Producer: Mosaic Publishing
Retail Price: £9.95
Author: RamJam Corporation

Mosaic have a penchant for bringing out games based on books (remember Adrian Mole and The Snow Queen) and this release is no exception. Twice Shy is based on the novel of the same name by Dick Francis, a book which I must confess I have never heard of, but seeing as I only have the time to read the odd science fiction book these days, this is hardly surprising. How much reading the book will help you complete the game is not made clear but let's assume the following storyline is based on the book.

You take the part of physics teacher Jonathan Derry who comes into possession of some intriguing computer program tapes. As you try to discover their purpose and return them to the rightful owner you attract the attention of some of the shadier figures in the horse-racing world. It seems they'll stop at nothing to wrest the tapes from you...

Steering clear of the heavy mob, you may make it to the racecourse which is in fact a whole separate plaything located on side two of the tape. A series of successfully placed bets can see you taking a useful pile of money back into the adventure, resuming where you left off - alternatively, you might find yourself going back with a lot less than you started with. The racecourse section can be loaded whenever it is met in the adventure and, if you're the sort who is addicted to gambling in this way, you can load the racing game on side two all by itself.

The mechanics of the adventure are most pleasing. In appearance, or perhaps more correctly in style, the game has a passing resemblance to Terrors of Trantoss, the last Ram Jam adventure release. The screen layout is imaginative and attractive, as has been the case with many of the top non-Quilled releases of the last few months. On to the picture frame: in the top half of the screen the left hand side shows the scene, while on the right is a horse racing mosaic (to remind you of the game's main theme).

Also in the top area is the static location description text which never changes at any particular location. Changes in objects and people's positions and behaviour are reflected in the print lower down the screen in a very tidy fashion - the character set is very nicely redesigned. The input routine is so fast and slick it appears to be as effective as LEVEL 9's famous type-ahead, while the vocabulary is broad and friendly. One example gives an insight into the complexities which lie behind the seemingly innocuous theme of this game: SAY TO JANE 'GO NORTH AND SHUT THE DOOR".

Conversation with other characters relies on their attitude to you at the time. You can attempt to improve relationships by offering advice, offering objects or by simply being friendly. I could only find one example of unfriendliness in the whole adventure and that was partly excusable when ANSWER TELEPHONE is confused with the television and ANSWER PHONE does the trick. In general, all the indicators of a finely tuned adventure are there, including the useful GET ALL and DROP ALL, an extremely informative EXAMINE command and multiple command entry using a comma, THEN, or AND as separators on the one input.

The television and phone lie in the first location, where there is much to do and explore. You see Sarah Derry who is presumably your wife, and the telephone is ringing. Answering it, 'Sarah takes the phone from you, puts her hand over the mouthpiece and motions you to be quiet'. That's all the intrigue for the moment, so you busy yourself by switching on the television to watch Dallasty and examining the mantelpiece. But a little while later Sarah is in a state of shock and must go immediately to the Keithlys in Norwich - Donna has stolen someone's baby.

Who the Keithlys are, and why this Donna person should pinch someone's little offspring is unknown to me, and probably anyone else who hasn't read the book. No doubt though, as in any good yarn, all will make sense in due course.

Moving upstairs to the main bedroom, quite a list of items are given you free as it were, without having to make recourse to the EXAMINE command. The bullets for an Enfield rifle rightly make you suspect you should have found such a rifle by this stage, while the canvas bag and exercise books should find some use further along the way. If you choose to, loading up the rifle is easily achieved here. There are quite a few further easy pickings upstairs, some with more obvious immediate uses than others. I'll leave this part of the game at the point where you will no doubt pause for a while...

The other side of the tape, the horse-racing game, is a tonic to all the brainwork of the adventure side where, on the face of it, all you have to do is plonk your money on any number of four horses and see how the race goes. However, the conscientious gambler, or those who consider every pound important, may wish to study the form of the horses in each race. This being a computer game, you might expect some formula to make itself felt after a few goes, but I found it hard to spot any consistencies so I suppose in that sense, this game mimics the real thing.

