Producer: Interceptor Software
Memory Required: 48K
Retail Price: £5.50
Language: Machine code
Author: D. Banner, T. Green

Jewels of Babylon follows in the footsteps of Message from Andromeda and Forest at World's End and if you were to buy this latest offering there would be few surprises, for all intents and purposes this is the same program but with a pirate/desert island backdrop. In effect it's the same cake with a different flavoured icing. It's almost inconceivable that a programmer could continue to churn out the same old game without attempting any improvements to refine the product, but this is the case we have here. All the old criticisms concerning the first two games still hold strong.

Impressive, high quality graphics appear very quickly and only appear automatically on your first visit to a location, which is a nice touch, but when you count up, there really aren't that many graphics. The input routine has opted for neatness as opposed to efficiency; there is no cursor and no beep on entry although to be fair input remains mostly error-free. Descriptions are short and unimaginative giving the whole a weak impact and there is no score. This game uses some awful system of text scrolling whereby the top part scrolls up and off when you input at the bottom.

The game boasts 100 locations. I went through 50 without solving a single problem, unless you count making the natives' supper a solution to a problem. Like its predecessor, Forest at World's End, it often falls back on cliche and is about as interesting as a jumblesale paperback book.

Three thousand years ago, before the Christian era, a fabulous treasure was crafted by the master craftsmen in the old city of Babylon. Such was the beauty of this collection, many men died to obtain possession of it. At the end of the nineteenth century the jewels were in English hands. In a great gesture of friendship, Queen Victoria intended to give them as a wedding present to an Indian Princess. On route from West Africa the ship carrying the jewels was attacked by pirates who took them, leaving the crew for dead. You are the sole survivor of the attack. After recovering from your wounds, you vow to reclaim the jewels. After much marching you locate the pirates' base on a remote island. Your objective is to search the island, find the jewels and return them to the ship.

The vocabulary often goes beyond verb/noun but despite the instructions suggesting adjectives, adverbs and prepositions are needed to avoid ambiguity, there are many cases where this is demonstrably not so and all the extra input required does is to make the language that bit more unfriendly. Take, for example, your first task - to get into the boat from from the ship to enable you to go ashore. CLIMB LADDER and ENTER BOAT are not accepted, but CLIMB DOWN LADDER and CLIMB INTO BOAT are. I admit there is a thin dividing line between greater sophistication and unfriendliness, but the program could provide more prompts to coax you along the right path. When you see a smooth, vertical slab of rock on your travels, you can't move or push it, but surely you should be able to examine it?

If, for you, an adventure is not complete unless it has a maze then here you can get all dizzy amongst no less than three. Amazing.

Jewels of Babylon shows all the traits of a game knocked off an assembly line. Some of its shortcomings are common to many while the conspicuous absence of any real problems is more typical of this series from Interceptor. If variety is the spice of life then this game is one big amorphous lump of monosodium glutamate.

COMMENTS

Difficulty: quite difficult
Graphics: very few but are fast and well designed
Presentation: has awful habit of scrolling description off as soon as new input is introduced. No use is made of colour
Input facility: often pedantic requiring more than verb/noun for no good reason

JEWELS OF BABYLON
Interceptor
Memory: 48K
Prices. £5.50

Wow, you think, as soon as you've loaded Jewels of Babylon, what faberooney graphics! Don't get overexcited though - there aren't that many.

The setting would do justice to Desert Island Discs - a remote, tropical sea-girt spot with dunes and palm trees. Somewhere in the interior lie concealed the jewels of the title.

Promising? Possibly, but first try to get into the wee rowing boat. Enter boat? Climb down? No - it's got to be 'Climb into boat'. The interpreter is not hyper-friendly.

Once ashore you explore. There are a few objects littered about but it is possible to wander around like a total wally for endless stretches.

Endless perserverance may well get you somewhere but personally I play games to be entertained.

3,000 years ago some fabulous jewels were created by master craftsmen in the old city of Babylon. They came into English hands in the 19th century, but were lost to pirates who left all but one of the crew of the boat that was carrying them for dead. This is where the Adventure begins, for you are the one who survived and have vowed to reclaim the jewels.

So it is that you find yourself on a bright pink ship off some remote island. Yes, it's bright pink, and no amount of fiddling with the TV will make it go the colour you thought 19th century ships were supposed to have been. The island itself is a place of golden sand and clear blue skies, just the place to spend a holiday - except for the cannibals!

The graphics are more less instant and are among the best I have seen on a Spectrum. The text allows full-sentence input, although in most cases you have to get the wording just right.

Babylon is said to have over 100 locations, although most of them are maze rooms, making pen and paper a must for this Adventure. So is a "save" tape, for there is plenty of wildlife about and a spider might just happen to drop from the trees onto your shoulder, or a water snake give you the once over as you battle your way across a swamp. Most of the time, such encounters are just for fun, but there is always that chance that the spider will sink its fangs into your neck!

Most of the puzzles seem to be the "find your way around" or "get past something" type and, although they all seem to have logical answers, it's getting the right words in the right order that's the real trick. That made playing Babylon a little on the difficult side at times, but still a very interesting Adventure with lots of action.

