Producer: Level 9 Computing
Memory Required: 48K
Retail Price: £9.90
Language: Machine code

Level 9 specialise in large, text-only adventures usually having over 200 individual locations. in Lords of Time, a band of evil Time Lords are plotting to alter the history of the world. You must travel back through time and collect nine crucial objects, each marked with the symbol of an hourglass. These will be later used to defeat the Time Lords.

The game starts and you find yourself in the comfort of your own living room. Suddenly there is a blinding flash and before you hangs a painting. There is also an hourglass on the mantlepiece. The painting depicts Old Father Time, and may come to life when examined. The hourglass is a valuable treasure and can be kept inside the grandfather clock to retain your points.

The only exit is North, and here stands a large, run down grandfather clock. It looks big enough to climb into, and perhaps it needs winding (could this be a clue)? Once inside the clock you can see huge cogs numbered one to nine, and a massive, stationary pendulum. The cogs are the key for travelling through to the many time zones. The idea is to leave the present and travel through many prominent times in the earth's history. Go back- and confront angry cave people and ferocious dinosaurs. Go forward and get lost amongst the stars.

Your main objective is to attain a maximum score of 1,000 points. In order to achieve this, the crucial treasures marked with the hourglass symbol must be collected and put into a cauldron. Doing this will cast a spell and defeat the Time Lords.

I find it impossible to justly describe what a brilliant adventure Lords of Time really is. To me, all Level 9 adventures create a remarkable atmosphere because the descriptions sound so life like. This is where so many other adventures fail.

The game comes with a useful booklet containing some helpful clues. The instructions are clearly set out and explain exactly what must be achieved. The booklet is short in length and can therefore be easily read before diving into the adventure itself.

Lords of Time, like any interesting adventure, has a long lasting appeal (at least, until completed), but I think it will take at least a few weeks to figure this one out. It is generally a difficult game, but definitely worth the money.

Fraser Hubbard

Producer: Level 9 Computing, 48K
£9.90 (3)

A band of evil Time Lords are plotting to alter the history of the world. You must travel back in time and collect nine crucial objects, each marked with the symbol of the hourglass, which, when they are put into a cauldron will be used to defeat the Time Lords. The game starts in your own living room and through a run down grandfather clock. The cogs inside are the key for travelling through to the many time zones - back to confront angry cave people - forward, where you may get lost among the stars. Once the nine objects have been located in whatever time zone they may be in, the cauldron must be found. The text creates a remarkable atmosphere with life-like descriptions. Includes a useful booklet of instruction and objectives. A brilliant adventure and highly recommended for a few weeks hard work.

POWERFUL PULL OF THE EVIL TIMELORDS

Quentin Heath finds that classic text-only adventures can still hold their own.

Some people may wonder where the good old text-only adventure games, such as those from Artic Computing, have gone. The advance of graphics and animated adventures, as explored in Mind Games in February, seem to have overshadowed this type of game.

Melbourne House started the move towards this type of game with The Hobbit last year and since then it has continued with the serious, from companies such as Digital Fantasia and Carnell, to the silly, from Automata with its Pi-man and Uncle Groucho.

Most of those graphics adventures are entertaining and worth the money but the textual adventure still holds a formidable place in the market. That is because, with graphics excluded, there is more memory with which to produce complicated plots. Having no graphics facilities also makes the author concentrate on conveying the atmosphere of an adventure to the player and using psychological tricks to beguile the unwary adventurer.

A good example of the state of the art in textual adventures is Lords of Time, the first part of a saga of the same name, from Level Nine Computing. It also shows what can be achieved by somebody who has been designing computer games for only a few months.

Lords of Time, for the 48K Spectrum, is about a band of evil Timelords, with no connection with Dr Who, who want to warp the course of Earth's history. To defeat their evil aims the player must travel through time to collect nine objects which will, if used correctly, restore the flow of time to its correct path.

You will receive your mission instructions from Father Time, if you can discover his whereabouts. Finding him is a matter of elimination, as he will convey his message to you through the only item which has nothing to do with time, or is timeless. It might help you to look upon him as a figure such as Dorian Gray, or Alice.

It is a good idea to pick up any objects you may find during your quest. At first you may have difficulty collecting all the items you need, as you can carry only a few items in your hands at one time. A pack on your back might help but you will soon realise that you need to act like a magpie and find a nest into which you can put the objects until you need them. The pack will not count as an object and you should find it at the end of a country lane.

Unlike the unfortunate Dr Who, you will have some control over your time machine.

The author provides you with nine cogs which make up a wheel of time. If you can learn to control them you should be able to land in any of the nine time zones you desire. It is, however, best to start in time zone one as you will find objects and tests which will be important when you reach the higher time zones.

It would be useful to make a map but, because of the complexity of the game, it is better to produce a plan for each time zone, together with a page of notes for each of those subsections of the adventure than to try to produce one overall plan. Some kind of plan is needed if you are to take this adventure seriously, as each time zone is like a mini adventure in its own right.

