Producer: Ariolasoft
Author: Ram Jam Corporation

It's at times like these that I wish I'd marshalled my back issues of CRASH into some semblance of order, perhaps with the help of those binders lost within the plethora of sweatshirts and peaked caps to be found in our beloved magazine. It has been stated by many a more academic devotee than myself that the universe is becoming more chaotic, not due to man's struggling with Sunday trading or the thinness of bin liners, no, but to some innate Physical Law, an inescapable truth even outside university Physics departments. The best laws can only be disproven by travelling to the very edges of the universe and proven by simply opening one's eyes. This idea of the whole works spiralling into a state of devilish disorder is indeed a good one as the evidence does lie right before me - on my desk to be precise. Someone once said for was it scowled?) an untidy desk is a sign of an untidy mind and this is borne out by the unruly state of my desk when compared to that of my bank manager's.

This lengthy introduction you might be surprised to discover is indeed an attempt to outdo that lengthy discourse which preceded a rather favourable review of Ram Jam's last adventure, Valkyrie 17, reviewed way back in a month with notables such as Return to Eden, Twin Kingdom Valley, Out of the Shadows, Tower of Despair, and Eye of Bain. Such months are, alas, conspicuously rare these days. As you may gather from the intro to this piece, it took me quite some time to discover this all happened way back in December 84.

Let's look at the bumph behind this one now because it seems to me we both need a rest from long discourses on disorder in the universe.

In the region of Hapshal, south of the dark mountains of Mortran, lies a small village on a road that leads to a far off city. Sinister things were happening during the hours of darkness, as each night when the villagers locked themselves into their homes a few of them would have disappeared by daybreak. Ancient legend told of an evil Xyradd called Trantoss, one of the undead who was banished to the far off mountains with all his powers removed by the long dead Wizards of Vane. The legend told of a golden mace that gave Trantoss his powers. This the wizards smashed and the pieces were scattered over the mountains.

Now, the wise men of the village believe, Trantoss must still be alive and he must have collected together the pieces of the mace. His power is returning. All they can hope to do is to destroy the mace once again before all his powers return. They need a brave man to venture along the lost paths into the mountains. None of the villagers are prepared to take the risks involved until, one night, two brothers awake to find the rest of their family has disappeared into the darkness. These two, Lobo the woodcutter, a large, slow man, and his brother Scorn, a nimble chap of dubious character, agree to go on the quest. You join the plot as they are equipping themselves in the village and your job is to guide these two disparate characters.

That's better, I feel quite refreshed and ready to get stuck into this review now.

Loading up, you are presented with a most impressive and professional display composed of three main parts. On the left is a tall, thin picture of where you stand. The pictures here are detailed and informative, given their very limited area. In the middle is a column symbolically depicting the two main characters Lobo and Scarn with the chap currently playing highlighted in yellow, and the other either green when in the same location as the chap playing, or blue if he has found a place of his own. During play the two brothers can be parted and joined to suit the style of play in any one instant.

The story is read from a scrolling column on the right of the screen, which is where you input as well, and tells of your travels from a village street with tavern, store and house to the forbidding mountains beyond. Inside the store the storekeeper bids you to take all you need for your quest and you'd have to be pretty ungrateful not to take many of the things he offers - which can be achieved with the ever useful GET ALL command. Inside the house are a woollen blanket and a couple of gold coins but these are soon augmented with the things from the cupboard which is seen to open in the picture - always a welcome addition. It is in the tavern where a real advance is made and you begin the adventure proper, but I'll leave you to discover how to proceed and how to deal with the dog found a little further along the way.

Terrors of Trantoss is a very professionally produced adventure with an attractive display and graphics. The character set has been tastefully redesigned to fit neatly into its column on the right of the screen, looking much smarter and more compact than the usual sprawling Spectrum text. The game is very easy to get into, being eminently playable and making up for any perturbations caused by its lack of an effective EXAMINE command and the adventure's slow, plodding pace. The control of two very different characters showing widely divergent attributes adds that little something to gameplay as you swap from one to the other in order to tackle different problems. All in all, a very worthy release from the Ram Jam team.

COMMENTS

Difficulty: easy to get into
Graphics: good
Presentation: appealing and a little different
Input facility: verb/noun
Response: slow

FAX BOX
Title: The Terrors of Trantoss
Publisher: Ariolasoft
Price: £8.95

Hang on to your Speccies, here's the next essential adventure. Marketed by Ariolasoft, The Terrors Of Trantoss is written by the RamJam Corporation, the very same people who brought us the wonderful Valkyrie 17. And if you're wondering whatever happened to that game's follow-up, which was meant to deal with certain caperings in Carpathia, then you'll just have to carry on wondering - this game certainly ain't it. Comparing Trantoss to RamJam's earlier effort is like comparing champagne to Lucozade - and remember how good the Lucozade was.

