Producer: Mastertronic
Retail Price: £1.99
Author: Clive Wilson & Les Hogarth

Aye aye, I think I've seen something like this before. Referring back to Issue 33 (Oct 86) I find the culprit, none other than that sleepy offering from MASTERTRONIC. ZZZZ. And what do you know, that game was penned by the very same chaps we see here, namely Clive Wilson and Les Hogarth. Looking back to that review last Autumn I see that although I was impressed with the game's sophisticated looks and features the whole thing came crashing down due to an inept input system. Even so, judging from my mail bag, many still sought out ZZZZ for further investigation, and they seemed impressed by a smart icon-driven adventure for only £1.99. Well the game reviewed this month should go down even better for it has no annoying input failings, and the presentation is finer than was the case with ZZZZ.

ZZZZ was innovative enough, but by golly these chaps are offering even more for the piffling budget asking price. Here we have a new slant on adventure-style input. You still end up with verb/noun couplings but the way in which you get there is totally fresh and engagingly original. Around the borders of the picture there are well-drawn icons, much as were seen in ZZZZ. In Naru, however, there's the added bonus of being able to scan through the text for the noun to team up with the verb chosen via the icons. If you've played a few adventures in the past you'll quickly realise just how clever this system is; it keeps players' imagination tightly on the problem in question as they're necessarily restricted to the vocabulary in the location description. Hence, if the game has been designed well (and it has), there will be less misunderstanding between player and program. Again, you can only marvel at a budget game making this kind of real advance in adventuring.

Kobyashi Naru is the final trial for those who would be one with the mortals. You stand in a closed chamber on the world of Ygor, a candidate to the Order. Sent here by Overlord of All, you must complete the Naru in all its phases. Success will bring you the knowledge and power of those who have transcended the need for life itself. Failure results in extinction.

Ahead are three doors and behind you a closed portal. It will not open again until you have completed the three tasks of Kobyashi Naru, and obtained the required objects from each. To help there are your wits and little else. The standard wrist terminal you are wearing may be able to analyse certain items and provide useful information, but its use is limited. A chime sounds and the Naru has begun...

The three portals you face at the start are marked Knowledge, Wisdom, and Understanding. There's a special option, SELECT, just for this move. No matter which portal you select to begin with, the immediate result is somewhat the same: a restricted movement between three or four locations followed by death when you try to get any further. For example, in the case of Knowledge, it's a giant, ugly, flesh-eatingKrakod which engulfs you with its tentacles. Chopping one of the tentacles with the double-edged scimitax only sees more tentacles holding you firm.

While scratching your head trying to progress in each of the three sub-adventures you may find it profitable to analyse as much of your environs as possible by way of the ANALYSE icon. This command is similar to EXAMINE in mainstream adventuring but here EXAMINE is reserved for those items actually in your possession. Keeping with the first portal, Knowledge, it might be useful to run through this part of the game to illustrate just how well the adventure runs.

'You stand on a vast plain, a myriad of tiny creatures scurry about. The place is teaming with life. A sweet smell in the air. The scimitax lies on a mossy plinth'. Leaving aside the ungrammatical feel of that passage let's ANALYSE SCIMITAX. The ANALYSE part is brought into the verb window via icons bordering the picture, and the noun placed up into its respective window next to the verb by wav of moving through the text description until the noun SCIMITAX is highlighted. (The system here likes to return to the left hand margin of the text, leaving the left and right cursor keys to do the fine tuning. Given the way this adventure plays there's a lot to be said for using a joystick - Kempston is cited on the cover). ANALYSE SCIMITAX results in 'The divine scimitax of Baal, Etheric Warlord of Gath. The jewel-encrusted shaft ends in twin blades honed to perfection. A runic inscription translates into, I will always return'.

Pressing zero (or FIRE) releases the icon mode again so you can choose another noun. Now if you decide ANALYSE PLINTH is a good move the program scrolls a message across the top of the screen: STUDIED ANALYSIS REVEALS NOTHING OF RELEVANCE, which might seem a little boring, but what is more interesting is the scrolling itself which is superbly smooth and a further touch of class for what is supposedly a cheap game.

I could go on for some time giving good examples of how flexible the game is but suffice to say that the icons allow much leeway and the ANALYSE command in particular gives many a long and detailed synopsis way beyond the one-liners of mainstream adventure.

Kobyashi Naru is a superb piece of microcomputer programming for the paltry sum required. I wonder just how much of a game is left in memory once that allocated for all the snazzy programming is totted up, but this is a small query set against the attractive looks and style of a progressive cheapie like Kobyashi Naru.

