Reviews by Canalboy

This spy caper from the early nineties has an interesting premise but is let down badly by non-intuitive puzzle solutions, an exasperatingly intractable CAC, sorry GAC parser and arthritically slow response times even with the occasional graphics switched off (type "graphics" or "text" to toggle.)

The premise is that you have awoken in a dimly lit cellar armed with nothing but a lit candle (which amazingly never goes out whatever you do or however long you take to do it) and a vague recollection of being a superspy on your biggest assignment ever. Upon making your exit from the cellar you find yourself in a snow-laden town with only a handful of locations to initially visit. This is the kind of game where you solve puzzles one by one rather than being able to pick and mix; as a result it is very easy to get bogged down when the latest non sequitur problem stumps you and believe me there are lots of them. The ending was quite amusing but I don't think I'll be playing another William Quinn game for a while. It is more Basildon Bond than James Bond. The parser is also limited in scope and the endless "You Can't" responses to perfectly valid commands quickly become tedious. There are precious few if any synonyms available; to give one inexcusable example of the sloppy coding, you find an overcoat but the game doesn't understand the word "overcoat" only "coat." There are other similar examples.

The terse descriptions and several NPCs that you can't talk to do not help to create any kind of taut, espionage-like atmosphere and the forty odd locations are all described in a utilitarian fashion. I kept with it as there was at least some kind of story developing but it doesn't really amount to much in the end. The crude and sporadic pictures bring nothing to the party neither. Add the static, taciturn NPCs and the resulting mix is anything but heady. The low inventory limit is exacerbated by the slow speed of the game. TAKE ALL, OOPS and any kind of verbal interaction with the other characters that you meet are missing, which you would think would be a bit of a problem to a superspy. Each puzzle is like a fence in a horse race; fail to solve it and you're going nowhere. Even more annoying is the balloon which cannot be referred to after it has been inflated and if you attempt to use a certain container more than once you cannot ever drop it again so it just gums up your inventory for the rest of the game. Many legitimate actions won't work except in one carefully designated location which makes you think you're barking up the wrong tree with your attempted solution and a lot of the puzzle solutions don't make sense. The solutions to problems like gaining access to the cinema (why can you go in past the ticket booth without a ticket but not past a tramp walking about?) avoiding being killed when going to sleep and creating the right scenario to be able to watch the film all make no sense to me. The strange tree problem, the eight sided cabinet (whose existence is never explained) the sleep problem and the film problem are similarly surreal in the solution and I ended up solving problems by brute forcing them. A car jack won't work anywhere logically so I just wandered around the map trying it on every meta object until it worked on something incongruous; this isn't a very fulfilling way of playing these games. The rocketbelt would have been more fun if it had worked in more than one area. I can't in all honesty recommend this; if you want to play a decent spy caper try the Rick Hanson trilogy by Robico.

This is the second of the Rick Hanson trilogy and is another excellent offering from the O'Leary stable. This time Rick is sent to steal some secret plans to prevent the enemy creating a particle beam accelerator or something (or was it an everlasting light bulb?). I never was very good at Physics or Chemistry.

At any rate Rick is the lad for the job again and you find yourself dripping wet on a beach dressed like Jacques Cousteau after being beached by the submersible equivalent of Calypso (is that John Denver I hear in the background?) The usual tension laden story spins out before you: exploding trunks; ominously swooping helicopters; a psychotic guard dog and coded newspaper articles await our go to espionage man as he travels through a meandering village, a confusing forest and a mine-laden beach with guard dogs snapping at his twinkling feet.

The parser is adequate rather than envelope pushing and the game uses the proprietory MIDGE compression system which crams a quart of words into a 32K BBC pint pot. I occasionally had problems knowing whether a verb was genuinely not understood at all or needed a transitive object to be understood; one such example occurred on the rocky pinnacle towards the climax of the game. Multiple commands on one line are theoretically parseable but in my experience they often cause more trouble than they are worth. Examining an object often produces a description followed by a default "you see nothing special." Stick to the basic two or three word commands would be my suggestion. Synonyms are often ok e.g. "paper" and "newspaper" are both accepted. UNDO, SCORE and VERBOSE are all missing but EXAMINE ALL is unusually and usefully available although I found that the full list of results sometimes disappeared off the top of the screen when using the B-Em emulator when more than seven or eight items were examinable at any one time. The MIDGE compressor, allied with Mr. O'Leary's excellent prose style and story book imagination have helped to create a very well-written and pulse quickening espionage game. There is seldom less than six lines of descriptive text through approximately 210 locations and often a lot more but the output never feels flabby. By way of contrast some of the paths and roads run across more locations than is strictly necessary but this scarcely dilutes the tautness of the action, so well written is the game. The dry mouthed moments when Rick stares danger in the face manage to stay on the right side of farce; Rick is more Sean Connery than Roger Moore and there are no fourth wall destroying winks to the crowd. I would have settled for "nasty" rather than "cruel" for the overall player experience if it wasn't for one completely motivationless action which needs to be performed in the winding lanes of Witherton village; I tried it out of a sense of mischief and was very surprised to find that the result was in fact essential for completion of the game. Do you remember Ray Steven's hit record in 1974? No, not Misty; that was '75...

Unusually for a Robico game there are three mazes and the village maze is a colossal pain in the lane. There are considerably fewer objects than locations and I had to continually map and save, map and restore and gradually join up the many similar locations. The other two mazes both have hints to help you find a way through without the need to fully map them but the first of these (the forest) requires a somewhat odd interpretation of the clock face (to me, anyway). You may also get stuck for something to do in places as it is the kind of game where not solving a particular problem can stop you dead in your tracks.

As usual for Robico there are no light/hunger/thirst/time daemons or inventory barriers to worry about and quite rightly so. Who enjoys a meal in a restaurant when you can only book the table for an hour?

This isn't the kind of game with a puzzle in every room; rather it is a thumping good spy yarn where the (mostly excellent) puzzles integrate holistically with the plot. My personal favourite is the guard dog problem; I was stuck for ages at this point, then had one of those eureka moments. It is a very clever two part puzzle and involves lateral thinking when manipulating an item in your inventory then working out where to use it. Apart from the aforementioned moon logic puzzle in the village all the solutions are I believe fair and logical. There are code puzzles, pursuit puzzles and Grizzly Adams type puzzles to scratch your head over.