Producer: Adventure International
Retail Price: £9.95
Author: S Adams, M. Gruenwald, J. Romita

Ever since the early days of Automata adverts, comic strips have been associated with computer games and now a well-established adventure games company and a comics group have got together to bring the green mass of the Hulk to the adventure scene.

The Hulk is the first instalment of the Questprobe Series of games from Adventure International which will feature Marvel Comic characters including Spiderman and other Superheroes. Marvel Comics are publishing a comic called Questprobe featuring the Hulk.

You are Robert Bruce Banner, an ex-physicist irradiated by highly charged radioactive particles during the test detonation of a nuclear weapon. The radiation has a mutigenetic effect on Banner's cellular structure causing him to transfer into the green-skinned monster known to all as the Hulk. Although the Hulk is clearly superhuman - he can leap to a height of 3,200 feet and withstand a temperature of 3000°F - it is possible to injure him. We are told he could not survive a near-hit with a nuclear warhead. Yes folks, even superheroes have no answer to these awesome weapons.

You begin as Banner tied up hand and foot to a chair and if you think you must flip to your alter ego to escape then I'd say you're doing quite well for an adventure which comes in a box marked 'Difficulty level: Moderate'. When in a room a gas soon permeates your skin turning it back to a Californian brown tan whilst flexing within are more gently rippling muscles.

What immediately strikes you is the richness and quality of the cartoon like graphics which depict your inflation to the green mass of the Hulk and subsequent demise to Bruce Banner. The detail is stunning. The graphics are not only tremendous but very fast, as is the response time and so the adventure flows along smoothly. There's no beep on input but the routine is so fast and efficient that mistakes are rare.

Your task is to locate all the gems and find somewhere to store them. There are many interesting problems to tackle but the foremost is how to survive. But when death-defying attempts come to an end not all is lost. In true cartoon style the hero is never really killed and pressing D for down will bring you out of the clouds and back on terra firma.

Other cartoon characters in this adventure are the Ant-Man who when reduced to the size of an ant retains his original mass loading a super punch for a half-inch high figure, and Doctor Strange who can tap the universe's ambient magical energy.

Vocabulary involves simple verb/noun couplings e.g., if you input WAVE FAN the reply AT WHAT? comes up and the program kindly gives you an example of the type of input is now requires - e.g. AT TREE.

When in need of assistance you may type HELP and more often than not be greeted with SORRY I CAN'T DO THAT BUT ASK FOR A SCOTT ADAMS HINT BOOK AT YOUR FAVORITE STORE!

My only criticism of this fine adventure is the repetitiveness that sets in once you've established the object of the game. As you move around collecting gems each of the three domes becomes indistinguishable as each is represented by the same graphic. To leave each dome the same routine is painstakingly followed.

The Hulk is a truly marvellous adventure with super graphics and a theme familiar to everyone.

COMMENTS

Difficulty: Average
Graphics: All locations and some actions. Remain on screen. Excellent
Presentation: Good
Input facility: Average. Two word inputs
Response: Very fast

FAX BOX
Game: The Hulk
Publisher: American Software
Price: £2.99

The Hulk was Questprobe's first release and is now on the American label. Here's your chance to become Bruce Banner or The Incredible Hulk, depending on who it's best to be at the time. Tied to a chair in the opening locations, Bruce Banner can't do much, but if you learn the secret of becoming The Hulk then a mere chair should prove no problem to you.

The aim of the game is to collect the gems and deposit them all in the right place, the emphasis being on toughness of problems rather than having a million and three locations. The graphics are good cartoon stuff, but the text is brief in the extreme, and the usual AI peculiarities ensure this time that the location description is not printed on-screen unless you type LOOK. Which means you're expected to respond to 'What shall I do?' without having the least idea of where you are or what objects there are. Not the greatest of games, but definitely an acceptable price.

THE JOLLY GREEN GIANT IS HERE

The incredible Hulk fails to move Quentin Heath.

The release of The Hulk, for the 48K Spectrum, marks the culmination of several months of collaborative effort between Marvel Comics and Scott Adam's UK company Adventure International.

The graphics adventure, which has a screen format almost identical to that of The Hobbit, features Marvel superheroes and villains such as The Hulk, Dr Strange and The Chief Examiner. It is Marvel's first venture into the world of microcomputer software and it is doubtful whether it would have made an entry if publisher Stan Lee and Scott Adams had not formed a team dedicated to producing a series of games based on comic characters.

