Tamoret - Michael Lyons/AGT on SynTax PD 66
  (Text only adventure on ST (reviewed) and PC. ST version is
      STE compatible, needs a double-sided disk drive.)

                  Reviewed by Claire Dyard

You  wake one night to find the shadowy figure of a woman at  your 
bedside.  She's upset and tells you that in a small town, Tamoret, 
a   scientist   had  built  a  gateway   to   another   dimension, 
inadvertently releasing an evil being who wants to take over  your 
world.  The woman comes from the same dimension and wants to  send 
this being back but can't do anything here so she needs your help. 
Of  course,  you can't refuse and,  in no time at  all,  you  find 
yourself in Tamoret.

First thing you see is a sign with these words:  "WE HOPE YOU  ARE 
GLAD  TO BE HERE BECAUSE WE ARE NOT GLAD TO HAVE YOU  HERE."  And, 
wandering in the streets,  you meet some inhabitants of this town: 
they are terrified and speak of werewolves,  zombies and the like. 
"Stay  away from the sheriff" is a good advice,  as you will  soon 
discover. In fact, you will encounter not only a werewolf but also 
a vampire, a strange statue, a giant rat...

The game is huge,  the text lengthy and usually good,  apart  from 
some spelling mistakes here and there,  and the atmosphere is good 
too.  The puzzles are a bit tricky at times and if you like  mazes 
there are THREE mazes!

This game has all the usual drawbacks of the AGT games:

You  can  play  it on medium resolution  only,  and  the  text  is 
difficult to read on a colour television. The default colours  are 
cyan  text on black background with inputs in yellow but  you  can 
@+easily change them. ~(You can actually play  it in mono too if  you
@~have a mono monitor; the same applies to all the AGT games - Sue)

When you die (and this can happen very often),  you return to  the 
desktop  and you have to load the game again.  Very  inconvenient. 
You have problems if you try saving on another disk so it's better 
to make a back-up copy of the game and save on this disk.

The game accesses the disk each time you move from one location to 
another,  slowing down the game. So, if you have enough memory, it 
is  a good idea to put all the relevant files on  a  ramdisk,  not 
forgetting to copy your saved positions when quitting the game.

But  in  spite  of these problems,  I enjoyed this  game  and  I'm 
looking forward to the follow-up.  Of course,  this is not INFOCOM 
but  it's  still  a  good  game  which  will  give  you  hours  of 
entertainment.  As  it is an american  shareware,  you can have  a 
look at it and pay the registration fee ($5) only if you  continue 
playing it.

@~Claire's solution is also in this issue.