Cult
£1.99

There's bound to be something nasty hiding in the forest north of Thryll Town. As a seasoned adventurer ? Meet Mrs Mop it's hardly the sort of thing to put you off, but as you enter the cool and leafy environment, your heart pounds nevertheless. Who knows what may be in store?

The ensuing journey winds from wizard's cottage through thickets and scrub, long grass and pine trees, a stone circle and a series of caves to the centre of the forest realm. Locations are accompanied intermittently by forgettable monochrome illustrations which take a while to re-draw. With a couple of exceptions they don't really enhance the sparse and minimalist location text.

A functional scenario hides a comparatively ordinary set of puzzles. Once you've found the mysterious spellbook in the wizard's kitchen, most of the rest of the adventure consists of collecting the correct ingredients (frogs, snakes, furry fwoobles, mouldy carrots etc) in order to cast spells to gather more ingredients. Characters ranging from an extremely thirsty nomad, to a hungry but musical little girl, will provide you with the appropriate object only if you help them first. What follows is a frantic round of search and exchange which soon begins to lose its appeal. As each individual defines exactly what he needs by name, you don't even get the chance to work out what exactly it is he wants.

An element of danger adds a little spice to what would otherwise become an even more mundane and monotonous trek. Collect the ingredients in the wrong order or get caught in some of the forest's natural hazards, and your quest comes to a sudden and sometimes sticky end. The procedure becomes something of a logic problem as you try to work out which of the nastier (troll, giant spider etc) you have the power to tackle first. Get it wrong and your adventure in the sinister forest realm is doomed.

Even for a budget game, the parser is extremely limited. It accepts approximately 16 verbs and no complex commands. There is a SAVE option, though no RAMSAVE and you can turn the pictures off for faster play. As the puzzles are so basic, the lack of flexibility doesn't matter that much. Simple commands solve simple problems.

The Realm might work as an introduction to adventuring for a very green beginner. The more experienced won't find it much of a challenge. Exploring and swapping objects is quite entertaining at first and there are one or two interesting features, but on the whole it's unlikely that any initial appeal will last. Considering the quality of some of the home-grown adventures on offer at the moment, you'd probably be happier spending your money on those.

FAX BOX
Title: The Realm
Publisher: The Cult, D&H Games, 19 Meine Road, Stevenage, Herts SG2 8LL
Price: £1.99
Reviewer: Mike Gerrard

This adventure came in, like dozens of others, with a covering letter from the author hoping I'd give it a review. Unlike most, The Realm is getting one. Why? Because of its originality, sense of humour and good old-fashioned fun.

The Realm is the land that you have to explore, and initially you know nothing more than that. At the start you're asked if you're male or female, and it's worth playing both versions as the problems and text are juggled around a little to adapt. In a cottage near the start you meet a wizard who asks you to wait there while he goes off in search of a goblin who's pinched a page from his spell book. In the cottage is a cage, and if you open the cage a little furry creature hops out. This, it seems, is a fwooble. All together now: awww! If you read the book you see the details of all the wizard's spells, page after page, followed by a handy appendix on fwoobles. A good job the wizard hasn't had his appendix removed. The spell details give the objects required, the incantation, and sometimes an explanation of the less-obvious ones. The only trouble is, once in the cottage I wasn't allowed to leave again, so this may be an adventure where you must quit and start again, bearing in mind the knowledge you've obtained.

The piccies are a bit slow to draw, and only the odd one is worth the wait, but you can always PIX OFF. The locations in the woods around the Realm contain a variety of people and animals, and The Quill is used to handle them well. The initial problems are fairly straightforward. Greet the old woman and she offers you a gift if you'll get her some firewood, while the little girl wants an apple. If you're female you can kiss the minstrel to listen to a song, while if you're male he asks for a song in exchange for a gift. The men get their kiss later with a maiden in the forest, though, so that's okay.

These problems and sub-problems are well-nested, and you have to keep careful notes as to who wants what, and also search everywhere you go. Some of the extra little touches really amused me, like if you jump in the pond you scare a duck, and if you try to get the duck it lays an egg and flies off quacking. Sound effects are used, as much as the Speccy/Patch combination allows, so that when you drop an object there's a splat, for example. The minstrel's song also has musical accompaniment, and, if you play as a male you learn part of the song from one of the other characters, then when you go to SING SONG to the minstrel he teaches you a bit more and next time you SING SONG you get a longer verse on-screen while the Spectrum beeps merrily away.

An excellent game for beginners, and anyone who likes to see an adventure with a bit of imagination. Spell-casters will enjoy it too, while Quill users should buy it and see what can still be done to brighten up an adventure.

Label: Willsoft, 36 Walton Avenue, Windmill Lane, Sneinton, Nottingham NG3 2BS
Author: In-house
Price: £2.99
Memory: 48K
Reviewer: Gary Rook

The Realm would have been an easy program to review, if it hadn't been for the letter from the author which accompanied it. In said letter, said author explained his philosophy of adventure writing: as he sees it, the main problem with most adventures is that they make what in the real world are simple actions, like entering a house, into complex problems the solution of which depends on performing a number of different separate actions. This, he suggests, is frustrating, and he has avoided using such 'problems'.

