Derek Brewster’s Adventure Trail

LULL BEFORE THE STORM

IF YOU LOOK through this month’s column you will notice it is a good deal shorter than is usually the case. The Trail is short for the simple reason that the powers that be at Crash Towers either haven’t received any new software this month or they are hogging it for themselves. True, I did spend some time at the Personal Computer World Show, where I sampled a moderate quantity of the ubiquitous DD beer and struggled in vain at the System 3 stand to see why such a large crowd had gathered. It was somewhat amusing to discover some time afterwards the crowd was caused by a scantily clad dancer. But once I got back home and put my legs up I could have quite happily played a megagame or two.

At the show rumours were rife but my legs were unwilling to check them all out — in fact I didn’t check any of them out. This may turn out to be just as well because I’m going to mention what was there even if it wasn’t.

The long-awaited Lord of the Rings, the major adventure based upon the major work by JRR Tolkien, is probably some way from completion. Terrormolinos, with very nice picture post card graphics on the Commodore, but none as yet on the Spectrum, looked very interesting and I’m sure will do very well on the Spectrum, so long as they can sort out their memory problems. Sorderon’s Shadow, although the graphics look very similar to the Midnight Trilogy, is in fact more an adventure game with text input and some movement within the graphics. Mikro-Gen’s Shadow of the Unicorn, would seem to be a similar sort of game, and is eagerly awaited due to its brightly coloured, highly detailed graphics forming over 11,000 panoramic views. You can travel only to the left or right of the screen, turning to enter other directions. The hardware add-on which is an integral part of this game is what makes it so special adding an extra 16K to the available Spectrum memory.