One of the most intriguing and helpful aspects is that you can learn by your mistakes better than in most other adventures with which I have dealt in this column. It is helpful to be killed by the giant Mammoth or Allosaurus in the pre-historic time period, as it will show you how to react, and what is expected in the way of weapons the next time you encounter either of those fearsome beasts.

I will endeavour to give some more clues to the solution of this mystery in Hints and Tips but it would take several months to give clues to them all.

The complexity of the plot is achieved partly by the data compilation and compression techniques used by Level Nine Computing in programming its games. That means that, to some extent, the bounds of memory availability become less important as data is squeezed into the memory available. Measuring information in the number of bytes or kilobytes it could, for instance, be possible to store 60K of data in only 40K, which is all you would have on a 48K Spectrum.

It is difficult to chart progress but as a general hint the timescape is structured so that you start when the earth was young, in the Ice Age, continue through Roman and Viking times, go through mediaeval and Tudor history and arrive in the present in a fairly battered state. The adventure does not finish in the present, however, as you will have to visit the near and far future to battle the Lords of Time.

If you know something about ancient history or archaeology you may be able to find your way round the adventure better than the player who knows little of house design during the Roman occupation of Britain.

The designer of both the plot and scenarios spent many months researching the finer points of scenic description with reference to such locations as Roman villages. The research was so deep that many of the locations are from descriptions of real places. The descriptions are so powerful in some cases that you can picture the locations without difficulty.

Level Nine Computing is one of the only companies I know which provides a back-up service for its adventurers. If you have difficulty with any part of the adventure you can send for a clue, using an envelope which has Fly back with a clue printed on it.

Level Nine is at 229, Hughenden Road, High Wycombe, Bucks HP13 5PG.

MACHINE: Spectrum 48K, BBC B, Commodore 64, Lynx Nascom, Oric 48K, Atari 32K
JOYSTICK: No
CATEGORY: Adventure
SUPPLIER: Level 9
PRICE: £9.90

Don't mess with me, chum, I've just killed a mammoth.

I did it this morning, after breakfast. Since then I've boarded Viking ships, fled from a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and been robbed in Ancient Rome.

I've picked flowers in an English country garden, battled with cavemen before the dawn of civilization, and climbed the Milky Way at its end.

I could go on and on. There are over 200 locations in this adventure, the latest from Level 9. As usual I have to take their word for it, I've been playing the game on and off for a week and haven't covered more than a hundred.

But it's not just the size of the game, it's the quality as well that is astonishing. These aren't your normal 'You're in a room. Exits lead West, East, and Down'- type locations, these are fully-described scenes to fire the imagination.

The aim of the game is to defeat the Timelords - a group of meddlesome baddies who get their kicks out of altering Earths history. You can only win by collecting nine objects.

To achieve your aim, you will have to travel, via a vast grandfather clock, through eight periods of history ranging from the ice age to the furthest future.

There is a ninth zone, but I wouldn't call it a time zone, exactly. If you want to find out more about it then you'd better go there, hadn't you?

The program has a very large vocabulary, but unfortunately it won't help you by telling you which words it doesn't understand. Unfamiliar words are greeted with responses ranging from 'Eh?' to 'Arfle Barfle Gloop'.

There is no HELP function, and if you get really stuck you'll have to write off to Level 9 for a clue.

Unusual commands include Left, Right, Forwards, and Backwards. You can repeat a command by typing AGAIN, and refer to an object previously mentioned by IT.

Lords of Time is well up to Level 9's usual high standard, and that means it belongs on your shelf.

A text-only adventure in which you must travel to different time zones in a grandfather clock collecting objects with which you can defeat the evil Lords of Time. The game includes over 200 locations and 80 objects. It is squeezed in 48K using a data compression compiler written by author Pete Austin.

It is in a class of its own as it contains adventures within an adventure. There are nine in all and each of those have at least three scenes. The complexity of the plot has kept players going for months and has given Level 9 a place in the history of adventure gaming.

Position 33/50

Not a Dr Who adventure, but connected very closely to the workings of a grandfather clock! It was designed by Sue Gazzard, mother of two boys and reluctant housewife!

The design was implemented by and is the latest offering from Level 9. It has their usual format - wordy descriptions, many locations, fast response, and occasional screwed-up text decompression.

You are recommended to play this game in short bursts, and indeed, the structure of the plot lends itself admirably to short sessions. Without giving too much away, the many locations are arranged into nine separate levels, and each level can be explored independently.

In fact, it is necessary to make reconnaissance trips to see what's around, before coming to any conclusions on how best to proceed to solve the game as a whole. If this sounds complicated, it isn't in practice, once you get the hang of moving round.

Each level of the game, which can be freely selected, has a theme of its own. One minute you might find yourself on a Viking ship - the next, playing a lute by a four-poster bed. Or trying to tame large woolly mammoths!

The logic of the fairly extensive vocabulary, does suffer some mental lapses. Too many times I seemed to get "Arfle baffle gloop?", Level 9's standard reply to what the program decides is rubbish and, when aboard the Viking ship, EXAMINE SHIP elicited the response "You can't see a moored Viking longship with a fierce dragon prow". A box of matches, when checked, contained "4tches".

