Your Sinclair


Tom Frost's Six Pack
By Tartan
Spectrum 48K

 
Published in Your Sinclair #19

Tom Frost's Six Pack

I'm often asked what titles I'd recommend for beginners to adventuring, and this is what I'll be recommending from now on! For less than a fiver you can get six games of progressive difficulty, plus a neat little introduction to adventure playing from Tom Frost, who should know what he's talking about having solved and written many a quest himself - including some of those here.

The first game is a simple quest for treasure, and introduces you to the idea of digging holes (and making sure you avoid falling down them later), of opening doors, examining objects, mysterious voices providing clues, and a little bit of the humour we adventurers tend to like.

Open Door presents a simple challenge - you start the game Here and have to get There. This introduces, amongst other things, magic wands and the waving thereof, the casting of spells, how to get down cliffs and how to go back and start again when you discover you've broken a vital object! These first two adventures have a unique HELP facility which prints out a full solution but only a section at a time.

In later games you're on your own. In Crisis At Christmas you choose to be either Husband or Wife and, your better half's car having broken down, you must search the house to find two special presents and place them in your children's bedrooms before Christmas Eve gives way to Christmas Day. Logical solutions, nicely presented, and just right for the beginner it's aimed at.

No room to detail all these adventures, but side two of the tape has Green Door, Red Door and a game called Rays. These are slightly more devious, as promised, and have a nice range of settings and styles. The six games include text-only, text and graphics, and what might be called text with trimmings. They seem to have been well-tested to eliminate any of those niggly little responses that newcomers could find puzzling. Definitely a bargain six-pack, but not one for the old hands.