I began at Wintersthorpe Park with the offer of a full racing day of six events (you must see through all the events of a day - even if you lose everything on the first race). Noticeable are the names of races and horses (many of which ring bells if you are familiar with Mosaic's previous releases), and some strange odds, like 16 to 9, and 17 to 5, which are presumably a mathematical tease designed to have you scratching your head to work out which are the most favourable.

I liked this racing simulation a lot. The graphics are very good, showing the four horses galloping across the field with a great variety of finishes - either with a horse coming from behind to win or perhaps two horses pulling away from the field in a neck and neck finish. Many permutations are seen in a meeting. It is most intriguing to study form before or after a race, trying to analyse the relationships between the going (hard, soft, heavy and so on), the weight carried by each horse, its preferred distance, and its recent form presented in a history table. Attempting correlations with all these variables can take some time!

I think Twice Shy is ably professional product from the Mosaic team, and the Ram Jam Corps have played their part in providing a most slick and playable program. Everything about the game, from instructions to completion, is thoroughly entertaining.

COMMENTS

Difficulty: easy to get into
Graphics: attractive
Presentation: very neat
Input facility: beyond verb/noun with speech
Response: type-ahead allowed in an amazingly fast routine

FAX BOX
Title: Twice Shy
Publisher: Mosaic
Price: £9.95

THE STORY

How many adventures can you think of where the hero's a physics teacher? Well that's what you are in this version of Dick Francis's thriller. Jonathan Derry teaches at East Middlesex Comprehensive, but how he comes to be involved in the world of horse racing is not immediately obvious - unless you've read the book, of course. All you know is that somewhere in the game you gain possession of a set of cassette tapes, something to do with a lucrative betting system. Sort the rest out for yourself. Don't expect any help from your wife, either. When you start the game the phone's ringing, and when you go to answer it she snatches it off you and insists on taking the call herself. If you try to speak she tells you to button your lip, then when the call's finished she says, "We must go immediately to the Keithly's in Norwich. Donna has stolen someone's baby. They need our help." And off she goes. I thought she said" We must go"? Very impulsive these women. Mention a baby and they take leave of their senses, not to mention the room. (Sexist beast! T'zer). Oh well, maybe we can get on with the adventure in peace.

THE ADVENTURE GAME

After the hysterical departure of your wife, you examine the living room of your home in Northolt, and note the dust on the mantelpiece, not to mention the Enfield rifle. There are dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, and upstairs someone's forgotten to drain the bathwater. What a pair of sluts you both are. Lying somewhere in the house is a cheque made out to cash for £150. You're going to need it as your dusty old Peugeot outside the front door is prone to breakdowns and eats up the petrol as if it were a Rolls.

The game is divided into areas you can walk round, and areas you must drive around. ENTER CAR and START CAR to get it going (I'll give you those commands for free) and STOP CAR to switch off the engine and get out again. A bit tedious when constantly repeated, especially if you've only driven two locations to find yourself outside the bank where you cash your cheque.

As you drive around Northolt, watch out for the deceptive road signs, and don't leave without polishing up your shooting skills at Bisley Rifle Range. Be sure you've got a tank full of petrol before setting off up the M25. Here you encounter the dubious joys of the M25/M11 interchange, and it was also about here I began to get fed up with the adventure's content - irritating problems rather than interesting ones. The programmers (The Ramjammers) see to it that you frequently run out of petrol which leaves you high and dry waiting for an AA man to turn up and tow you back to the garage. Then you have to SAY TO GARAGE HAND "FILL HER UP" and wait some more while he fills her up, or possibly ignores you if he's in that kind of mood. I suppose this is what's called Artificial Intelligence, though all it means is that you repeat your request till he agrees. Then off you go up the M25 again.