But it would be churlish to carp too much about this, as the game is a light-hearted one which is fun to play, not too difficult to progress in but will, I suspect, take rather a long time to complete. Who could ask for more?

Lord of Time from Level 9, for a wide range of micros, costs £9.90.

GREG TURNBULL, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR AND ADVENTURE FANATIC, BEGINS A REGULAR FEATURE FOR NON-ARCADE FANS.

Level 9 are well known for their adventure programs. Their latest offering, Lords of Time, follows hot on the heels of the Middle Earth trilogy (Colossal Adventure, Adventure Quest and Dungeon Adventure) and the Silicon Dream trilogy (Snowball, Return to Eden and The Worm in Paradise). Lords of Time is written in what is called "a super-compact adventure language; a-code". This gives fast response times with long text messages but doesn't occupy much memory.

The tape comes in an attractive (if superfluous) large package and has a brief ten-page pamphlet (like Dark Crystal) which contains highly cryptic clues in the form of an introduction and a poem. The tape appears to be well duplicated and loads first time. Although it only occupies 32K of memory, the program is very wide in scope, having some 300 locations, 750 messages, and about 80 objects. The objective is to score points by collecting each of 9 ingredients and 18 treasures.

Bonus points are awarded for certain actions and for completing the game; points are lost if you get killed! The central location point is the clock from which nine time-zones can be reached. These must be completed in numerical order, as objects from previous zones are required to solve problems in subsequent ones. The ultimate aim of the adventure is to defeat the evil Timelords.

The program recognizes most of the usual adventure words such as: examine inv(entory), score (out of 1,000), drop, look, give, take, N, S, SE, NW, U, D, forward, backward, enter, get eve(rything). search, open, wear, it, etc. AGAIN repeats the last command but there is no HELP routine. The vocabulary understands some 200 words and will accept short sentences, eg search the bedroom, examine the clock, etc. However, you may need to rephrase some requests that it doesn't understand.

The usual quit/save game features are available the word RESTORE will load a previously saved situation. This feature is always welcome if you get stuck and want to go away and think about a problem over a cup of tea. The speed of reply is excellent and the scenes described are very detailed. However, no graphics are available as this is an old-style adventure without character interaction and not in 'real-time'. Hence it suffers badly in comparison to the likes of The Hobbit and Valhalla perhaps the closest equivalent would be Artie's series of text-only adventures.

Some of the problems are very perplexing; one of the earliest being how to get to each of the time-zones, and later how to get the maddeningly-elusive keys under the door of the garden shed! Each of the time-zones contains various locations and problems for you to solve. Numerous objects are provided to help you in these tasks, eg a rope, spear, tin of catfood, metronome, a pick, matchbox, candle, mirror, tin opener, planks of wood, valerian (a plant), a lodestone, keys, a rucksack (to carry extra items), coins, mushrooms, a petrol can, etc.

In each zone you collect one of the nine ingredients: olive branch, dragon's wing, ivory tusk, diamond teardrop, evil eye, dinosaur's egg, jester's cap, silicon chip (the program has some nice humorous touches) and a gold buckle. There are also two treasures per zone, an hourglass, jewellery box, etc. All are needed to increase your point score (so you can see how you are progressing as you complete more and more of the adventure) and for the final confrontation with the Timelords.

I have only explored the first time-zone which contains such locations as a road-works, a two storey cottage with garden, shed, a garage (containing a Porsche!) and a nearby stream so I cannot comment on the content of the other eight sections of the program. However, this early section is very absorbing and will easily hold your interest for some time. Once you've solved these puzzles you can go on to tax your brain on the other zones.

Should you really get stuck, the program box contains an envelope and a hint card for you to send to Level 9, and ask them any specific question(s) you may have about the adventure. This is a nice touch, but could be your one and only chance as Level 9 do not promise to answer any further questions without the special card. So make good use of it, and only when you definitely can't get any further.

In conclusion, this is a well-packaged adventure program for the Spectrum with fast response times to avoid tedium, good descriptions of each location, many difficult puzzles to solve which keeps you interested, and lots of different (and unusual) areas to explore. The situations range from dinosaurs to knights to computers which adds to the time-travel feel of the program. The small pamphlet doesn't actually tell you much about the program, so previous adventuring experience is an advantage (but not essential). The lack of graphics to accompany the good descriptions of each location is a shame, but I suppose it could be said that you can get bored with looking at the same picture many times (especially if it takes some time to draw it) and it does help to save on the amount of memory used.

Overall, Lords of Time is an enjoyable, if somewhat old-style, package from Level 9 and although rather expensive, can be recommended for hours of problem-solving fun for new and hardened adventurers alike. If you like this program you could then go back and try some of the excellent earlier Level 9 adventures, especially the first, Colossal Adventure.

Lords of Time costs £9.90 and is available from Level 9 Computing at 229 Hughendon Road, High Wycombe, Bucks.