Trantoss is due out in late April, so should be out by the time you read this - bu we all know how 'flexible' release dates can be, and my review copy is only a pre-production version. If the adventure is available, though, all I can say is go out and get it - it's a beaut!

It's also choc-a-bloc with those funny names so beloved of adventure programmers, names like Hapshal, Mortran, Scarn and Xyradd. Now can you guess which is one of the heroes and which is the name of a range of dark mountains? Okay, well here goes the scenario: south of the dark mountains of Mortran, in the region of Hapshal, lies a small village that doesn't seem to have a funny name at all, though it does have its problems - mainly the fact that it's slowly disappearing. Well, not the village itself, just the villagers, a few at a time, each night, and from behind locked doors as well. Sinister doings are afoot. Either that or Paul Daniels is rehearsing his next series there!

The sinister doings are not unconnected with a Xyradd called Trantoss, who's an evil old thing. In fact he's very old. Well, not to put too fine a point on it, he's undead. He was banished to far off mountains by the Wizards of Vane, who, rather unfortunately, are now just plain dead. The source of Trantoss's evil power was a golden mace that was smashed and scattered by the Wizards, but current happenings suggest that Trantoss must have been re-maced.

What do you think happens now? Enter the intrepid adventurer, to sort things out, right? Wrong! Enter two intrepid adventurers, who have woken up one morning to find the rest of the family missing. The survivors are Lobo the woodcutter, who's big but not exactly mastermind of Hapshal, and his brother, Scarn, who's a bit of a scoundrel and pretty nimble with it. You control both players, which introduces a few interesting commands into the regular adventure language. The characters can move either together or independently. At the start they move together but the command PART will cause them to move separately, JOIN will reunite them provided they're both in the same location, and SWAP enables you to change control from one to the other, no matter where they are.

The screen layout has the graphics down the left-hand side, text scrolling up the right, with a band inbetween on which you see Lobo and Scarn. The one you're currently controlling is indicated in yellow, with his oppo in green if he's in the same location and blue if elsewhere. The graphics are beautifully detailed and they change instantly as you move or as you swap between characters.

The brothers begin in the village street, with a tavern, a store, a house and a route west all visible. I made the tavern my first port of call where, naturally, a darkly clad stranger looked at me from under his hat. A strange place to keep his eyes, I thought, but never mind; he offered to guide me through the Forest of Gondin for a fee. Could he perhaps be talking through his hat? Not that it mattered as I was fee-less anyway. Back to the street and into the house, where I found a few useful objects.

The vocabulary looked fairly promising, too, as IN and ENTER HOUSE both worked, while in the store I was offered all the supplies I might need for my trip by a kindly storekeeper. Not having a list of commands I thought GET ALL was worth a try, and blow me, it worked, although I later found a (pre-production?) bug in the routine. The objects have different weights attributed to them, and the GET ALL command goes through the objects in order till it finds one that makes you exceed your weight limit. It then tells you that you can't carry any more, but in fact there may be lighter objects listed after the heavier one that you can pick up if you take them individually. I also tried to PUT BLANKET IN SACK, though that only resulted in me dropping the blanket. Slightly irritating but not disastrous.

There are so many goodies on offer at the store that I made my first SWAP and loaded up both brothers, but still had to leave things behind. Back at the tavern I was pleased to see the dark stranger hadn't done a bunk and so a bargain was struck. He then took us through hidden forest paths (and just you try to find them if he's not with you!), to the edge of a rocky ravine where he planted his staff in the ground, winked and disappeared. Ravine mad, obviously. As well as adding another dimension to maze mapping, having two different characters adds to the complexities of problem solving, too. Back at the well with the crumbling rope, which had mysteriously reappeared, would it be any easier if the nimbler Scarn tried climbing down the rope? Nope! Perhaps the dog's only scared of Lobo, or perhaps Scarn would be quick enough to throw the blanket over it? Who's got the blanket, Lobo or Scarn? And so your thoughts go.

As for me, I went back to the ravine to try to cross that and see if there's anything corny like an old bone lying around to help me catch this wretched dog. I found getting over to the other side not too tricky, though getting back is slightly different. But once you've gut there you encounter the Gates of Ganreth... hang on, let me check my list of funny names... no, haven't come across that one before. Who or what or where is Ganreth? And how to open the gates, which are naturally locked? Though I could part, join and swap my two characters, I couldn't get them to stand on each other's shoulders. At this point a quick peek at the cheat sheet was called for. That told me I was on the wrong track and I'd need to solve elsewhere before going through the gates and encountering the fanglizard that was waiting for me on the other side.

Back at the ravine I made Lobo wait while Scarn went off to explore some of the as-yet unmapped forest paths. But he only found himself back at the village where we began and with no hidden paths to enable him to return to the ravine. Lobo felt a bit lonely, and though he carried on for a while while Scarn made sure everything in the village had been explored, Lobo soon realised that he wasn't going to get through this adventure alone and QUIT.