Tedious eh? Try this... The interchange is obviously meant to be a maze of routes. Except that it isn't. It's a single location, as you can see if you drop an object. Any movement N, S, E or W and you stay in the same place. Wait long enough (using up petrol all the time) and "You suddenly find a sign you recognise" and you're heading south on the M11. By this time you've discovered that if you're heading in a particular direction on the motorway, and you enter any other direction as a command, you crash the car for trying to drive in the wrong direction. And you know what that means. (Yep. AA man again, back to garage...) if you see the sign and are heading south, you crash if you enter WEST or NORTH, while SOUTH takes you back to the interchange location (I know because I left my canvas bag there), and EAST puts you on the M25 heading west back to Northolt. I won't reveal how you get out of this seemingly impossibly maze, except to say that you must take the risk of crashing occasionally and experiment with all the directions. Given luck you'll find yourself heading towards Norwich, and maybe even outside the Keithly's home, whereupon you'll probably run out of petrol again and have to be taken back to your Northolt garage to fill up. A bit silly of the AA man when you're in Norwich, but it's at this point I began to think the whole game was a bit silly and wondered why I was wasting my time playing it. The graphics are quite nice, though.

PARSING COMMENTS

Twice Shy's got one of the poorest parsers I've seen in a long time. At the start when your wife answers the phone she tells you to "Be Quiet". If you then respond to the "Well?" prompt by typing BE QUIET you get "What do you mean by that?" I tried WAIT and got "Huh?" Then I tried LISTEN and was told "You have nothing at all." Not the best of starts.

The REDESCRIBE command is rather redundant as the location description is a permanent fixture anyway. Having found a canvas bag I typed PUT ALL IN BAG and this produced no response, but the prompt reappeared so I tried PUT PILLS IN BAG, and was told "OK." So then I laboriously typed the individual commands to put all the items in the bag, only to discover a few locations later that I was carrying nothing - PUT PILLS IN BAG is treated by this parser as DROP PILLS. In the kitchen there's a knife-rack, and examining it shows you a blunt knife. Having got his, I tried EXAMINE RACK again to see if anything else had appeared. There was a knife on it. GET KNIFE was rewarded with "It's not available" and I realised this was the knife I was actually carrying. If you ENTER CAR, you're told "You climb into your car" but type REDESCRIBE and you're outside your car again. And this is just the first half-dozen locations. Need I go on? (A question you might well ask yourself about Twice Sky.)

THE RACING GAME

Side two of the cassette contains a racing simulation, which you can either play independently or as a part of the adventure. If the latter, you load up the simulation and take into it whatever cash you happen to have accumulated in the adventure in the hope that you can pick a winner or two and boost your balance a wee bit to pay for all your repair and petrol bills. You can play the gee-gees for as long as you like, and whenever you're ready you load up the adventure again with the new improved (or more likely reduced) balance at your disposal.

How long you're likely to want to play the racing game remains to be seen, as it's a pretty tedious effort. There are six races, four horses per race, and with odds like 23/10 the accuracy of the simulation is pretty dubious. There's a guide to each horse, with useful bits of information like the going it prefers and its recent form. After looking at the distance of the race, the state of the course and so on, you simply place your bet or bets. Now sit back and watch while four horses move silently across the screen from right to left, and the winner's given. And that's it. Unfortunately you can't switch channels and watch the rugby league, so it's back to the adventure. Boring!

Label: Mosaic
Author: Ram Jam
Price: £9.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Gary Rook

Dick Francis is said to be the Queen Mother's favourite author - she reads every one of his racing thrillers, which is a heck of a lot of words. He's written well over 20 by now.

Does this mean that Mosaic, by publishing an adventure game based on the Francis novel Twice Shy, could become software publishers by appointment to the Royal Family? Somehow, the image of Britain's favourite grandmother hunched over a Spectrum is rather appealing.

In Twice Shy, the adventure game, you are Jonathan Derry, a lowly physics teacher at East Middlesex Comprehensive. At some point during the game, you will find a set of cassette tapes. Certain other less than scrupulous people are going to try to take them off you. Who are they? What does it mean? Who's trying to stop you finding out? What's running in the 3.30? Why is the AA man so mercenary? And how come you can wander around for hours carrying a loaded Enfield rifle and not get arrested? These questions, and more, will be answered - if you're clever enough.

The adventure. Begins, as so many adventure games do, in your living room. With you is Sarah. As I haven't read the book, I haven't the faintest idea who she is, but since your aren't allowed to answer the phone and she is, she's very useful.

