprites for a constant danger.

Within all of this, your objective, as determined by the timelord, is to find the number of stars in the universe. Not an impossible task, you might think, but the problem with Peter Torrance's games is the problems. They defy all logic, and yet seem logical enough afterwards.

Imagination has graphics at most locations, and was using GAC in Peter's inimitable tongue-in-cheek text. Nothing world-shattering, but you can't help liking it!