The Golden Fleece - Jim MacBrayne RRP œ7.50
                     (Text-only)

It's always a risky business making a wager with someone as a
result of a disagreement, but when one is the god Hermes and the
person the bet has been made with is Zeus, the father of the gods
(never the best of losers), that's what I'd call laying your life
on the line.

It all starts during what is supposed to be a friendly game of
chess between Hermes and Zeus. Zeus reckons that humans are a
pretty hopeless bunch whose sole use is to provide amusement for
the gods but Hermes disagrees, assuring Zeus that he could find
at least one mortal who Zeus would be willing to call "brother".
Uh-oh... So Zeus sets a challenge; Hermes must find a champion who
can perform a task - the acquisition of the Golden Fleece. If he
succeeds, he'll be in clover (or is that ambrosia?) for the rest of
his life but if he fails, he'll be up the proverbial Styx without
a paddle, and Hermes will be right there with him!

You play the hero chosen to complete the task and start the game
in a room with only a lamp by your side and a sword in an adjacent
location.  The surrounding rooms are enshrouded in darkness but,
lamp and sword in hand, you set off to explore, only to find
yourself a few moves further on in a series of rooms which are so
gloomy that the light from your lamp cannot penetrate the
darkness.  Finding the exits is a matter of trial and error,
since, with only two objects at your disposal - one of which is
your lamp - it is impossible to map the rooms by the conventional
method of dropping objects.

However, once you have mapped the area, you'll find there are
several exits leading off, each through a doorway. Several of the
doors are locked but the others will each take you to different
areas, each with a puzzle or three to solve.

I won't give too much away about the types of places you'll find
as it will spoil the surprise for you, but they include a
gingerbread house (complete with a witch, naturally), a dying
goblin who makes a long speech to you which you're sure would be
useful if only you could understand a word he was saying, a series
of sewage pipes where you'll meet an imp who will ask you a
diabolical mathematical puzzle and a room with a see-saw floor
which tilts as you walk from one end to another, alternately
hiding and exposing two exits which are tantalisingly out of
reach......

At first there are few objects to manipulate but as you make
progress you'll find a pile of them, if only you can work out how
to get them without killing yourself. Luckily you can save your
game to disk before trying anything dangerous and the copy
protection on the game comes into effect when you restore a saved
position, the copy protection taking the form of a colour code
wheel as in Infocom's A Mind Forever Voyaging.

Jim has obviously been strongly influenced by Infocom when writing
The Golden Fleece, relying on a good storyline and atmospheric
descriptions, not to mention intricate puzzles! I would have
preferred a few more easy puzzles dotted about the game to make me
feel I was achieving more in the early stages, rather than
spending a lot of time exploring and mapping but otherwise making
little progress.

The game accesses the disk when moving from location to location
but you can link commands by full stops or the word "then". The
parser is excellent, allowing the use of "everything", "and",
"all", "except" and "but" as in "get everything except the lamp
and the ball". "Again" (to repeat an input) is available, as
are "brief", "verbose" and "superbrief" to toggle between
different lengths of location descriptions but the "examine"
command is rather weak and ramsave/ramload aren't included.

All in all, if you've missed the style of Infocom adventures since
their demise you'll be delighted to discover The Golden Fleece.
Jim's other two games will be reviewed in a future issue of
SynTax and promise to be every bit as good. To order, contact Jim
MacBrayne, 27 Paidmyre Crescent, Newton Mearns, Glasgow, G77 5AQ
or see the adverts section elsewhere in this issue.

                                                  Sue