Amiga Power


Magnetic Scrolls Compilation

Author: Sean Masterson
Publisher: Infocom
Machine: Amiga 500

 
Published in Amiga Power #7

Magnetic Scrolls Compilation

If you thought adventure games had gone out with the advent of the blitter, think again. What's more remarkable about this package than any of the games it contains is the window and menu system it uses. The functions embedded in the system are normally the domain of expensive desktop software suites. Assuming you have one meg, then, you can now spend more time playing the same move in a myriad of possible ways than the weeks it would previously have taken to finish Fish, Corruption and Guild Of Thieves.

These games first appeared in traditional graphic adventure format, with key illustrations displayed above a text display and command line interpreter that threatened to reply "You cannot see the south here" every time you typed in a command.

Using the windows system the company developed for the overblown Wonderland (as in the one Alice trashed), you can make moves by moving icons, clicking a pointer menus of key commands or typing them in. ("You cannot see the south here.") It is a revolution. Magnetic Scrolls, who first found fame with The Pawn and its Infocom-beating parser implementation, now give us a whole bunch of reaches to spontaneously combust in awe of their cleverness.

Guild Of Thieves was their second release and it's good to see it again, dressed up or otherwise. It's the only game that has ever really managed to get the concept (apologies to Pseuds' Corner for using the world) of thieving into a game and make it fun. As you try to prove yourself to a town's most discreet brotherhood, you're drawn into a veritable den of iniquity, whatever one of those is. And the ensuing plot unravels faster than knuckles crack when they're caught in a till. There's a high humour quotient and some of the punchlines are good enough to steal for yourself. This stuff is well above second rate.

Fish boasts another first. If you've never played an adventure set entirely in one of those plastic castles that look so natural in the bottom of a goldfish bowl, you've never played Fish. Yes, only you, a humble goldfish, can rescue your underwater world from a gang of extraordinary aquatic adversaries known as The Seven Deadly Fins. Extremely silly adventure games have been tried before most of them have been trying. The problem with Fish is that some of it is just so totally hatstand - quite often the stumpers seem either pointless or wasted, occasionally unfair. Still, in my book, it's a damn site funnier and more playable than James Pond. You'll have a good laugh at the puns, too. I'd make one here but it ain't my plaice.

Weakest of the three games is Corruption. Your character is a budding yuppie and the plot seems to involve little more than a succession of lessons in humourless disillusionment. I'm afraid I found it less than captivating and certainly isn't the kind of thing you should think about getting into if you get easily paranoid.

Still, anyone eho's ever enjoyed an adventure game will lap up Fish and Guild Of Thieves at least. Even if adventure games usually turn you catatonic from four hundred yards, they've rarely been more playable than the examples here, and the new display system makes them more accessible too. They're all notoriously difficult to complete too. Neat.

The Bottom Line

Interesting and useable new display system gives to classic adventures (and one okayish one) a new lease of life. Ideal for people who got into Wonderland, but perhaps expensive if you already own one or more.

Sean Masterson