Producer: Arrow Publications
Retail Price: £7.95
Author: Joe Dever and Gary Chalk

Fire on the Water consists of a self-contained cassette (which can be bought separately through mail order) with a very instructive concertina inlay and a full roleplaying book of the same name, Book Two in the 'Lone Wolf' series (Flight from the Dark was number one, while the third will be The Caverns of Kalte). With numbered paragraphs throughout, these books create something akin to a computer adventure where the options open to you at each turn lead to different paragraphs. Action Charts, a Combat Result Table and a random number page form the machinery which drives the story along. Within the inside cover of the book lies a map of the Lastlands depicting some of the places mentioned in the inlay: the Kai Monastery, Holmgard and Durenor. Sparrow Books, the publishers, tell us something of the author and the illustrator. Joe Dever became a full-time musician and while on a business trip to Los Angeles discovered D&D, becoming so engrossed he went on to win the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Championship in America in 1982. Gary Chalk began playing war games some years ago when only fifteen and has now turned his BA in design to good design to good effect in Cry Havoc, Starship Captain and Battlecars (co-designed with Ian Livingstone).

This is how we are introduced to Book Two. The Darklords invaded Sommerlund and destroyed the Kai Monastery but you, Lone Wolf, survive the attack and travel to your King enthroned in the capital, Holmgard. Only one power can now save your people - the Sommersword, sword of the sun, bestowed upon the allies of Durenor to the east as a mark of allegiance that exists between the two kingdoms. In return the King of Durenor gave Sommerlund the golden ring known as the Seal of Hammerdal. If ever the shadow of the west should rise again, Durenor would come to the aid of Sommerlund.

On loading you see a castle courtyard with fine detail of battlements, turrets, doors and ropes. The redesigned character set is in keeping with the flavour of the adventure. The text scrolls slowly upward through the bottom half of the screen after which a characters enters stage left, making a distinctive clip clop' sound - a noise which become familiar as it accompanies all movements by characters throughout the game. (The analogy with a stage is apt, since the backgrounds are indeed backcloths with only one, two or perhaps three characters moving along the front of the stage). Lone Wolf, who appears a distinguished chap with a cloak, is offered a choice of weapons between spear, sword or hammer but when you make your choice you should note that it is difficult to swipe with a spear or thrust with a hammer. NB: if you choose to fight with your hands, it is inadvisable to parry!

The significance of the terms SWIPE, THRUST and PARRY lie in their use a keywords on the keyboard overlay supplied with the game. Another keyword, CYCLE OPTIONS, scrolls the options open to you at any one stage, one by one, so you can press CHOOSE OPTION when the most attractive one appears. At this point I chose a sword to help Lone Wolf whereupon a sword appeared on the screen in his hands. Keeping CHOOSE OPTION depressed also cycles the spear and hammer through his hands if you are curious as to how they look. Pressing OBJECTS CARRIED tells me I have a sword and thirty-two gold coins in my pouch. As I progress I can carry up to eight items in my backpack.

The next choice is straightforward enough - off to train with the King's Guard which develops Combat Skill, shown by a bar along the left side of the screen. Training is completed when Lone Wolf loses his endurance (shown by a baron the right) and the fight. Your first effort will no doubt, like my own, be ignominious because the keyword buttons STEP TOWARDS, STEP BACK, THRUST, SWIPE, CHOP etc take some getting used to. More mystical are the activities of Mind Blast which momentarily breaks the enemy's concentration and increases your Combat Skill, and Mind Shield whereby those creatures who use mind force against you find their powers curtailed.

In the bottom right of the screen is a wolf's head which bears a number. Numbers up to 350 correspond to episodes in the book. It won't take long after realising this to discover something rather fundamental governing the whole Fire on the Water project, principally, that the book develops the story to a far greater depth than does the software and in many cases provides more routes to explore the adventure to the full. Hence it can be said that not only does the book provide a more intricate plot but it also offers this for the price of £1.50. The implications are obvious to anyone with limited funds at their disposal.

Fire on the Water is something different for the adventurer. It is a precis of an accompanying role-playing book but it is not dependent upon it, and indeed the software, if need be, can be purchased separately. The quality of the graphics varies with the backdrop but they are always colourful. The first scene and many more which follow are highly detailed and well laid out. Movements of characters, and the occasional movement within the backdrops leg the bird and the ship) are slow and give the whole a plodding, laboured feel. A small graphic of a cassette appears at the side of the screen at moments opportune for saving the game - and the opportunity should be seized, as the game cannot be restarted once you have lost a life.