She leaves almost instantly, to go and offer to succour some friend of yours who seems to be stealing babies (not your usual adventure game, this one), suggesting as she flies out the door that you should meet her in Norwich. Why she didn't wait for you I can't work out.

Searching the flat turns up an interesting collection of items including a gun, a cheque, pills, exercise books and a pink towel. H you don't look on the mantlepiece, you won't even get out of the house.

Outside you'll find your car, a battered grey Peugeot. You can use this to drive around - you're advised to forget about walking if you try to get away from your house on foot.

Incidentally, this is one thing I did find a bit annoying: you get told the exits from a location, but not whether they are exits for motorised transport or for Shank's pony.

Location wise, Twice Shy seems to be big. I've been to well over 30 places and I hardly seem to have got anywhere. At first, you find yourself driving round beautiful downtown Northolt, but you can soon find yourself on the M25 on the way to Welwyn Garden City. Unfortunately, I keep on getting lost on an intersection, running out of petrol, and having to be rescued by my friendly AA man, who demands £15 quid to tow me to the nearest garage.

There are rather too many mazes for my liking, including a caravan park that you don't seem to be able to find your way out of. I tried dropping something to mark where I'd been, but the item dropped - a pile of exercise books - just kept moving with me. The shopping centre is another maze, which I managed to get out of by going in a direction not listed on screen.

The screen, by the way, is divided into two main sections. The top half contains graphics showing your present location and a window containing a description of that location: the bottom half is for communication with the program, and is also where it tells you about items you have found. The graphics are excellent, and the program has an impressive vocabulary.

Incidentally, on the reverse of the tape, there's a bonus - a racing simulation game which can either be played separately or in conjunction with the adventure.

You are at the races for the day, and there are six events on the card. In each race, four horses are running. You get told the odds, the weather conditions, the going, and can examine the form book on each of the horses. If you're playing for fun, then you can just keep on piling up the money - assuming you've got half a brain and the sense to study the form book properly, along with a reasonable idea of how to cover your bets.

If you're at the races as part of the adventure game, then you'll be allowed to take up to £250 back into the adventure.

Twice Shy - despite the fact I haven't got an awful lot further in the adventure - looks like a very good game.

The programming is excellent and the graphics add a lot to the feel. There should be enough meat here to keep any adventure buff going for a good few hours - and the race game's fun too.

I found it difficult and, though, a bit disappointing that nothing dramatic happened in the first 30 locations - nobody shot at me, no murders, no car chases.

SUPPLIER: Mosaic Publishing/Ram Jam Corporation
MACHINE: Spectrum 48/128K (£9.95), Commodore 64/128K/Amstrad (£9.95 cass, £12.95 disk)
VERSION REVIEWED: Spectrum

Twice Shy is the title of a book by best-selling thriller author Dick Francis, and is set in the world of horse racing. Ram Jam have taken the book and turned it into a composite adventure and betting game.

The book is not provided in the package, and you don't need to read the novel before being able to complete the adventure. However, reading it in advance of playing the game will add to your enjoyment - and provide some useful background.

In the adventure game, you play the part of schoolteacher Jonathan Derry. You find yourself in your sitting room with your wife Sarah. The phone is ringing, and Sarah has to leave hurriedly on a mercy mission to Norwich, to help some friends, the Keithlys.

Donna Keithly is in trouble - she has stolen someone's baby.

A look around the house yields all sorts of interesting objects, including a sharp knife, an Enfield rifle and bullets, plus a cheque for £150.

Outside is your dusty if not trusty old Peugeot, and soon you are driving round the M25 near Northolt.

In an adventure which allows travel over long distances, with freedom choose different routes, and has detailed local scenarios, there is considerable difficulty in providing a realistic mechanism for movement.

Ram Jam achieve this very well, limiting motorway routes by getting you irretrievably lost at interchanges, yet allowing turn-offs where they are relevant.

Petrol can be a problem if you make a mess of the route, but not to worry, a cheery AA man will tow you to a garage. He'll even repair the car for you if you inadvertently try to drive south down the northbound carriageway - for a price!

