Dragon User


Syzygy
By Microdeal
Dragon 32

 
Published in Dragon User #026

If nothing else, this qualifies as the software with the silliest title, though it does offer a little more than that - in fact 250 pictures which cover 300 locations in an attempt to produce a kind of graphics adventure. The setting is the Deathstar where you are trapped with one Dark Lord Vader, who sounds vaguely familiar. You don't want to get too familiar with him, though, as if you encounter him you can be sure he won't be offering you cups of tea and cucumber sandwiches. You need your Light Saber to see him off, and to do that you need to find something that will deal with the 'orrible alien that's guarding it.

As you can see, the adventure elements are here, and the graphics side comprises, for the most part, a 3-D maze of corridors and doors a little like Salamander's Red Meanies or Microdeal's own earlier Phantom Slayer. The pictures, which are simple but convincingly done, take up one quarter of the screen, leaving room for an inventory alongside with the bottom half of the screen given over to the text. You move along the corridors using the up arrow key, and turn with the left and right arrows, movement being instantaneous and very impressive. Doors open automatically when you come to them ... which is not necessarily a good thing as some lead to instant death as you may step into a lift that's guarded by some kind of force field, or into another corridor where there's no air.

The spacesuit I've found has holes in it, and this didn't do me a great deal of good. Another door leads to a room with a pool in it, so I tried EXAMINE POOL to be given the helpful information "It's wet." I'd also apparently forgotten how to swim so that wasn't a great success either.

There are plenty of other rooms to explore, and objects to slowly amass, and despite the difficulty of mapping out the maze of corridors which all look so similar, I liked the blend of graphics and adventure - not the easiest thing to do on the Dragon, and by simptifying the graphics they can squeeze in a vocabulary of 62 words. Not bad, and as long as you don't expect a conventional adventure Syzygy shouldn't disappoint.

Mike Gerrard

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