Altered Destiny - Accolade
           (Animated graphic adventure with text input)
              (for PC (Hard Disk) and Amiga(1 Meg))

              Reviewed (PC version) by Neil Shipman

Altered Destiny is the creation of Michael Berlyn, a science
fiction writer of some repute and author of a number of adventures
including Infocom's Cutthroats, Infidel and Suspended. I first
read about it a year ago in the American adventure magazine
Questbusters where it received such a glowing review that I
thought, "I must have a look at that when I get a PC." In fact I
bought the adventure before the computer but it was only recently
that I settled down to play it. What did I find - and did I agree
with Questbusters' assessment? Read on...

The adventure came on seven 5.25" disks and, after a quick look
through the instruction manual, I set about installing it onto my
hard disk. Half an hour later I still hadn't managed it despite
following the clear instructions to the letter. A search through
the manual revealed USA phone numbers but no UK customer service
one, so I then spent ages trying to get through to Special Reserve
from whom I'd bought the game to see if they could help. They dug
out Accolade's phone number and, a few minutes later, I was
talking to a young lady in their technical department.

"I think you might have to copy all the files from the floppies
onto your hard disk BEFORE trying to install the game, but I'm not
sure," she said. Well, that wasn't what it said in the booklet,
but it worked. I quickly went through the setup program to select
the configuration I wanted for mouse/keyboard, graphics and sound
then, at long last, I was up and running. The codewheel protection
was easily mastered and the colourful title screens led into an
optional eight minute introduction to the adventure.

In Altered Destiny you play the part of unsuspecting inter-
dimensional hero P. J. Barrett. Your girlfriend, Trudy, is coming
over that evening to watch TV, so you pop down to the shop to pick
up your set which has been in for repair. But there is a mix up
over the ticket numbers - some great hulk has just taken yours and
you get his hi-def one instead. Later that evening, as Trudy
disappears off to the bedroom to slip into something suitable for
a spot of canoodling in front of the box, you settle back on the
sofa with your bowl of popcorn and turn on the new TV.

Suddenly you find yourself sucked through into another universe!
As you float between here and there the voice of JonQuah tells you
that his twin brother, Helmar, has had the Jewel of Light for too
long. He is untrained in its power and its effect on him is
causing a potentially fatal instability in their universe. It will
take a stranger whose presence is unknown to find the Jewel and
wrest it from Helmar before everyone perishes. You are not the
great warrior JonQuah summoned but it looks like you'll have
to do!

Your adventure begins as you stand in a clearing on top of a
floating island tethered to the surface of the planet Daltere by
huge vines. Strange flowers bloom amongst the rocks and green seed
pods drift past you from below. One nearby structure is the

workplace of Alnar the metal-shaper where you can equip yourself
with a battleaxe and other items. Another is covered in troughs
into which brightly coloured globules are coalescing from the
atmosphere. Tentro works here making "frags" of information with a
bio-mechanical contraption. An equally strange creature, Vindah
the diviner, inhabits an adjoining island and may impart some
useful knowledge if provided with the things he requires.

These and many of the other denizens of Daltere are sketched in a
Travel Diary which accompanies the adventure. This recounts the
experiences of Ekim from Tanla-Borug while taking a holiday on the
planet and gives you some idea of what might be going on. From it
you can see that your ultimate goal must be the castle, once-
beautiful but now corrupted and fallen into disrepair, where,
perhaps, Helmar and the Jewel will be found. Before you get there,
though, you will encounter many weird and wonderful examples of
alien life and visit numerous locations, all graphically portrayed
in glorious colour.


P.J.'s movement is controlled by pointing and clicking with the
mouse or by using the cursor keys, just like in Sierra games.
Pressing ESC or clicking on the menu bar (which always shows the
title, your score and your current location) brings up sub-menus
for loading/saving, help (non-existent!) and control of sound and
speed. All other commands have to be typed in and, as soon as you
start to type, a window opens near the bottom of the screen to
show your input. (A "Speak up, doc." prompt always appears which I
felt was completely unnecessary and rather irritating.) Text
responses appear in dialogue or description boxes, usually in the
centre of the screen.