The combat action is good with diagrams on the cover depicting exactly what stance is represented by CHOP, SWIPE, THRUST etc. Watching fights take place and guiding your character through them is the chief advantage the software has over the book. The book, however, wins on most counts with a greater depth to its storyline and the fact that it provides more routes through which the adventure may be explored. Although it's not strictly necessary to read the book to enjoy the software, a knowledge of the book does improve your play as familiarity with the larger picture can influence your route through the program.

COMMENTS

Difficulty: Quite easy
Graphics: On all locations, and with moving characters
Presentation: Good
Input facility: Single key input
Response: A touch slow due to character movement
Special features: Real time combat, multiple choice adventure

MACHINE: Spectrum
PRICE: £6.95

The first is the Lone Wolf series for the Spectrum, though I imagine that there will soon be similar offerings for other machines. There are two games in the series so far - Escape from the Dark and Fire on the Water. Both titles offer excellent animated graphics and a very unusual format.

The cassettes come either on then own or with an accompanying book that gives some idea of what to expect from the games themselves. The books are split up into numbered sections each of which contains a stage in the development of the plots. I say plots rather than plot, because the story changes as you read.

This because whenever you come to a crucial point in the story, you have to make a decision. Depending on the decision you make you are then directed to another numbered section where you continue reading.

This, of course, is very much like playing an adventure game on a computer, so it's only natural that Arrow, the publishers, have decided to offer a game as well.

The format is as follows - there's a graphics screen surrounded by an attractive border and a scrolling text window below. You place a keyboard overlay on top of your Spectrum. The storyline scrolls on the screen, and whenever you have to make a decision you press the appropriate key and the program jumps to the next stage in the story.

There are also extensive fight routines, requiring diligent pressing of Parry, Thrust, Chop, and Swipe keys. Your fighting skill and energy are monitored on the screen, and when you run out of energy Lone Wolf (that's you) bites the dust.

The fight sequences are well-animated, and after a couple of hours playing I decided that there really was a tactical element which made them much more satisfying than the usual 'You-stab-the-Dire-Wolf routines that other games tend to offer.

Escape from the Dark and Fire on the Water are consecutive games, and a character developed in the first can be loaded into the second ready for action.

So what's different about these games? The first thing to notice is that the program itself dictates your movements. For instance, you can't type in 'Go West' unless that is presented to you as an option to be selected. In this respect the game is more limited than a traditional adventure.

However, all the space saved by the absence of complex 'parsing' routines (the bits of the program in a normal adventure that scan your inputs and generate appropriate responses) means more room for graphics and animation. There is still a good deal of scope for the player to shape the game - you can sometimes run away rather than fight. You can choose your own routes to your destination, and investigate a number of dead-ends, some of which are more rewarding than others.

The White Wizard gives these games the thumbs-up and looks forward to more along the same lines. They are very different in feel to the traditional text/graphics games. but I think they have at value all of their own.

It is, incidentally, worth getting the books as well as the games - you can then use them as crib-sheets if you find the going too tough!

FIRE ON THE KEYBOARD

Noel Williams tackles Hutchinson's new computer games, Flight From the Dark and Fire on the Water, based on the Lone Wolf game book series.

It's getting harder to make the distinction between computer gamer, wargamer, roleplayer, adventurer and reader of fantasy novels. Joe Dever and Gary Chalk have produced something to make the distinction even less clear - the Lone Wolf programmed adventure books, which have now been turned into computer adventures.

It's easy to see why the computer games have been written. A programmed scenario in book form is only a couple of removes from a computer adventure, as the description 'programmed' tells us. Any competent programmer can turn such a book into a simple game with ease. In fact this is probably the easiest way to write an adventure.

Using a computer to play such a paragraph game has various advantages over the book version. No pages to turn, no risk of losing your place or forgetting the next paragraph number, no need to throw dice or to keep records on scraps of paper. But if you are looking for an interesting computer game you want more than this, especially if the game is based on a book with the same structure and which is a third of the price. Most people would have a shopping list of additions which would include things like 'attractive graphics', 'animation', 'real time action', 'significant differences from the book in plot', 'use of sound'.

