Personal Computer News


Castle Of Doom
By Paramount
Dragon 32

 
Published in Personal Computer News #053

Pop Out For A Bite

CASTLE OF DOOM

Here's one for the garlic-lovers, a graphics adventure where you have to see off yet another vampire lurking inside your Dragon.

Objective

You start in The House of Doom, and if you get out of there you move to Doom Town, which in turn may lead you to the Castle of Doom, the home of Count Doom.

In Play

After a few words of introduction you're shown your starting location, a simple three-dimensional drawing of a room with a window in one wall, doors in the others, and a ladder leading up somewhere. You press the space bar to remove the picture and give you the text, which tells you the possible exits and what you can see.

Castle of Doom

It doesn't take much moving about to realise that the 27 locations in The House of Doom are basically the same, but with doors and windows in different places and the addition of an object of a ladder up or down. You also soon work out that there are three floors, with each floor being nine rooms in a 3 x 3 block.

Nor does it take you very much longer to discover how to get out of the one blocked exit in the place. Typing HELP basically tells you what to do.

Doom Town has 36 locations, but these too are all very similar, being rows of houses slightly rearranged to take account of the different exits each time. Here you might come across objects like rings, cloaks, crosses and garlic, though these aren't depicted in the graphics, just in the text.

Castle of Doom

A simple map enables you to find your way out of Doom Town and on to the Castle, though of course you have to figure out what objects you're going to need and there is a limit to what you can carry.

No ladders between floors this time, which means you have to figure out how to get through the trap door in one of the rooms. I couldn't bring a table or chair from one of the other rooms so I tried SHOOT TRAP DOOR. Back came the terse response: "You were arrested. Adventure over."

Verdict

I doubt if there'll be a next time, somehow, and it's obvious that completing the 'adventure' once will be an end to it. The Dragon is a very poor machine to attempt graphics adventures on, and when the software isn't very good either the result is inevitably disappointing.

Mike Gerrard

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