Altered Destiny purports to recognise over 140 verbs, many of
which can usefully be abbreviated such as AB for ASK ABOUT which
is essential for eliciting information from friendly inhabitants.
Your last four commands can be repeated and edited as required
using the spacebar and cursor keys. Despite the reasonable size of
the vocabulary and adequacy of the parser, however, I was still
stumped for the right input on two or three occasions.

The graphics and animation are extremely well done with the
adventure looking best in its enhanced 16 colour VGA version which
has a more glossy, golden sheen than the standard VGA or EGA ones.
But if, like me, you find yourself continually falling over
cliffs, sinking into acid pits or stepping off aerial pathways to
your doom, you may find that the sharper, standard colours help to
delineate the border between life and death and make it easier to
see where P.J. is putting his feet!

The time taken to load the new graphic screens as you move between
locations is between 5 and 10 seconds on a 20 Mhz PC. I found this
acceptable but I would suspect that the longer delay on slower
machines might make play rather laborious at times. The musical
score is excellent - nearly every location has music or strange
alien sounds associated with it - but you really do need a sound
board to do it justice.

I must admit to having an innate dislike of most graphic
adventures - with the notable exception of those from Lucasfilm!


This stems partly from the feeling of remoteness I get when
endeavouring to steer a character into just the right position on
screen and partly from difficulty in interpreting what a certain
blob of colour is supposed to be. In Altered Destiny I became
stuck for a long time when I failed to appreciate that what I had
thought was simply a mound of rocks was, in fact, an archway.
Movement was made easier when I began using a better mouse with
more precise control, but I still found it hard to suspend
disbelief and become totally immersed in the adventure.

Apart from this I have a number of other criticisms, by far the
major one being that there is a glaring hole in the logic of the
story. This meant that an entire section of the game does not have
to be carried out for you to complete your task and get the Jewel
from Helmar. This is doubly unfortunate as it is the piece
involving the indella bird which I found to be one of the most
amusing - graphically and musically - in the whole adventure.

Although the packaging mentions some 90 graphic screens there are
actually less than 70 locations and, because of the faulty puzzle
logic, you do not need to venture into 10% of these. The puzzles
themselves are rather thin on the ground and, as long as you
question thoroughly all the friendly characters, not particularly
taxing.

I felt that the ending was rather weak, finding and dealing with
Helmar only being made difficult by having to negotiate an
infuriating crystal maze. I found a lovely bug here - about the
third one I had come across in the adventure - whereby I was able
to walk P.J. through a glass wall into a dimension behind the
playing screen, underneath the menu bar and off somewhere into the
depths of my monitor!

The artists' conception of an alien world with its strange flora
and fauna is visually appealing and clever animation greatly
enhances the overall effect. But much of this has no integral part
to play in the adventure and is only present to provide
atmosphere. A great deal more could have been done with plant life
like the writhing pomenta flowers and with creatures like the
sleepy flubox, the inquisitive snert and the ever-changing
squalna.

So, to sum up, Altered Destiny is a treat to look at and listen
to; the interface for text input is easy to use with an adequate
parser but limited vocabulary; puzzles are sparse and a large
section need not be tackled at all. Michael Berlyn, who wrote,
designed and directed the production, and the team from Accolade
who implemented it are surely capable of better things.

Now to dig out the Questbusters review and see what its
conclusions were...

"A kind of 'total immersion logic' that distinguishes Berlyn's
work and draws you into his fantasy world so effectively... A
quest whose many elements are integrally linked to each other as
well as to the fantasy itself... Accolade's second adventure is
even better than the first (Les Manley), with better illustrations

and more engrossing puzzles. The puzzles are part of a holistic
story that reaches a conceptually higher plane than Les Manley."

Sorry folks, but I just don't see it like that - which, I suppose,
only goes to show that different reviewers can and do have very
different opinions!