PRICE: £9.95
MEMORY REQUIRED: 48K

This is the least well produced adventure of the cassettes reviewed this issue. The adventure is in BASIC and it does not even auto start, ie it is necessary to type RUN to start - a very poor omission. The game also simply ends if you die and has to be re-RUN. There are no graphics at all, which makes the game even less exciting.

Though I have seen worse adventures I would not be happy to recommend this one.

There are mediocre Adventures and bad Adventures, but Leopard Lord from Kayde Software has that little something less that makes it one of the most awful I have had the misfortune to come across. Sounds bad doesn't it!

It loads on a 48K Spectrum under plain cover, and stops - so you have to press RUN. You may soon wish you hadn't. If you ask for instructions, you learn that. "THE PEOPLEOF YARM HAVE OFFERED 1000 GOLD COINS TO RID THEM OF FORDEL, THE EVIL WIZARD". Who was this strange "Peopleof" I wondered.

You find yourself in a gloomy forest, and in so doing are treated to your first sight of Leopard Lord's tiring screen display.

The initial screen, displayed on a white background, gives details of location, exits, and objects.

These are well spaced out, exits and objects appearing in columns rather than rows. After each command the screen scrolls to redisplay, and as the display height is about 3/4 screen height, the eyes soon tire of watching the screen and trying to decide where the new information starts. Another tiring feature is that commands must be entered as full words - no abbreviations allowed.

After a while, my eyes feeling like a reel on a one-arm bandit, I decided to BREAK and put in a CLS statement before the display. All was then revealed!

Not the key to the game, but the lack of care, thought, and expertise put into the program. As I suspected, the program was as sloppy as "PEOPLEOF".

A further look at the listing gave me the impression that whoever wrote it had not heard of a subroutine. Many lines read PRINT "YOU CAN'T": GOTO 20. There were countless repeated FOR/NEXT loops, and the Spectrum's missing ON X GOTO statement was overcome in an inefficient way. The vocabulary, directly assigned variables, was minimal.

I got the impression that tightly written, this program could have fitted a 16K Spectrum. 16K owners are lucky to be spared!

The warning is there for everyone in Cleveland. Don't go blackberry picking in Yarm - or the deadly "Peopleof Hedgerow" will get you! And to friends and readers everywhere - don't even bother to pirate Leopard Lord!

Leopard Lord
From Kayde Software for the 48K Spectrum @ £5.95