Murder - US Gold RRP œ24.99
    (3D mouse-controlled game for ST (reviewed), Amiga, PC)

                  Reviewed by Ian Taylor

   There's been a murder committed. Although you haven't 
committed it, you decide in which house it's been committed and 
when.  With the level of difficulty, these factors give a 
different scenario every time. US Gold claim a total of nearly 3 
million scenarios are possible.

   You are the sleuth called in to investigate the murder and you 
have 2 hours real time to solve it - and no save function. To 
solve the murder, you need to collect the murder weapon and 
confront the suspect with it. You only get one chance and the 
result of your investigation is revealed on the front page of the 
Daily Chronicle - resulting in instant fame if you're right and 
ignominy if you're wrong.

   To collect the evidence, you interview people for facts and 
opinions and collect and compare fingerprints. There are over 20 
suspects in each game for you to interview. You can question them 
about rooms, weapons, their own movements and other people's 
movements and relationships. They will always tell the truth, 
but not necessarily the whole truth and they will never 
incriminate themselves. The information can be stored in an      
on-screen notebook and indeed should be, but you can't store 
everything there and you will need a pen and paper handy. The
game is completely mouse operated using icons.

   You are told at the start how the murder was committed 
(stabbed, shot, strangled etc.). There are several weapons which 
might have been used. You must locate the likely ones and dust 
them for fingerprints. You can store the fingerprint to compare 
with the suspects'. However, to do this, you need a fingerprint 
that you KNOW belongs to a certain suspect. To do this, you need 
to follow the suspects about and when they drop an object - as 
they do all the time - you grab it and dust it for fingerprints.  
If no-one else has picked up the object since it was last 
cleaned, and if the surface is not too rough (you can't 
fingerprint rope for example), then there will be a nice clear 
fingerprint for you to store and compare. Unfortunately, 
although there is a grid to store fingerprints in, there is no 
way of storing whose fingerprint it is or on what object it was 
found.

   The house is shown by a 3D isometric sepia display. The 
people move about, picking things up and dropping them again.
Although you can customise your own close-up portrait at the 
start, you can't do anything about the fact that, on the 
isometric display, all the males look the same and all the 
females either look like a maid or a guest. This does not make 
it easy to find the person you're looking for and it reduces the 
game atmosphere. Sound? Taps drip, toilets flush, birds hoot 
and clocks tick. That's all.

   The game has some worthy aims, but somehow it doesn't quite 
make it. There may be 3 million possibilities, but if anyone 
plays on the 2 lower levels more than once or twice, I would be 
surprised. They're far too easy as there only seems to be one 
real suspect in each game. The game lacks any real atmosphere, 
despite attempts - the sound effects, sepia etc. The isometric 
view is not really made best use of: surely the programmers could 
have managed some differentiation between people, houses etc.  
The display may be 3D, but the characters very definitely are 
not. It's an enjoyable enough way to spend two hours, but make 
sure the phone's off the hook - you can't even pause the game!  
It's a pity that the programmers couldn't have looked at the old 
Spectrum game "Killed Until Dead", which although not having any 
movement had far more atmosphere and was much more fun and 
ultimately a more playable game.