GEM

MAKER: Interceptor
FORMAT: cassette
PRICE: £5.50

Sole survivor of a pirate attack on a ship carrying the fabled Js of B, you have found the pirate's islands base and set out to recover the hot ice. In standard Interceptor style, it's a mainly text adventure, 100+ locations, with periodic and brilliant, if rather unnecessary, graphics, far superior to those of their earlier Forest At World's End. A very sophisticated command analyser makes it possible, and necessary, to enter complex actions. Getting off your ship, for example, is done by 'climb down ladder'. There are three maxes, jungle, swamp and thicket, very early on with not much in the way of loose objects to use for mapping them. Beyond them lie further hazards, such as lip-licking cannibals, before you get to the main course. Fraught and exciting.

MACHINE: Spectrum, Amstrad
PRICE: £5.50

If you think the screen-dump of the bridge on the opening page of Adventureworld is impressive, then check out Jewels of Babylon from Interceptor, because there are plenty more where that came from. Ever since Heroes of Karn the company seem to have made a point of including high-quality graphics in their games, and this one is no exception.

At the beginning of the game you find yourself in a boat moored a short distance from a tropical island. To get into the adventure proper you must enter your rowing boat, row north, and on landing at the island your adventure begins. Not all the locations have graphics, but those that do are beautifully depicted. Your objective is to explore the island, find the treasure, and return to your ship.

The cassette cover gives you the impression that the program will understand 'standard English', but this is not the case. Here's a typical sequence from the game to illustrate the point:

Computer: You can see: a smooth vertical slab of rock.

Player: Examine rock.

Computer: Please rephrase that

Player: Examine slab

Computer: I don't know the word 'slab'

Player: Look rock

Computer: Please rephrase that.

...and so on. The moral is that just because a program 'makes full use of nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions' (as this one claims to do) doesn't mean it's going to be any easier to get along with.

Other niggles about this game include random death, where the player gets killed off by poisonous spiders falling from above without warning, and very scanty location descriptions, though I suppose the graphics make up for the last shortcoming.

Perhaps I was just having a bad day, but I didn't find Jewels of Babylon an easy game by any means. Even the maze had me foxed for quite a while, since there aren't an enormous amount of objects for you to collect and then use to drop and mark your position. I kept ending up in a native village at supper time, only to find out that it was guess-who on the menu.

As a result I'm determined to get back to this game and crack it, so I have to admit that, for me anyway, it possesses addictive qualities.

The game boasts over 100 locations, so there's going to be quite a bit of exploring going on in the Wizard's cave over the next few days.

Interceptor Micros
£5.50

The cover artwork for the cassette inlay of Jewel Of Babylon is strikingly similar to that for Mordon's Quest, as both feature skulls and swords. This is the only thing between the games which is similar because where Mordon's Quest is full of atmosphere with lengthy text descriptions. Jewels Of Babylon is not, despite the brilliant graphics which accompany certain locations.

The story goes thus: in Babylon, 3000 years ago, master craftsmen created a set of jewels, so beautiful that men would kill for them. By the end of the 19th Century, the jewels' bloody history had brought them into the possession of Queen Victoria, who intended to give them as a wedding gift to an Indian Princess. The ship carrying the jewels though, is attacked by pirates who leave the crew for dead and take the jewels. You have survived the attack and plan to regain the jewels. You travel to the pirate's island, which you must search to find the jewels, and return with them to your ship.

Several of the locations boast excellent graphic pictures, which give highly detailed views of your surroundings. The text descriptions though, are very sparse and don't adequately support the pictures. There are few taxing problems and it is possible to visit about half the game's locations with very little trouble at all. The adversaries for these first few locations are the island's wildlife - snakes, crocodiles, spiders and lions. Most of them are easily dealt with or easily avoided. There is very little challenge until you reach the later stages, despite the fact that the game claims to be for 'advanced players".

The game goes beyond the standard Verb/Noun input, but uses non-standard vocabulary which makes it more difficult to tell the game exactly what you wish to do. To leave your rowing boat, rather than CLIMB ASHORE or LEAVE BOAT, you have to enter CLIMB OUT BOAT. Small points like this increase the difficulty of the game, but in the wrong way. Rather than having difficult problems which need ingenious solutions, Jewels Of Babylon makes it difficult to find the correct phrases to use to get the response you want, which just results in annoying the player. Rather than playing a game, you're simply trying various phrases until you hit upon the right one. A more user friendly attitude would have improved the game.

Jewels Of Babylon is packaged in the video style cassette case which seems to be all the rage now with software houses. Fancy packaging does not make up for a poor game and only increases the price. If Jewels Of Babylon had been a £2.50 Firebird game then it would have been well worth the money.

Of the two graphic adventures reviewed this issue Subsunk and Jewels Of Babylon, Subsunk has simpler graphics but a far better game, whereas Jewels Of Babylon consists of excellent graphics but a very poor game.

Overall then, Jewels Of Babylon is a simple 'pirate and treasure' type game with spectacular graphics, but little game. If you want a graphic adventure then get Subsunk. If you want a REAL adventure, then get Mordon's Quest. Give Jewels Of Babylon a miss.