Silicon Dreams - Level 9/Rainbird RRP œ19.95 Silicon Dreams is the second trilogy of old games from Level 9, originally written for a variety of 8-bit machines but revamped for the ST and other 16-bits, with added graphics (rudimentary though they may be) and extra features such as RAM SAVE/ RAM RESTORE, OOPS, a 1000 word type-ahead buffer and much improved parser. Unlike Jewels of Darkness (reviewed in Issue 1) which had a Middle Earth setting, the adventures in this trilogy are set in a futuristic space-travelling society. Like Jewels, the three stories link into a realistic series. The first adventure, Snowball, is set on the ship Snowball 9, travelling through space, transporting a million colonists to the planet of Eden. The colonists are travelling in suspended animation, frozen in freezer disks in the rear of the ship which is composed of a huge ice asteroid. You play Kim Kimberley and you are woken from your hibernation to sort out an urgent problem. A crazy female hijacker has taken over the central control room, planning to fly the ship into the nearest sun! You will first have to avoid the dreaded Nightingales to escape from the first few locations before you can even consider trying to prevent the hijacker's plans coming to fruition. In the second game, Return to Eden, you again play Kim. Having successfully saved Snowball (oh dash, I've given away the end to the first adventure, but I think you probably guessed it anyway!) you are once again in fear for your life. The reason? A video taken of you in the control centre as you saved the ship appears to show you as the saboteur! Charged with hijacking and found guilty, you have escaped by stealing a stratoglider and crash-landing on the planet Eden. A few moves into the game, a voice booms out from the ship that the sentence imposed on you will now be carried out. A few moves later and it's ........goodbye, Kim! So you will have to work very quickly if you are to avoid being blown to smithereens. Your next problem will be to avoid death from radiation and THEN to find out how to stop the cuddly little animals on the planet surface from killing you. The other inhabitants of the planet are robots. They are the "descendants" of the original robot survey team that landed on Eden over a century before. Unfortunately, the two groups on Eden are in a state of war and the city of Enoch, built ready for the colonists, is shielded by a huge wall to keep the two warring factions apart. Another factor is that the robots have been battling with their surroundings for so long that they now have trouble telling friend from foe. Snowball has come, but will the robots realise what it is? The final part, The Worm in Paradise, is set a further 100 years in the future. This time, you don't play Kim. You are just an "ordinary" inhabitant of Enoch. On the surface, the city appears a perfect place to live. The robots do most of the work, humans are only required to do 15 hours work a week. You can also, theoretically, live for ever, as you can buy spare body parts as your own wear out - if you have enough money. The police force makes a profit by fining people rather than imprisoning them. Who would challenge such a system? Far better to work your way up the social ladder in a society where status is all important. Though I bought Silicon Dreams as soon as it was released, until writing this review, the only game I had tried was Worm in Paradise (on the spectrum) and I must admit, I wasn't impressed with it. For one thing, Enoch has a transport system where each location has a different colour code and it is notoriously difficult to find your way around. I had been told that the germ of this idea originated in Snowball and, within a few moves, I saw what they meant. Not the best start for someone who had got hopelessly and totally lost in Worm! To be fair, the Snowball system seemed a bit easier to cope with so perhaps I may give Worm another try in the future as that may now make some sense. The only one of the three games I am looking forward to going back to with any enthusiasm is Return to Eden. There seems a lot more to get to grips with in it and the plot has shades of a Harry Harrison book, Deathworld, which I read and enjoyed many years ago. But perhaps I am being unfair to the other two games, it's just those awful colour-coded systems put me off. One thing that occurred to me while playing the trilogy and reflecting on Level 9's games in general, is that though Level 9 have good plots and problems in their games, their ideas for location descriptions are sadly lacking. This was taken to its worst extreme in Knight Orc but these early games have the same sort of feel. Either you have these colour- coded locations or groups of related locations eg burnt plain, trudging through ashes, in ashes, blasted heath, charred plain and blasted plain, sometimes with no logic to the arrangement of the locations so that going east from A to B doesn't necessarily mean going west will take you back. But above all, the names of the locations show no spark of imagination and just look like so much padding. Anyone agree? All in all, not such a good collection of adventures as Jewels of Darkness but still a worthy addition to your collection, especially if you like fiddling around with colour codes and have the patience to work out the maths behind the system. Sue