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These two adventures are reviewed together because their faults are similar; and they're the first I've seen written with Incentive's Graphic Adventure Creator, so are they better than your average "Quilled" piece?

Apache Gold sees you as cowboy Luke Warm (Groan!), in search of the treasure buried with an Indian Chief. The writer is Peter Torrance, described as a "fantasy author" on the packaging; in fact, a credit arising from his previous successes, Firebird cheapies Subsunk and Seabase Delta. Winter Wonderland casts you as an anthropologist - original at least - who must investigate a Tibetan civilisation, which has never been in contact with the rest of mankind, yet developed at the same rate.

Immeditely you notice the graphics - appropriately so considering the utility's name - which are faster, bolder and much bigger than in "Quilled" games, and remain on-screen rather than scroll up. The pics are jolly enough in Apache Gold, but poor and repetitive in Winter Wonderland. In neither game are they consistently up to the design standard of The Hobbit from four years ago! The text window is too small, with no border separating it from the graphic. Because everything scrolls out of sight so soon, you have to keep LOOKing, but this causes the picture to draw again on top of itself, with a resulting, unnecessary delay!

Text display is black on white (or on blue, deeper into Winter Wonderland) with no redesigned character set. Combined with slightly sluggish printing times, this means that the games don't appear anything like as slick as, for example, The (Quilled) Colour Of Magic.

An advantage of GACed gamed over Quilled ones is the editing facilities: you can enter commands in upper or lower case, punctuate, and use cursor keys. Also, these games sometimes require sentences with more than two key words. However, despite their technical superiority, the actual adventures are fairly primitive by today's standards. Description in both is below par, dull in Winter Wonderland and simple - almost childish! - in Apache Gold.

Torrance STILL have an ANNOYING habit of breaking into CAPITALS for no APPARENT reason, and PUNCTUATION problems.

Neither game is particularly atmospheric or innovative - just fairly traditional puzzle solving, marred in Winter Wonderland by "instant death locations", a dumb idea which should have died out aeons ago. Torrance gives clues which are laughable for their lack of subtlety. Both games have limited vocabularies and a disappointing lack of responses. And the instructions are too skimpy - nothing on tape storage, or (in Winter Wonderland) on how to communicate with other characters.

In short, what we have here are two unremarkable adventures, which could have been written a year or two ago. They would make ideal, indeed particularly entertaining, budget games. However, eight pounds each is a ridiculous price for such mediocrity, so steer clear.

What I find surprising is that these were apparently the "best" of the many games Incentive were sent (Medallion is Incentive's own label for such games). Evidently there are no hordes of potential McNeills and Austins out there - unless you can prove otherwise...