Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls - Legend RRP œ29.99
           (PC text/graphics or menu-driven game)

Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls (which will be known
as S101 for short from now on) is the first adventure from a new
company, Legend. The company may be new but the founder of Legend
and the author of its first game will both be well-known to most
of you as they are ex-Infocom employees. Bob Bates is the
brains behind Legend; he wrote Sherlock: Riddle of the Crown
Jewels and Arthur for Infocom. Neither were available on the ST
(boo, hiss) but the PC versions played without problems on the ST
with a PC emulator and I know a lot of you have seen them. The
author of S101 is a more familiar name, none other than Steve
Meretzky who wrote such classics as Planetfall, Sorcerer, Leather
Goddesses and A Mind Forever Voyaging, to name but a few.

In S101, you play young Ernie Eaglebeak who yearns for two things
- to become a sorcerer and to win the heart of Lola Tigerbelly.
You have rather a crush on her and though you've written her
poetry and love letters, you haven't had the nerve to tell her how
you feel. Unfortunately, there's a rather large obstacle to your
ambitions in the shape of your stepfather, Joey Rottenwood.  Not
only is he determined that you will NOT go to Sorcerer University
but will be apprenticed to a friend in the Dragon Tending Guild
instead but he's also making advances towards Lola, the swine!

As the game starts, you are locked in your squalid room, with only
a little time left before you start your apprenticeship. If you
don't want to spend the rest of your life shovelling whatever it
is dragons do, you'd better find a way out of there, fast! Having
solved this initial problem, you'll soon find yourself at
Sorcerer University and, after you've registered (which involves
one of the small sections of copy protection in the game) you can
start attending classes, going to parties at one of the two
fraternities - the Tappa Kegga Bru or I Phelta Thi - and doing
whatever else young men get up to at University.

But suddenly, disaster strikes when the University is invaded and
ransacked, leaving you the only person on the campus apart from
one old Professor who is breathing his last at the boat dock. By
this point you should have a strong suspicion about your main task
in the game and the Prof will confirm it. You must recover the
Sorcerer's Appliance, a strange contraption made up of several
sections and which, until now, had been dotted around the land.
Acquiring transportation from the University isn't as easy as it
might first appear but once you've overcome that obstacle, you are
free to start on your search for the Appliance around the
Fizzbuttle Ocean, armed with your trusty spellbook, a talisman
given to you by your mother and a few other bits and bobs. The
spellbook works much as in Enchanter et al in that you find spell
boxes at various points in the game and, by opening each box, write
the spell it contained into your book for future use.

You'll have a good laugh as you travel, too, for there's a lot of
humour in the game, as you'd expect from Steve Meretzky. All of
the characters have great surnames, my favourite being Professor
Peelerofsmallfigs. There are some interesting and unusual places
to visit too, including the Restaurant at the End of the Ocean and
an island of Amazons. As there are two modes, naughty and nice, in
which you can play the game, you can expect some, ahem, energetic
activities to go on at this part of the game which is renamed the
Island of Horny Women in the naughty version - shades of Leather
Goddesses. I liked the way the program responded with "Oh goody!"
when you went back into nice mode. (Well, I had to check it out...)

When you load S101, the screen display comes as a bit of a shock
at first. The top half of the screen contains a graphics window,
with a picture of your current location (which is sometimes
animated), several command buttons (help, inv, look, pict etc) and
a compass rose which shows available exits. The bottom half is
made up of two menus, one a list of verbs, the other of objects
and below the graphics window is a relatively small area for
text input.  However, you can customise the screen to suit
yourself. "Half mode" removes the two menus, expanding the text
input area (called the "story window" by Legend) to fill the
bottom half of the screen. "Full mode" removes all the graphics
and compass rose as well, leaving you with a text-only adventure.
"Map" replaces the picture with a map (you don't say!) showing
your current location.

However, if you leave the menus and pictures in, you have the
option to play the game completely with the mouse. You can
use the mouse to select your commands directly from the
verb/object lists, in which case prepositions will be offered as
necessary, click on objects in the picture to examine, take or
open them etc or move from one location to another by clicking on
the compass rose.

S101 runs fine on a 1 meg ST with a PC emulator but you'll need
two double-sided drives, one to hold a system disk and one for a
graphics disk. I bought my copy on import from Strategic Plus
Software for œ34.99 just after Christmas but is now available at
a cheaper price through MicroProse. I noticed when I saw it on
sale in Sidcup recently that it is on 3 1/2" disks, unlike my
import copy which was on 9 x 5 1/4" disks, so double-check
before you buy.

It's a bit expensive, but, to my mind, worth every penny. Though
the game isn't too hard, it will still give you hours of
enjoyment and it's such a treat to play an Infocom adventure
again - I know it isn't an Infocom game as such but I can't
help thinking of it as that.

Two final bits of information. Bob Bates is also working on an
adventure to come out soon. It will be based on time travel where
you have to foil an evil character who is changing the past in an
attempt to affect the future adversely. The second bit is that at
the end of S101 we are told that Spellcasting 201 is in the
pipeline. Gr-e-a-t! All I can say to you Infocom fans out there is
invest in an emulator and get playin'!
                                             Sue