The Third Courier - Accolade RRP œ24.95
                 (Graphic RPG)

It's quite an eerie feeling to play The Third Courier as it is
set in and around East and West Berlin before the fall of the
Berlin Wall - a great day for democracy but rather poor timing
for Accolade, though I am sure they don't mind.

In the game, you play the part of Moondancer, a CIA agent. The
background to the story is that three couriers had each been
carrying one part of a secret NATO non-nuclear defence plan which
is to be revealed at a top-secret conference in Brussels in seven
days time.  However, things have gone badly wrong. Two of the
agents are dead, one killed in London, the other in Madrid. The
third, William Morris, is missing. He was known to be travelling
to Brussels via Berlin and you have been assigned to the case.
Through careful exploration and investigation, you must find him
and recover the third part.

Though The Third Courier is described as an RPG, this is a bit
misleading because you only control one character - Moondancer.
This character can be one of several already on the disk, or one
you create yourself. Character creation is simpler than in most
true RPGs. All you must choose is the sex of your character, your
cover profession, favourite leisure activity, age group and the
place where you spent most of your life (urban, rural etc). From
this the program will assign your character traits (intelligence,
strength and so on) and also tell you two of your personality
traits. As you progress in the game, you will gain experience and
rise through the ranks from sleuth to, eventually, master spy.
With each increase in level, you'll learn one more positive and
one negative personality trait for your character.

You start the adventure in your appartment in Knesebeck Strasse
with only a computer and an answering machine for company.
Logging onto the computer will bring a message explaining
your mission from Black Magic, your main source of information
during the game.

The game controls are very easy to get used to and you can use
the mouse, keyboard or joystick. The screen is divided into
several sections. One shows your location, ether an interior
scene or, if outdoors, a picture of the street which scrolls as
you move and is overlaid with a graphic of any character who
appears. The rest of the screen shows the compass buttons for
movement, your current level, experience and statistics together
with any messages and encounter options. Drop-down menus are used
for actions, inventory and places to go by cab.

Once outside your appartment, you can start your investigations
in earnest. Unfortunately, you will find yourself thwarted at
every turn by the random appearances of panhandlers (beggars),
hooligans, drunks, guards and other characters with which the
streets of Berlin seem to be infested. Some of them will aid you
in your investigations but the others are just a damn nuisance!
Okay, a successful FIGHT will gain you experience points but the
other options of CHAT, THREATEN and RUN can be worse than
useless. CHAT is mostly of use with the guards who then ask to
see your papers. If you show your passport, they leave and that's
that!  THREATEN, if successful, just makes the character leave
whereas RUN moves you to a random part of the city. The
encounters happen with monotonous regularity, making mapping a
nightmare, for though a basic map of the city is provided, there
are shops, hotels, bars, offices et al dotted about the place
which have to be located.

What makes it even worse is the constant disk-swapping and
disk-access during the game. The game comes on three disks, and
though the message "insert disk <number> in any drive" appears on
the screen, the program doesn't seem to recognise a second drive
so you are continually swapping disks two and three while
playing. After a while it gets very tedious!

Despite the user-friendly appearance of the game, the random
encounters and disk-swapping make The Third Courier very
frustrating to play. It could be worth persisting with it - I'll
let you know if I have the energy to keep going and find out!

                                            Sue