Arriving at the Keithly's, you find Sarah already talking to Donna and her husband Peter. If you are a drinking man, it won't be long before some cassette tapes fall into your hands, in rather worrying circumstances.

There're characters around who would dearly love to get hold of them. And as soon as they realise YOU have them, they probably will!

Ram Jam has written this game using the latest version of The Biro, and very neat it is too. I played the Spectrum version.

The screen is divided into four windows. The text window occupies the bottom half. Conversation with the player takes place here - using a redefined set of 48 characters per line.

Above this is the location description window, again with a new set of characters, but this time slightly bigger.

A fixed graphic 'title' showing a horse's head, rosettes, and horse racing tops the location window, whilst to the left of these windows is the current location graphic.

Although this occupies only about one sixth of the screen, the pictures are extremely effective, and artistically drawn.

The whole presentation is extremely professional, with a colourful and attractive look and feel about it. With all these windows, and a parser that accepts fairly complex commands, including speech, the response time is amazing. A change of location is usually a good test for the longest response, requiring changes in text and graphics. In Twice Shy, the prompt is back in under two seconds!

A completely novel feature of the game, is that when you are at the racecourse, you can type RACE, and move from the adventure into a horse racing simulation.

How much money you have for a flutter is determined by your financial state in the adventure.

An "event" consists of six races, each with four runners. The weather, going, and distance is displayed, and the form of each horse can be called up, before your bets are placed.

At the off, the face is displayed graphically, and if you watch carefully, you'll notice the position of the horses reflects how they are faring. The one nearest the top of the screen is the horse named first in the list of runners.

Twice Shy is an unusual and entertaining package, containing two games for the price of one, or, if you prefer, one big game with a difference!

Mosaic
£9.95

It always amazes me how Dick Francis can come up with so many best sellers ALL based round intrigue in the racing world. Anyway. Twice Shy was one of his, Mosaic have released the adventure, and it's programmed by RamJam, authors of an all-time favourite of mine, Valkyrie 17.

You are Jonathan Derry, a Physics teacher who has become custodian of some computer tapes. The purpose of these is unknown to you at the start, but other people seem to know - and they'll stop at nothing to get them.

First thing you notice when you load up the adventure is the excellent screen presentation. There's a static box containing the location description and another for the graphics. The bottom half of the screen scrolls, and is used for input, messages and object reports. The graphics system is similar to Ocean's adventures: small, and not every location has its own illustration, but pictures which do appear are high resolution and pleasant to look at.

Once you begin playing, however, the true strength of this game becomes apparent. It's a wonderful adventure packed full of things to do and look at, even if they're not relevant. So you can switch on and watch the television. Examine the flying ducks Shoot your friends with the rifle. Or crash your car. You'd be amazed how many games I receive won't let the player do things like this. There are numerous small details which add so much. Your house is packed full of objects to find, as a real house would be.

There's a sense of humour, and other welcome features like well-used independent characters and the ability to interact with them. Vocabulary is adequate.

When you need more money during the game (you have to buy things like petrol, drinks, car repairs), you must visit the race course at Newmarket. Once there, you load side 2 where you have six graphically portrayed races to bet on. At your disposal are odds, racing conditions and form cards. Apart from having doubts about whether adventurers will like their problem-solving interrupted in this way, I also found it difficult to win anything. I'm not a betting man you see, and haven the foggiest idea about half the factors I'm supposed to consider.

The instructions should have dealt with this, with some sort of "Idiots Guide to Horse Racing". But the instructions are too brief, telling no more of the plot than that I gave at the start of the review. More should have been given, including a guide to the characters you will encounter. The best thing to do, presumably, is read the book - though I haven't had the chance to do so yet, and I think it's slightly unfair of Mosaic to expect all adventurers to wade through a whole novel.

Those gripes aside Twice Shy is technically smoother than Valkyrie 17 and seems as good in other ways. Which means another Monster Hit. A good Christmas present for someone who doesn't play many adventurers, but give them the book with it.