Five Ways Software, the company which programmed the games, clearly know this and has gone some way towards ticking off all the items on your shopping list. You get real time combat, illustrations of each setting, moving characters and use of sound. However there does not seem to be much in the way of variation from the original books - in fact you can proceed through the programs in many situations by using the book as a reference guide. What variations there are are generally by way of reducing descriptions and missing events out. Occasionally this becomes a real problem. For example in the first four 'paragraphs' of Fire on the Water so much has been taken out of the original that you are given no choices at all and have to play through three combats. Unless you start with a well trained character you stand little chance of surviving this onslaught.

Real time combat on the Spectrum replaces the combat system of the books. The conflict in the computer versions is the most detailed and novel aspect of the program. You have choice of weapons and choice of tactics, including the psychic modes and mind blast and mind shield, and have to move your character to the most advantageous position on screen for striking a particular kind of blow. Movement is only in one plane (left to right) and you cannot change weapons halfway through a fight, but simply remembering which keys govern which tactic makes the contest quite hard. Different weapons add different values to combats and the most effective tactic also depends on the chosen weapon (it's quite hard to stab someone with a mace!). However the Spectrum's keyboard means that timing of blows is haphazard - you never know if a particular keystroke has led to a particular blow and I found that sometimes my blows were 'queued' so that the figure went on striking even when my fingers were not on the keyboard.

Nor is the feedback of effects during combat all that it might be. You do not get the usual constantly updated stats on performance. Instead your own endurance and combat skill are represented by two green thermometer like columns. When the liquid in endurance has run out, you are dead. As for the monsters, they sometimes indicate weakness by adopting slightly crumpled postures, but in other cases you have no real idea if you are doing the right thing or not.

The combination of these devices means that combat feels more haphazard than it probably is. In practice you tend to bash away at the keys in no particular order (because you have no indication of which does best) until your endurance gets low, when you attempt to retreat (and, if you are like me, you hit the wrong key only to find that you have killed the monster by mistake). It seems a little silly to design a complete system which the player is totally ignorant of.

Another novelty is that, instead of being given a character to start with who has pre-generated skills, you must undergo a training session to establish your basic skill. This takes the form of a fight with one of the elders. Apart from the report at the end of the fight you do not get a good indication of how well you are doing and the whole business is a little mystifying the first time round, but it is quite a good idea and works well once you know what is supposed to be happening.

The graphics themselves are somewhere between The Hobbit and Valhalla. They certainly offer no major advances on previous games. The backgrounds are rather better than those in The Hobbit with a better use of colour and some shading. Some are more imaginative but others less well drawn than Valhalla. The moving figures are less convincing than Valhalla's despite being better drawn and on a larger scale. The silliest thing is the way that your own character hops around the place on a single leg. The other leg is supposedly hidden by a cloak but the visual effect resembles an amputated Kermit imitating Little Red Riding Hood. On the other hand some of the monsters are quite well done, and the combat sequences produce some credible combinations of hacking and slashing. However our copy was a pre-production model and we are told some of the weaker graphics may change by the final version.

I have to say that I usually hate any game that is not pure Adventure - that is, one that does not require logic to solve problems. Adventure games, to my mind, should be of the original type and not so-called "Arcade Adventures". Lone Wolf's Fire on the Water is the exception to that rule.

Although the game is not an arcade Adventure, it does rely on graphics for the fighting scenes and is a role-playing game.

You are a Kai warrior, a sort of Samurai warrior who has powers to communicate with animals, and whose mind can attack other minds with a power called "mind force". As a student from the Kai monastery, you start off in the game being taught to fight and soon get used to being well and truly trounced by your master.

You are later sent out to collect firewood as a punishment for inattention in class and, as luck would have it, whilst you are out, the monastery is destroyed by the Dark Lords, and all the Kai Lords are killed It is your task to avenge their deaths and warn the King of the threat of attack.

The game now starts in earnest and many battles and problems confront you. Movement takes place by menu-type commands and, although this may put you off, it is offset by the graphic fighting scenes which are great.

There's an accompanying book with the game which is great fun but, as I'm no role-playing expert, I passed it over to a friend, Paul Cleden, who is into that sort of thing and he promptly solved it in half an hour without cheating! In his opinion, it is a book for beginners which I can quite believe, as it took me three days to complete!

The book and game can be bought in two ways. You can get the game only for £6.95 or the combined package for £8.95. The book alone can be obtained for £1.50, so if you are thinking of buying the combined package, do a quick bit of arithmetic first! "Nuff said!" as the Chief Examiner would probably remark!