The Terrors Of Trantoss is a really delightful adventure, and despite the few vocabulary faults it is generally quick to respond. I'm looking forward to more time with it than this quick preview allowed. Good graphics, and plenty of those humorous and detailed little touches that made Valkyrie 17 stand out from the crowd of hum-drum adventure releases.

Label: Ariolasoft
Authors: Ram Jam
Price: £7.95
Memory: 48K
Reviewer: Richard Price

Those of you who managed to survive the assassin's bullets in Ram Jam's previous effort, the excellent Valkyrie 17 should be pleased with their latest, Terrors of Trantoss.

The game, marketed by Ariolasoft, has been written with Ram Jam's own adventure generator, the BIRO Mk2, and has a 'traditional'setting - the world of heroic fantasy and magic.

The story goes thus... Trantoss, archmage and evildoer, was defeated long ago and his magic mace fractured and hidden. As is usual with these crafty warlocks, Trantoss has somehow managed to resurrect himself and the Mountains of Mortran rumble again with his power. Whilst all good folk quail in terror, two brothers decide to rid the world of Trantoss once and for all and meet in the village of Hapsal to begin their quest.

Lobo is a hefty sort of bloke, well able to swing a good punch or cart around a sack of sea-coal. Scarn is slim and tall - he may not be as strong as his brother but he can wriggle his way into places where Lobo would just get stuck. Put together, they make a good adventuring team.

They'll either operate as a unit and travel together, saving you the need to give separate movement instructions to each or you can send each brother to different locations to achieve different aims. If they are apart you can swap between them following their action at different places. Colour coding on the small pictures of our heroes shows who you're currently controlling.

The location graphics are fairly classy and, unusually, take up the left-hand side of the screen. They draw so rapidly that they don't interfere with the game in any way and they're also interactive - that is, they'll often show the results of your actions. If you open a cupboard you'll get a new picture showing the open door; if you bridge a stream the planks you use will be shown. There's a picture for every location but, despite that, there are over 130 locations and a very complex set of problems.

The quest gets off at a leisurely pace with the collection of useful items for the journey - as usual in these situations you'll have to agonise over what you're going to leave behind.

The brothers buy the services of a guide to take them through the trackless paths of the Forest of Grondin. Magic rears its enigmatic head almost immediately with the discovery of a Wizard's Staff. Inscribed on it are strange runes. Symbols of the same type are found in a number of places and you're going to have to puzzle out their meaning quite quickly if you want to progress very far.

All amateur cryptologists will probably put in a lot of effort at breaking the code - let me warn you that the solution is a simpler than you think!

Provided you solve the mystery of the runes you can explore a wide region of countryside. Once past the ferryman you head up into the mountains where there are caverns, vaults and more magical objects. Several tough mazes to negotiate and other characters, like robbers and mountain men. to help or hinder you. You aren't forced along one route and can easily wander around in quite a broad landscape.

In fact, for many of the problems you'll need to perform complicated tasks involving numbers of objects and considerable exploration to discover those you require. For instance, at one point, the mountain mens' blacksmith needs some steel - you know that you might get a bow in payment if you can bring him some. Off you go, back towards a demon-filled dungeon where you notice some bars under lock and key. To get there you'll have to cross a crystal bridge but to do that you'll need a vine - you've probably already lost your rope. Have you got a suitable chopper to get the vine? Do you know how dangerous the bridge is?

This is one of the simpler of a mass of tangled tasks.

The net result is an adventure of pretty fair difficulty that will keep even the experts busy.

I found very little to feel negative about except for the occasional delayed response from the interpreter. In general it's verb/noun input but at times you'll need to say a little more - like stating which type of key you want to use for a door or where you want to put a particular object. This is no problem as far as I'm concerned, as I far prefer simplicity to the complications of some of the poorer full sentence parsers. The descriptions are crisp but, given the smartness of the graphics and the plethora of things to do, this doesn't seem a great loss. Even so, when you do get an amplified description you'll find it's literate and atmospheric. "The hunchback grunts noisily, in stark contrast to the ominous silence, as he ferries you across the river. You are on the north side of the river where you see the remains of an old bridge by a sand strip."

Terrors of Transtoss is a fine successor to Valkyrie and, according to Ram Jam, is one of a string of forthcoming adventures. I'm pretty sure you'll find it tantalising, frustrating and very satisfying to solve. In concept and design it's up at the top end of the adventure market, offering you fancy graphics, two-character play and a truly complex scenario.

Be thorough - old Trantoss is no walkover and his magic mace hard to destroy.

And when you've done that, you're still going to have to go through a great deal of the game again in order to collect the treasure and complete it.