Both men have been innovators in their heydays. Lee almost single-handedly created the comic market in Britain and created many of the Marvel heroes. Scott Adams is the man who invented the microcomputer-based adventure game. He was behind the first commercial adventure to be launched, Adventureland, and has most of the responsibility for bringing The Hulk to the small computer screen. The game uses the classic Adams textual style, which he took from the larger mainframe adventures, combined with graphics which are drawn at a speed which rivals The Hobbit.

The graphics routines may be innovative but the text translator routines which decode the player's instructions to the computer are simplistic and crude. They allow only the use of a verb and noun structure which means only one instruction at a time can be typed into the machine and all commands must conform to the same format.

The program will only understand words which are relevant to a particular location and will ignore all others, sending an error message to the player with apologies for its ignorance. That puts user-friendliness right out of the window and makes the player feel as though the game was written in the stone age of computing.

If Adams had been limited for memory space within the program he should have put to one side the detailed pictures which emulate The Hobbit and instead worked on the translator so that it could handle multiple phrases within sentences coupled by conjunctions. Such techniques might have been innovative six or seven years ago, when Adams first started writing games, but in the British market today they are old hat.

The story involves Dr David Banner and his alter-ego The Hulk in a quest to find the Bio-Gem, an orb of energy with fantastic powers. While trying to accomplish his quest Banner must collect several ordinary gems. Finding and placing the gems is the main method of scoring in The Hulk and you are not given a logical reason for so doing. The same is true of the character motivation within the game. Unlike many of the classic adventures, created by such companies as Level Nine Computing and Digital Fantasia, the characters within The Hulk are not given any motivation apart from an allegiance with either good or evil.

The total lack of character realisation produces cardboard cutouts which you will not find even in the comic books. In those publications the heroes try to lead ordinary lives, such as Peter Parker who as well as being Spiderman also leads a more mundane life as a newspaper photographer. In the comics characters worry about money, the level of crime in society and even where their next meal is coming from.

The Hulk adventure, however, takes none of those factors into the storyline and so the player tends not to feel any attachment to hero or villain. The Hulk would have been an excellent opportunity for Stan Lee's brand of superhuman drama.

While the characters are uninteresting the plot is too inventive. The authors have taken great leaps and expected the player to follow. For instance, The Hulk creature is an integral part of the adventure and helps Banner to get out of most of the tight spots. The player, however, will either have to be clairvoyant or pay attention to all the examples in the instruction booklet to find the one way in which Banner can turn into this alter-ego.

If you are a gamer who does not want to look at the help sheets supplied with the game to solve the adventure then you are likely to be disappointed with The Hulk, unless you have a power of deduction which borders on ESP.

Most adventure writers leave 'plants', or objects which aid understanding, at every location. Adams does not bother with that and you move suddenly from open fields to an underground enclosure without entering a dome or going through a tunnel. Any map-making techniques, which have been started when the player is transported, will become useless and a new strategy will have to be formed.

Adams seems to be in a time warp. He is still writing for the 1970s and does not seem to be aware of the latest advances in adventure writing techniques.

The Hulk will sell but not because of its technical excellence. Marvel has put so much commercial hype behind the product that anyone enticed by superheroes will buy it. That is a pity as there is too much hype in the market already and the new Marvel adventures only add to it.

MACHINE: Spectrum 48K, Commodore 64, Atari, BBC, Apple
PRICE: £9.95 (C64 £9.95; Atari £9.95, £19.95 disk, BBC £7.95, Apple £19.95)

Meanwhile The Incredible Hulk bursts onto your screens, courtesy of Scott Adams and Adventure International. This is one of a new line of graphic adventures that look very promising, and versions are available for the Spectrum, Commodore 64, Atari and Apple machines. There's also a text-only version for the BBC.

Scott Adams' games are intriguing. They are at best rather primitive - no complex sentence input, rather limited vocabularies, and very brief location descriptions. However for some reason they are all furiously addictive. The Hulk is no exception and I struggled with it for hours.

The graphics are excellent, but thankfully you can turn them off as they take a while to load from disk. I haven't tried the cassette versions yet, but don't see how they could be any faster.

