Omnicron Conspiracy - Imageworks RRP œ24.95
           (Graphic adventure, double-sided disks)

Some games immediately strike you as being good, others quickly
have you reaching for the "off" switch. But a third group leave
you indecisive as to whether or not you like them.  Omnicron
Conspiracy is one of these.

The game starts off in a fairly traditional manner. You are
Captain Ace Powers, assigned to bust an intergalactic drugs ring.
You're currently living on a space cruiser, the Falcon, due to
possible attempts on your life. A bit of blurb in the packaging
fills you in on the story so far. This is supposedly told to you
by Powers himself and he comes over as rather an objectionable
character.  One black mark against the game to start with - I
prefer to play a sympathetic character in an adventure.

The drugs ring appears to be based on a planet called Omnicron
(or "Cron" as it seems to be called locally) and when you begin
the game in your quarters on the Falcon, a PAL droid, one of the
many robots on the ship, arrives to give you the coordinates of
the planet. Ace is manoeuvered using a joystick or the cursor keys.
I didn't attempt joystick control as I found the cursor keys quite
easy to use apart from the fact that if you want Ace to go in a
particular direction you seem to have to push the relevant key a
couple of times, to get him turned and then start him moving
and then keep the key depressed so he keeps walking. Sometimes he
still ends up doing a sort of "soft-shoe shuffle" while you try to
get him going. I got the hang of it after a while though.

Arriving at the planet and beaming down to Police HQ, you
first have to visit the Chief of Police in his office to be
briefed. It turns out that the operative who was investigating the
drugs ring has gone silent since sending a message from a small
freighter, the BlackStar, where he (or she?) was acting on
information received from a contact in a local tavern. The ship
was later found drifting in space, having been attacked, and it's
up to you to finish the investigation, bring the guilty parties to
justice and so forth.


There is no typing in the game, all action commands (and
there aren't many of them) being selected from a menu when you
walk up to a person or object. These can be examine, search,
converse, use or take. Sometimes people will walk up to you and
start up what passes for a conversation in this game (ie
completely one-sided!) but more often than not you will have to
seek out characters with useful information.

Most of the action - as far as I've seen - takes place on the
streets of Cron.  There are several long ones running sideways
across the screen (which for the sake of argument I'll call east
to west) with doors leading off to the north of some screens which
lead into shops, bars, a temple, motel etc.  Every so often
there's an alley leading off to the north which will take you
directly to another major street; that's why the east/west
description isn't strictly accurate. Even in interior scenes,
exits are only ever north, west or east which makes mapping very
messy. Each new location is loaded from disk as you enter it.

Some people will attack you and, if you don't want to be bumped
off and go through the protracted resurrection sequence, you'll
have to fight back with your trusty gun which is kept in one of
your six pockets. This can be set on stun or kill and is fired
with the fire button or space bar. The pockets and their contents,
if any, are arranged on either side of the main action window with
"rest" and "life" bars above and below.  Ace has to sleep and eat
at regular intervals to keep up his strength if he isn't to keel
over and faint or expire.

There are certainly a lot of people in the game - if you can call
them that, as the inhabitants of Cron seem to cover a wide variety
of alien species from humanoid, feline/humanoid, snails, strange
octopus-like creatures that bounce along, kids on peculiar
airborne bike and more. Even Superman makes an appearance!
However, as you keep playing, you get the feeling that very few
of them are essential to your investigations; most of them are
just there to fill up the streets. And fill them up they do,
accompanied by disk accesses and much finger-tapping while you
wait. If you stand Ace in the wrong place, he will cause quite a
traffic jam as these aliens build up behind him in a queue,
jostling each other and trying to overtake him!

Two other things that slow down the game-play are the sound and
animation used in the game. Ace marches along to the tap-tap of
his boots and other characters also trot about to the sound of
footsteps. By the time you enter the Mind Zi Tavern, with several
thugs moving about and strident music playing (which, despite the
instructions, I couldn't manage to disable), Ace was moving about
at a snail's pace.

At the beginning of this review, I said that I couldn't make up my
mind whether I liked Omnicron Conspiracy or not. During the course
of doing this review and re-reading what I'd written, I came to
the conclusion that, deep down, I hadn't really liked it much at
all ... I just hadn't realised how much I disliked it until now!
Basically you must talk to everyone, search everywhere and hope
you find something interesting and if, like me, you find little of
interest, it's very boring to play.
                                               Sue