TIME AND MAGIK by Piper
This is the first offering from the new Mandarin label, and it
bodes well for future products. The games are an enhanced
collection of three of Level 9's earlier award-winning releases,
telling the story of the Guardians struggle to safeguard the
forces of Time and Magic. As any seasoned adventurer will know, a
Level 9 game is always worth a look. So let's look.
The first of the trilogy is Time and Magik, in which you,
uninspiring though you are, must find nine key elements scattered
throughout time and bring them together to stop the Timelords
from changing the course of history to suit their own ends. This
is the oldest of the games, and suffers from a somewhat quirky
parser (try putting something in the rucksack, and it'll end up
on the ground without letting you know about it) so that you
sometimes have to play "hunt the right word" instead of solving
problems, but with the inclusion of such characters as the Tooth
Fairy (don't let her have too easy a bargain) and a Viking called
Erik, the amusement level is still high. You travel between
timezones by the expedient medium of stepping into a large clock,
and by the time you're finished, you'll have gone from Pre-
history to space-age, meeting robots, dinosaurs and Romans along
the way.
Red Moon is the sequel, of sorts. Having foiled the plans of
the Timelords (you did manage to foil their plans, didn't you?)
you now have to search out and recover the Red Moon Crystal, the
sole remaining source of Magik. The action here takes place in
and around the statutry monster-infested castle, complete with
hidden corridors, rooms without exits, magic mushrooms and a
sauna. You also have the option of entering into combat with any
of the nasties you find, though exactly why you might want to go
into combat with a five metre long rat is entirely beyond me.
Both you and your opponent have a limited amount of stamina and
firepower, but yours is rather more variable since you, being a
wise, cunning and generally cowardly being, will try to hunt
around for armour, weapons and maybe even a couple of spells
before doing anything as risky and possibly painful as getting in
to a fight.
A further bonus, at least as far as the things you're happily
turning into puree are concerned, is that your dead opponents
come back to haunt you, popping up at all sorts of inconvenient
times (ever tried doing battle with a couple of dragons when the
ghost of a cloaked statue is sneaking up from behind? Not easy.)
and at just about any location. When they were alive, they seemed
happy to just sit in their rooms and be menacing, but as soon as
they're dead, they start getting wanderlust. A minor bug in the
program allows you to avoid these spectral pests, but if you
think I'll tell you what it is in a review, you're crazy.
Which brings us on to the final chapter in this story, where
your very sanity is challenged. The Price of Magik has a somewhat
unusual theme in that part of the normal hunt-around-and-find-
things aspect is superceded by trying to remain sane or, if
you're more that way inclined to completely lose your marbles.
You start off the game outside a large and particularly
menacing house with all the vitality of a 20 year old, and
completely sane, and there's not many 20 year olds you can say
that about. Pretty soon, however, you start seeing things that
shake your sanity and give you a rapid aging course, the
slithering nasty and the giant bloodworm being only two examples.
You score points for learning how to use the various spells that
are scattered around the house, scattered being a good descrip-
tion considering the size of the place; how many other houses do
you know with a river running through their basement, or with
green fields as part of the decor? Again, you can go into combat
with such adversaries as the giant snail, which I would have been
quite happy to feed to a giant Frenchman if I could have found
one, loosing stamina points on the way. Certain spells you must
have a focus for, which can be very frustrating if you know the
spell but can't find the focus (where is the staff, dammit),
others you need to be a little bit crazy to even think about
casting. Generally, the idea behind it is very well thought out,
but I know of a number of people who have complained that there
is less sense of "getting somewhere" with this game than with the
others since there are less treasures to collect, and also since
the house is so damned big.
The whole trilogy comes complete with a story to set the scene,
though I found that it seemed to be telling it from a slightly
different perspective than that of the program, and has a number
of new features, possibly the most useful of which is the ability
to adjust the text size to make it easily readable on a TV
screen. There is also the possibility to incorporate this into
earlier games like Knight Orc, the procedure for which is fully
explained. An "Oops" command is incorporated allow you to take
back a move, handy when the move happens to be slightly fatal,
and a RAM save is also available.
Recently, one of my distinguished colleagues wrote a review of
this set of Level 9 adventures in which he stated that these are
really eight-bit adventures with nothing to offer those who'd
sampled the delights of The Pawn or Jinxter. Frankly, I think
that's nonsense (actually, I think it's crap, but I'm not sure I
can say that in a review). (Oh well...YEAH! Ed.) When they first
appeared, these games were called classics. Yes, they were
written for eight-bit machines, but they were well written. This
compilation has been enhanced with more locations, a better
parser (still not great, but better), graphics (probably the
least succesful move) and you get all three games in the trilogy
for the price of one.
So you tell me; what makes a good game? The best graphics? The
best sound? Pushing the technological and theoretical limits of
the hardware? Well, maybe. It certainly isn't a handicap. But are
those things the most important? For me, the game is more
important than the "gosh wow isn't this well programmed" aspect,
and the games here are good. It took me two afternoons of zapping
aliens to finish Obliterator. It's taken me four days, as well as
the occasional large portion of the night, to get part way
through these games. Lots of frustration (how the hell do I hold
my breath long enough to get through the flooded tunnels), lots
of fun (I'll leave it to your own imaginations why Mary
Whitehouse leapt out and slapped my legs after I entered a
command which is at least physically difficult, if not impossible
for a computer) and a certain amount of annoyance (I don't really
like the combat and found it irritating the few times it was
unavoidable and the parser is occassionally very bloody-minded
about what the right words are) makes any one of these games
worth a look, even if it wasn't produced yesterday on a
transputer. Add to that the fact that you get all three games at
once, and you have a winner. If you already have the old version
of the games, you'll probably already be on your way to the shops
to get them for your new machine. If not, go out and treat
yourselves, three for the price of one can't be bad.
Price 19.95 pounds
Company: Mandarin
Value for Money: 8.5
Thanks to Anne Creasey of Mandarin and Cuddly Cactus Amsterdam
a division of Stichting Stem (020-6644022) for the review copy.
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