Your task is to collect a number of jewels or die in the attempt which you will almost certainly do over and over again. As with other Scott Adams games, however, dying isn't much of a problem - you end up in limbo, but don't lose the things you're carrying and can re-enter the game with ease.

The Hulk's super powers give you possibilities that take a while to explore. Try digging a hole and you soon find you've dug your way right to the centre of the Earth! I leave the rest to your imagination, which will certainly be kindled by this very enjoyable game.

If you were a green skinned monster trapped inside a computer, perpetually turned into a weakling human by nasty gases and persistently encountering an unhelpful Chief Examiner, what would you do? Answers on a postcard please to...

The Hulk is the latest offering from Adventure International, written in collaboration with Marvel Comics, who first spawned the not-so-jolly green giant. It follows the current trend for adventure of the book of the film of the record of the comic strip, which actually seems to be doing us poor adventurers a great deal of good as new talents, new plots and new money is being put into this masochistic hobby. So, you might expect the product of the design talents of Scott Adams and the graphics of Marvel to be something extra special in this line. If you do, then you will be rather disappointed.

I reviewed the Spectrum version. The graphics are definitely good, though the claim to be 'the best yet' might be contested by a few software houses. They are static illustrations in the style popularised by the Hobbit, with each scene getting its graphic. Some actions also have appropriate graphics. For example turning from the Hulk to Bruce Banner takes three pictures which you must step through by pressing . This is attractive at first but becomes a bit of a pain after a while, because all you want to do is type in the next command. Most illustrations are pretty close to the comics' originals, and there are some nice touches. For example, 'Look Ring' gives you a close up picture of the ring (not that it does you any good!). Looking in the mirror shows your current image (either Hulk or Banner). You can turn off the graphics, if you want to.

The game is definitely difficult. Some might say it was too difficult. I would - I am stuck. However, I have never held this against any adventure (mind you my copy of Castle of Riddles has taken to cowering when I enter the room). I would say it is about standard Scott Adams, but I do have some gripes about the game. The main one is that this Spectrum version is one of the unfriendliest games I have played.

It often refuses to interpret a command you know it understands: 'look ring', you say. 'I don't understand LOok riNg' it replies. Perversely, when it feels annoyed by the way you keep bothering it, it turns your innocent commands into something totally different and pretends it does not know what is going on, presumably hoping you will give up and go away. Obviously either the keyboard reading routine is at fault or, more likely, the text compression is getting the bends on decompression. Maybe other copies will not have this fault, but it seems to be a serious flaw.

There is more. Output is pretty crude. The program opens with various credits, then does not even clear the screen before giving the first game message. No fifth form programmer would let a game go out like that. Screen scrolling is also untidy. Your task is to collect a number of gems (some of which seem to appear randomly) and 'store them into' the proper location, whatever that means. Worst of all, many messages appear in mixtures of upper and lower case and are written vertically on the screen rather than from left to right. Even some of the cheapest amateur games around format screen messages more attractively than this.

Another irritating point, though perhaps not a flaw, is the pure commercialism (and, dare I say it, Americanism) of the program. The flashing cursor pointlessly includes the letters AI (not Artificial intelligence but Adventure International) making a distracting, headache inducing feature. The manual says HELP may give you assistance. It may, but it has not given me any; instead it gives an advertising message for the Scott Adams Hint Book. No free help sheets for the brain-warped adventurer here but more on the lines of Melbourne House again - write a game too difficult to solve then charge more for the solution - and use the program to advertise it. Even sillier is the fact that every time the words The Incredible Hulk appear a little (TM) follows them. This does not look much like the 'wondrous electronic world' promised in the blurb. And I will not mention the American expression (after all 'Hit Enter' might be appropriate to the Hulk) and spelling (but why cannot a game for a predominantly British machine use British English?)

If you are looking for sophisticated artificial intelligence, or complex text handling, or interactive characters you will find none of that in The Hulk (TM). What you will find is the classic two word input plus a few single key commands L for Look, I for inventory, and initial letters for directions and some special commands which depend on your machine. In fact the only real novelty in the game itself (as opposed to its graphics) is the type of puzzle and problem you have to solve. Whilst the claim that you do not need to know Marvel comics to play is true to some extent (just as The Hobbit can be solved by guesswork, trial and error and some common sense), you are not going to get far if you do not know anything at all about the relationship between Banner and Hulk. In fact the settings and problems are very much in tune with the comic book ethos, and are likely to delight everyone Out there with fingers blackened from cheap ink. This, of course, contributes to the difficulty of the game.

