Five on a Treasure Island - Enigma Variations RRP œ24.99
        (Text/graphic adventure for ST, Amiga or PC)

It was the summer holidays - hurrah! We thought they'd never come,
but, at last they had and my brother Dick, my sister Anne and I
were on our way to visit Aunt Fanny, Uncle Quentin and my cousin
Georgina. "I wonder what they'll be like?" said Dick, as we sat in
the train, watching the countryside pass by the window. "Golly,
aren't adventures fun!" said Anne. My sister is SO cute sometimes.

The train drew into Kirrin Station and Aunt Fanny was there to
meet us. Cousin Georgina wasn't, though, and from what our Aunt
said, it sounded as though she wasn't going to be too pleased to
see us. We followed Auntie back to Kirrin Cottage where she said
she hoped we'd find a way to make friends with Georgina and
suggested we went off to explore. We had a quick look round the
house first and met Uncle Quentin, who worked a lot and didn't
want us to disturb him, and Joanna, the cook, who wouldn't let us
into her kitchen.  "Golly, aren't adventures fun!" said Anne for
the umpteenth time.  She was starting to get on my nerves.
We went to look for Georgina and managed to become friends. It
turned out she preferred to be called George because she'd rather
be a boy.  "I wish my dog Timmy was here," she sighed and soon
we'd helped our cousin and collected Timmy, the dog becoming the
fifth member of our gang. She told us about Kirrin Island which
Aunt Fanny had given her and about the gold that had been on board
her great great grandfather's ship which was wrecked off the
island.  We decided to kit ourselves out with all the things
adventurers need and sail across the bay to explore the island.
Maybe we could even find the treasure! "Golly, aren't adventures
fun!" said Anne. Just say that ONCE more, Anne, and find out how
much fun they can be, I thought.

We eventually reached the island safely and started to explore.
We found a hidden cave with a crate in it and then Timmy chased a
rabbit and fell down an old well shaft! Next thing, a huge storm
came up and soaked us to the skin and none of us could stop
sneezing. We did find the ship though. "Golly, aren't adventures
fun!" said Anne. I wondered if I could have pushed her down the
shaft after Timmy.

Five on a Treasure Island is based on the book by Enid Blyton. I
have fond memories of the Famous Five books from my childhood.
However, there's no disputing the fact that they are old now and
look it. Enigma Variations have gone all out to recapture the
same feel as the books and they've succeeded. The language is
very dated, boys are tough and organised, girls moan about
carrying too much or come out with cute "oh gosh" type sayings
or, as in George's case, are better than "regular" girls, mostly
because they'd prefer to be one of the chaps. Yes, I DID try to
push Anne down the shaft when her whingeing got too much but the
program said "I don't understand you." Pity.

The screen display is blue background with white text, changing to
white on black in dark areas when you haven't got a light source.
NPCs are few and far between but you can converse with them in a
very limited fashion so long as you pick the right words. Some are
stationary but others such as Fanny and Quentin move about at will
within a restricted area. Uncle Quentin seemed to spend a lot of
time in the dark store room under the stairs.... Some locations
are accompanied by a well-drawn graphic which takes up the top
half of the screen as standard but you can reduce them if you
want. However, this doesn't shrink the picture, it merely cuts off
the bottom section, making it pretty useless. You can also disable
the pictures and change the text size.

You control the five members of the "gang", using the BECOME
<whoever> command to swap between them. Some problems need you to
use more than one character working in concert to solve a problem
by splitting the gang into two groups.  You can also use the drop
down menus along the top of the screen to swap from one to
another. These menus also contain options to save/load,
ramsave/ramload, swap text size, list verbs etc but all these
commands can be carried out just as easily from the keyboard.

In appearance, Five on a Treasure Island on the ST looks very much
like a badly-programmed early STAC adventure with split quotes
over the end of lines, odd spaces and upper case letters, over-use
of exclamation marks and incorrectly used apostrophes. There are
often at least four other characters on the screen with you, each
of which has to make its own contribution to the "realism" of the
game with each having his/her own line(s) to speak, sneeze or
whatever in, with a blank line in between each one. Add to this
the space taken up by the fairly verbose location descriptions
given on first entry into a location and you'll find you're
continuously having to press a key for more text and wishing you
could lose half the children permanently in some long-forgotten
and preferably bottomless pit. It's a shame you know you can't
complete the game with only one character - preferably the dog.

When you finally get stuck, you'll probably feel as I did that
it's due to the inherent unfriendliness of the programming rather
than any stupidity on your part. If anyone has the solution to the
game, I'd be grateful for a copy of it as that would mean I'd
never have to load the game again to try to finish it myself!  The
old fashioned style of the game itself doesn't put you off playing
it but the way it's been designed sets adventuring back several
years. If it was a new player's first sight of an adventure game,
I doubt they'd ever try another.
                                                Sue