The Magic Shop - Jason Taylor/Zenobi RRP œ3.99
              (Mouse-controlled Talespin adventure)

If you found yourself outside a magic shop with a bit of time on
your hands, what would you do?  Pause to look in the window but
then keep walking? Or would you step inside? In this game from
Jason Taylor, you have the chance to make the decision and see
what might happen.

Inside the shop there are several things to look at. A fire burns
brightly in the grate while a wooden chair stands temptingly
nearby and a strange candlestick shaped like a grotesque creature
is fixed to the wall. As you get into conversation with the woman
who runs the shop she insists that you must be a magician for only
a real magician could leave the shop. You insist that you aren't -
and then prove it when you try to leave through the front door and
find your way barred by a blinding fire.

As the young woman offers to show you some of the items she has in
stock, you might as well have a look at them; after all, you
aren't going anywhere right now .... or are you? For, as you
examine each object in turn, you find yourself whisked away into
another world.

The objects are fairly mundane - a silver ring, a pair of dice, a
bag of herbs, a carved wooden figure and a framed mirror.
Sometimes the places they take you to will seem pretty ordinary
too. One of them is a field where some people have obviously had a
picnic and left their rubbish behind and on a nearby road a young
man stands proudly by his shining sports car, just waiting for you
to admire it. But if you take a closer look at the rubbish, you'll
find a book that is dated 2036 and what about the registration
plate on the sports car - MA 61C?!

Another object, the dice, will involve you in a competition
against a strange creature who challenges you to throw a higher
score than him in a game of dice if you want to keep your life and
gain a spell as well. It's such a shame your dice only have one
spot on each face...

Those are just two of the five scenarios within The Magic Shop
which is only the second game I have seen written with Talespin,
the graphic adventure creator from Microdeal. The first was The
Grail and I wasn't impressed, finishing it in about two hours! The
Magic Shop is a much more pleasant and professional game to play.
Because Talespin relies so much on graphics, it's a help if you
can draw and luckily Mr Taylor is fairly proficient in that field.

As with all Talespun (or should that be Talespinned?) games, it is
completely mouse-driven and plays very much like a story. By
clicking with the left-hand mouse button on different areas of the
picture, a selection box will appear giving you a choice of
decisions to make. An imaginary example - if you click on a chest,
you might be given the choice of opening it or leaving it alone.
Choosing to open it would probably cause a different picture of
the chest to be displayed and clicking on the open chest might
list the contents which you could take or not.

Possible choices are shown as black text on white background when
you move the mouse over them which is the reverse of the normal
colours. At other times, clicking on reverse text merely advances
the story. Clicking with the right-hand mouse button brings up
various game options such as save and load. Saved positions are
called "placemarkers" making the analogy with a story even
stronger, especially as save is called "set placemarker at this
page".  Talespin games recognise two drives so you can keep the
game disk in one drive and your save disk in the other, and the
save files are fairly small so you can get a good number on a disk.

There are a few criticisms I could level at the game but mostly
they are due to the way Talespin works rather than at The Magic
Shop itself. It plays fairly slowly because any changes in the
graphics have to be loaded from disk.  Another criticism is that
I've often felt that it would be possible to complete one of these
games mostly by trial and error.  This was the case with The Grail
but though there is more depth to The Magic Shop and a larger
range of choices to make, this still applies to some extent in
that, if you are given a couple of possible moves in one situation,
if you do a quick save game and then try each in turn, you'll be
able to eliminate some of the choices because they'll turn out to
be fatal. One thing I would have liked, though, was the option of
an inventory because in several scenarios I collected objects and,
on returning to the shop, would have liked to have known whether
or not I still had them. That shows one of the major drawbacks of
games written with Talespin; you are very restricted by the
author's choice of which options he feels should be available at
any time. You can't experiment freely as in a text adventure and
think "what would happen if I did this?" - in those, you might be
told "you can't do that" but at least you could try.

But all in all, The Magic Shop is a good example of a
well-designed and well-written Talespin game at a fair price. Even
though the game is graphics-based, there is a substantial amount
of text in it with only a few glaring spelling mistakes and
grammatical errors.  It won't take too long to finish so long as
you search each screen diligently for all the possible options but
you'll find it an enjoyable way to pass some time. I'm looking
forward to more adventures from the same author as promised in the
final scene.
                                          Sue