The Neverending Story

Sinclair User

"The storyline follows that of the film, rather than Michael Ende's original tale. You play Atreyu, a young boy who must find the saviour of his land, Fantasia, threatened by the Nothing which consumes it. Various quaintly-named characters are there to help or hinder - Falkor the luckdragon, Morla the ancient tortoise, or the gnomes Engywook and Urgll. Gmork, the evil werewolf, will be hot on your tracks the whole time, so you have to move quickly."
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Page 6
Just as the book inspired a movie, so too the movie inspired a computer game. 'The Neverending Story' is a disk-based Adventure which was originally written by Ian Weatherburn and released by Ocean Software Ltd. for a variety of computers. The Atari version was advertised, but I'm not sure whether it actually made it to market. Distribution was later taken over in Australia by Intellicreations under the Datasoft label. This is the version I bought, so that's what I'll review here.

'The Neverending Story' is a traditional text Adventure, but does include some nice graphics in a most unusual screen layout. The top three-eighths of the screen has a 'Cinemascope' picture of the Ivory Tower. This never changes. As you move around the landscape, a smaller window is superimposed over the left hand side of the main picture. The smaller picture shows your current location or a character that you've just encountered.

In a similar manner, every time you pick up an object, a picture of it appears somewhere over the right hand side of the main picture. You can carry five objects and have one travelling companion at any one time, hence you can have up to six little pictures on the right hand side of the screen plus the picture of your current location on the left hand side all superimposed over the main picture.
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