MACHINE: Spectrum 48K
SUPPLIER: Ariolasoft/Ram Jam Corporation
PRICE: £7.95

Villagers in Hapshall, south of the mountains of Mortran, are disappearing nightly, and it is thought that an evil Xyradd called Trantoss (Oh no! Not a Xyradd!) is spiriting them away. His powers must be stopped by destroying his mace, but no one is keen to carry out this dangerous quest. So a local thicko called Lobo and Scarn, a shady character, are persuaded.

You are they, in this game. As well as being able to SWAP between the two characters, there are some novel commands in the increasingly popular adventure format of interchangeable roles. PART lets the two move around independently, whilst JOIN makes them move together, provided they are in the same place when the command is given.

At the start it soon becomes apparent that there will be some frustration in managing to can't all the objects required.

In fact, kitting up is somewhat reminiscent of Lord of the Rings, especially as there is a type-ahead buffer of one character, and a nasty delay before input is accepted, after the text has screened. This quirk succeeds in preventing the fast-thinking adventurer from getting into any sort of typing rhythm, and causes lots of PARDON?s.

Eventually, the adventurer is set on his way with the help of a stranger, who drags the party at high speed through the forest to the edge of a ravine, and promptly disappears. The forest turns our to be a maze, with self-sealing exits.

If the text is slow, then it is compensated by the speed of the graphics. These are held in memory, and flash on the screen instantly. What's more, they are very effective and detailed - as good as you are likely to encounter on a Spectrum. The whole screen design is attractive, with the graphics occupying a vertical third of the screen to the left of the text area.

The problems are not easy, and whilst I would not complain about that, the vocabularly, both input recognised and messages output, has a lot to answer for. NOT NOW is received all too frequently, and it is unclear whether this means that the command is invalid, or the action can be performed later.

The poorer features of the game are a pity, for the problems look as if they make for a good, and somewhat unusual adventure.

Spectrum 48K
Ariolasoft
Graphic Adventure
£7.95

The latest game from Ariolasoft has been written by the people who wrote Valkyrie 17, recently re-released, the Ram Jam Corporation. It certainly scored with its first game and Terrors of Trantoss looks as if it could be equally successful. The plot is the usual find-the-evil-wizard-and-in-doing-so-restore-order type of adventure, including all your old-time favourites, such as Orcs, mysterious runes which need to be translated, the obligatory key, deserted villages - everything for which the adventurer could wish.

Where the game differs is in the interplay between the two main characters, who are brothers called Lobo and Scarn, a kind of a Laurel and Hardy double act. Using the swap command - I wonder where I have seen that previously? - you interchange between the two.

The graphics are well-detailed and I liked particularly the shading effect used on the mountains. My only criticism about an otherwise excellent game was the slow response times - it took up to four seconds, which is annoying when one wants to press on.

RamJam/Ariolasoft
£8.95

Aeons ago the evil Wizard Trantoss used to rule supreme, gaining his powers through his mace. This continued until the villagers stole the mace and broke it. Over the years, the servants of Trantoss have tried to reassemble the mace and there are ominous rumours that Trantoss himself is not dead. Villagers have started to disappear, including the parents of two brothers, Lobo and Scarn. They decide that they must do something to stop this dreadful evil. The villagers are only too willing to give them every assistance, pleased that someone is going to do their dirty work for them. A lot of treasure has also gone missing and it would be a pleasant bonus if the two lads could retrieve that as well.

Of the two boys, one is as strong as on ox whilst the other is small and agile. This is important to remember as each will be more suitable for performing different tasks. You can move both characters together (this will be most of the time) swapping between them at will or you can part them and send them off on different tasks. In theory, you can succeed if one of them gets killed but in practice this will be almost impossible.

The story starts in the village and you must collect various provisions before going info the tavern and getting a dark stranger to guide you on the secret paths through the woods.

The stranger also leaves you a magic staff when he disappears. Examining this gives you a real headache. There is writing on the staff but it is in the form of some runes and there are more of these strange letters over the ravine at the gates. At this point I sat down for a bit of code breaking - at first it looked easy as the first two words on the staff looked fairly obvious but several hours later I was both cross and frustrated. The letter combinations just did not make sense. Back in the game, I eventually found out why when I discovered a patent rune translator. Not all the words are spelled in ways that would appear in the Oxford Dictionary!

The on screen presentation is very attractive. On the left is a vertical format picture of your current location, bright and colourful. A central strip indicates which character you are currently controlling and whether or not the other brother is with you or elsewhere On the right is the text entry box. The only problems here are that the program checks the first five letters of a word. This can be confusing if, like me, you are used to using only the first four.

Type "drop blan" and the program replies that you don't have it whilst "drop blank" or "blanket" works perfectly. Oh well, that's the price for idleness I suppose. The vocabulary is more or less straightforward with a few unusual words being hinted at in the instructions. All in all, a most enjoyable adventure.