COMMENTS

Difficulty: a head scratcher
Graphics: good icons, adequate pictures.
Presentation: attractive
Input facility: icons for verbs and word extraction for nouns.
Response: fast

FAX BOX
Title: Kobyashi Naru
Publisher: Mastertronic

Another interesting budget adventure from Mastertronic, the first challenge being to figure out what the *&#! the title means, though the inlay says it's the final trial for those who would be one with the immortals. Fair enough. This is one of those attempts to produce an icon-driven game that's pretty close to your conventional text adventure, presumably on the grounds that anything you can do, icons do better. I'm not convinced this is a good thing, as what's the point of taking up memory producing pretty little pictures representing GET or DROP when you could just type the thing in at the keyboard?

I'm not knocking the game, though, as I liked it, though that's maybe got a lot to do with its novelty value as well. The game's compatible with the Kempston joystick, or you can use the cursor keys to move around the screen. At the top and sides are 23 icons, and you move the cursor round to choose the one you want. As well as the obvious EXAMINE, GO NORTH, QUIT and so on, there are some like ANALYSE which work in conjunction with the text that appears below the picture in the centre of the screen. Choose ANALYSE and the cursor highlights the first word of the text description. It can then be moved about so that you can analyse whatever's there. In one place, for example, there's "a myriad of tiny creatures scurrying about." Select ANALYSE and move the cursor to highlight 'creatures' and you're told: "Small animals capable of great speed." Other commands include THROW, SWIM, JUMP, USE, PUSH, PULL and so forth.

In the adventure itself you're initially presented with three portals marked WISDOM, KNOWLEDGE and UNDERSTANDING, and through each is a quest that has to be fulfilled before you'll be allowed back through the portal - unless you quit, of course. Some people might hate the restriction on the problem solving that an icon-controlled game offers, but to make up for that the problems do seem to be pretty devious! Definitely worth checking out at this price.

Label: Mastertronic
Price: £1.99
Joystick: various
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Gary Rook

Kobyashi Naru - which for some reason sounds to me like it should be the name of a Japanese supertanker - is an icon-driven graphic adventure with some very impressive twists.

The plot is simple enough. You want to become immortal and to do so must complete three tests - the Kobyashi Naru. You choose which of the tests you want to take first - will you first pursue wisdom, understanding or enlightenment? It's really the screen layout and actual play mechanics which are particularly nice.

At the centre of the screen you get a graphic window showing you what you can see in front of you - usually a landscape, although sometimes it will be an object which you are using or examining.

Then, grouped around the graphics window are a number of icons - little pictures representing actions which you might wish to attempt. In total there are 23, which gives you a fairly wide range of options to choose from. They include the familiar: arrows representing movement in the cardinal compass points - and they include the not so familiar - sometimes you have to pick an option to find out not only what it means but what it does. You can use either the cursor keys and the Fire key, or a joystick, to choose the icon you want.

A really neat little adventure. It may not appeal to the hardened text adventure fanatics but should sell well to those willing to try something a bit different.

Mastertronic
£1.99

You stand in a closed chamber on the world of Ygor. Ahead of you are three portals that lead to three quests that you must complete to learn the ways of the Immortal. Fall and you die!

This is the triple quest of Mastertronic's superb cut price icon driven graphics adventure that introduces a novel new way of adventuring.

The centre of the screen is filled with a "functional" picture of your current location with a text description below it. Above the picture is a message window through which computer replies to your actions that are performed by selecting one of the 23 icons that allow you to do actions such as get, drop use, select, examine, analyse, throw, dive swim and so on. There are also arrow keys to move north, south, east and west and a load/save icon to save your position on tape or in memory (quicksave) in case death lies around the next corner.

Actions such as throw, get, and analyse need further information of what you're going to do it to. Instead of having the frustration of typing words that the computer doesn't understand, you simply use the joystick to pick the word out of the text description! You still get the occasional "You can't do that" message but at least you know which words you can use leaving you to concentrate on the problems.

The three portals are marked knowledge wisdom and understanding and lead to quests that can be attempted in any order although once you've started one you have to finish it before attempting another. However by using the memory save option you can store your position (where you're stuck) in one quest, quit then try another. If you get nowhere with that one loading from memory will return you to your original position.

Don't expect to solve the quests in one evening as they're not easy, but mainly consist of trial and error problems, such as how do you get a sword out of a metal block, crawl through a gas tunnel without dying or blowing yourself up and how to get past a monster that has tentacles that grow faster than you can destroy them. These can generally be solved by analysing everything, trying every possible option and a few impossible ones helped by a sprinkling of logical and lateral thinking.

If you succeed the prize is immortality, but is that worth dying for? One thing's for sure this game is worth every penny.