With all that build up, I was expecting something rather special once I'd loaded up the actual program, which, like so many independent adventures, was written using The Quill, Patch or Illustrator - but, no...

Although the game has over 50 locations, all of which feature split screen illustrations, the game is a bit dull, with a plot that tends to be a trifle on the simplistic side and graphics that look a bit crude. This is all a bit unfortunate, as I suspect that quite a lot of effort has gone into writing the adventure.

Wandering through the wilderness north of Thryll Town, the cassette insert tells you, you find yourselves in some wild woods, populated with the usual assortment of adventuring stereotypes - the wizard, the minstrel, the old crone and so on.

One of the main problems with it is that you are so limited in what you can do. A quick glance at the cassette inlay will show you that there are only 36 possible commands which you can use, apart from the magic words which you can pick up during the adventure. Eight of these are compass directions, and up, down, in and out make up another four. Five are program commands, like Save or Load. That only leaves 19 different words with which to solve all the problems of a 50 location adventure!

It's a bit annoying to find a house very close to the start location, and to have problems trying to get in! It's all very well to burble on about making things simple for people, but you can't get much more simple that Enter - and to constantly get the reply hocus pocus is a bit discombobulating. Actually, you can get simpler - the correct command is In.

Similarly, if you want to get a room description again, then the standard L or Look are completely useless; only R - short for redescribe - will work.

The Realm is a decent, if unexciting, adventure program which is unlikely to appeal to experienced adventurers.

Either way I'm less than enthusiastic about the program on side two of the tape, Boxing Manager. If you like these management type games, then you might enjoy Boxing Manager - for a couple of hours. But there isn't really much to attract either serious sports fans or anyone looking for a challenging strategy game. You start with a boxer, who has ratings for strength, stamina and skill; you can hire a trainer to increase these ratings; the more a trainer can teach your lad, the more he costs to hire; you get more money by entering your fighter in contests which he wins; and that's it.

SUPPLIER: D&H Games
MACHINES: Spectrum 48K
PRICE: £9.95

If you wandered into a lonely cottage and found a wizard, what would you do if he asked you stay behind and guard his spell book whilst he went in search of a missing page, recently stolen by a goblin?

Would you hang around, trusting him to return within a reasonable time, or would you desert your post? I hung around a bit, examined his mouldy carrot, and let his pet fwooble out of its cage, tried reading the book with little success, and after a while, began to seriously wonder whether he would bother to come back/ Carefully guarding the book, I thought I would take a stroll outside for a breath of fresh air, and see if I could find him. Oppps! The book was definitely magic, for I was picked up and whisked back inside the cottage again!

The Realm is set in a strange wood, and has monochrome graphics that are mostly passable, in some cases quite detailed. They may be turned on and off with a PIX command.

The parser accepts only two words, and whilst I have always thought of myself as basically a two-word adventurer, having been playing Fish extensively, I found it rather limiting. I wanted to put the fwooble back in its cage, to put the carrot inside the kettle. I began to feel a mite frustrated, not the least due to a not over-endowed vocabulary, until I stopped to think: "If I can't eneter a command because it is too complex, then the game does not require it!"

An interesting little adventure that puts the player in quite an original dilemma at the start, and is pleasant to play.

Spectrum 48/128 Cassette: £1.99

D&H Games are more famous for their football orientated software, it was therefore with interest and some trepidation that I loaded this adventure from their new budget label, Cult, hoping that it wouldn't be a Football Frenzy.

The first point of interest is the staggering in-depth game background include in the packaging. It is:

'Wandering through the wilderness to the North of Thryll town, you come across a strange wood. Dare you step beneath its brooding eaves?' Makes you want to rip the cassette box open and plunge in doesn't it?

After ingesting the scenario I started the game loading and waited. The first screen to appear asked if I was male or female, once I had decided and input my answer the adventure proper began.

A garish green screen sat before me informing in black text that I was south of the wood. A very basic, childish graphic stared back at me from atop the written descriptions. This was obviously the spooky wood the scenario was daring me to enter... In I went.

The text descriptions are sparse, treating you with such dripping prose as 'The forest. Exits are North' and 'The Cottage. Exits are North and Northwest'.

Regardless, I trudged onward. The first place of interest was the wizard's cottage in which I found a book of spells, a furry creature and a carrot. The wizard asked me to stay and guard his magic book until he returned. Deciding not to trust him, I tried to leave (with the book), unfortunately magic powers were working to prevent me from doing so. I discarded the spellbook for the time being and walked out of the cottage to explore the surrounding wood.

A ONE-CARROT GAME

I came across an old woman, a minstrel (who sang a ballad for me) and a fair maiden. All these characters were there for a reason. Quickly discovering the lack of vocabulary within the adventure and deciding that none of them were interested in my carrot. I continued on my travels. Further discoveries included a pond, a swarm of bees, a snake and a duck - which I managed to frighten sufficiently to make it lay an egg.

The Realm is a not a good adventure. it lacks all the ingredients necessary to keep you playing (except for the ease of mapping) and its problems are obscure enough to prompt premature boredom. That it is a budget game is no excuse for producing an interior product, perhaps D & H Games should stick to their successful format of football simulations.