Wonderland - Magnetic Scrolls RRP œ29.99-34.99
  (Text/graphics adventure on PC (reviewed), ST and Amiga)

Well, we've waited and waited and it's finally here. Wonderland
has arrived! I gather the ST and Amiga versions are the same as
the PC version I played though if you're playing on a 1/2meg ST,
you may lose some of the extra frills and features. But after
such a long delay, is Wonderland worth the wait? If, like me,
you've always had a soft spot for Lewis Carroll's Alice in
Wonderland, then I'm sure you'll enjoy the game for that reason
alone. It's certainly beautifully presented with marvellous
animated graphics but I have to admit to certain reservations.

But, back to the story. I'm sure you don't need reminding of the
tale of Alice in Wonderland but suffice it to say that the
adventure follows the story-line to quite an extent but though
familiarity with the book may aid you in certain ways as you'll
have an insight into some of the puzzles, the adventure has a lot
of additions and sneaky changes to keep you guessing.

In the early stages at least, the game is pretty easy. Having said
that, I got stuck for quite a time on the frustratingly low score
of 4/501!  As you can guess, I'd missed something pretty simple
and I quickly roared ahead, gradually picking up points and
building up a reasonable score before grinding to a halt again and
having to stop for a think. Once you enter the main game, there
are lots of places to visit and objects to collect and if there's
one thing I like it's a nice open adventure like this.  I hate
being shuffled along one particular route from start to finish.

Initial impressions of the appearance of Wonderland is that it's a
real treat, every bit as good as we'd been led to expect, with
windows for text, a compass, the location graphic, a map, your
inventory and room objects. The last three use icons and these can
be manipulated using the mouse.  You can drag objects from the
room inventory to your own (and vice versa) or click on a distant
location on the map to travel there using a "go to" command.  The
windows can be moved around or resized and opened or closed to
give the screen display you want.  However the system is very
greedy for memory and when a particularly large or very animated
graphic was displayed on the PC, I frequently got "short of
memory" messages and had to close down some of the windows
temporarily.

Though you can create your own screen display, things can go wrong
as you move from one location to another and the graphics change
because, for some unknown reason, the graphics come in various
sizes from large to "blimey-where's-it-gone?". So one minute your
screen can look nice and neat and the next you've got a little
picture surrounded by a lot of blank space where there was once a
decent-sized picture.  Even the tiniest pictures are beautifully
drawn though and the animation ...  wow! ... talk about smooth ...
it has to be seen to be believed.

Sadly, Wonderland is far from being bug-free with some really
sloppy errors which, when you consider how long it's been in
preparation, is quite a disgrace. It's easy to confuse it if you
type in a "go to" command and though if you try to walk through a
closed door, the program will open the door automatically for you,
if the door is locked, there's still the same old messing about
with questions about which key do you want to use, even if you
only have one key in your possession!

Magnetic Scrolls are good but despite the innovations in
this game they still aren't THAT good and, to my mind, in no way
do they approach the standards set by Infocom. Having played
Wonderland straight after Spellcasting 101, which has many
features similar to Wonderland, like many other people
I'd say that Spellcasting wins hands down. Wonderland has tried to
be too flash and clever and failed because you just don't need
that many frills on an adventure game. After the initial ooh-ing
and aah-ing at the display, once I got down to playing the game
seriously, I found most of the windows were superfluous and just
ended up by closing them down before the system prompted me to!

                                         Sue