There are other good features, and some that are debatable. One of these is Questprobe, a comic cum magazine devoted to this series of adventures. Ah, you had not guessed that this was the first of a series? There are to be twelve comics, and twelve games, over the next four years, each featuring a Marvel hero but all linked in plot. If they improve as they go along, this will be a good feature. If they remain the same as The Hulk they will be dismal in four years, and I doubt if the series will be completed.

The first issue of Questprobe is no different from your standard Marvel comic, including the puzzling story. I suspect that there are clues to the game within it, but I have not found any yet. Despite all I have said, the combination of game and comic seems an attractive package, especially if they can be tied together rather more convincingly than the first time around.

On balance then, this is a goodish adventure, well packaged but badly presented on screen. Too much time has been given to the graphics and to commercial enterprise, and too little to considering the user. Nevertheless, many copies will be sold and lots of money will change hands because of the names behind the game. If you are keen on comics or want a game with some of the best graphics around, you can probably put up with the irksome features of The Hulk, but I hope at least some of you will avoid it and encourage a better program next time.

Spectrum 48K
£8.95
Adventure International

Scott Adams fans should rejoice! The master has written this brand new adventure, the first of a series featuring characters from Marvel Comics. The next one in the pipeline features Spiderman but leading the Quesprobe series is that lovable mountain of muscle, the Incredible Hulk.

The game is a mixture of text and colourful comic strip, high-resolution graphics. There are a large number of pictures, more than one for every location, and each one filling almost the top half of the screen. The graphics appear almost instantaneously - no twiddling your thumbs while the picture is slowly and laboriously etched in.

The rest of the screen is used for text input and output, the messages scrolling upwards as more are added. Commands are the simple and traditional single or two word type, e.g. I (for inventory), Get Mirror, Go Dome etc.

The main aim of the quest is to recover gems. In doing so, you'll meet such characters as Ant Man, Doctor Strange and a mysterious personage known as the Chief Examiner.

Apart from the impressive graphics, the fun of the game lies in trying to solve Scott Adams' usual mind-bending puzzles. There are plenty of brain teasers in this adventure. Right from the start, problem follows problem; in fact, you're in trouble as soon as the game opens. There in front of you is Bruce Banner, securely tied to a chair.

Since it is Bruce - and his alternative self, Hulk - whom you have to steer through the adventure, you're going nowhere. Banner is not strong enough to break the ropes but Hulk could do it in a trice.

Having freed Banner from the chair, you will be spending the rest of the adventure switching between the two characters. It's hard to stay as the Incredible Hulk for too long - gas keeps turning you back into Bruce Banner.

The comic strip graphics are faithful to the originals and the problems are up to the usual Scott Adams' standard. This is certainly one not to be missed.

Americana
£2.99

A re-release of the first Questprobe game, courtesy of US Gold's budget arm. You play Bruce Banner and his monstrous alter ego and, in the author's ever-realistic style, must collect some gems.

This was the first Scott Adams game I played and I was bitterly disappointed. The major fault is an intrinsically poor design. It relies on dirty tricks like having three different domes but identically external descriptions of each, and random distances between them (an astoundingly dum idea). Nearly half the gems can be found by entering three simple commands in various places.

The usual Adams flaws are here, like dodgy vocabulary and very sparse description (complete with "TM" after some words). Add to this poor quality programming (thankfully it improved with later games). Among the ways this manifests itself are the sloppy presentation of messages, and a peculiar parser bug which means some commands must be entered twice before they're understood.

The graphics were stunning when this first came out; now some look scrappy, but most are still rather good. Shame they black out every time you enter a command.

There are a few good points. Sometimes when you type EXAMINE you are shown a close-up picture, a clever idea; and the pics illustrate actions as well as locations. The instructions are impressively lengthy for a cheapie. And a few of the puzzles are fun, if you can tolerate all the faults which make them harder.

Perhaps worth looking at if you're an Adams or a graphics fan, and certainly better at £3 than full price ... but still pretty naff.