The Puzzle Gallery : At The Carnival - Miles Computing RRP œ25.99 ("Puzzle" game for Amiga (reviewed), MAC, and PC) Reviewed by Dave Barker At The Carnival is Cliff Johnson's follow up to the excellent Fool's Errand which was reviewed in the July '91 issue of SynTax. Unlike its predecessor At The Carnival does not have a linking storyline, rather all the puzzles are set around a central theme, a fairground and its attractions. Stripped of the embellishment of a storyline At The Gallery comes on a single disk. Whilst there are fewer named puzzles or attractions to visit, forty in fact, that being about two-thirds of the number in Fool's Errand, each attraction can be made up of many elements resulting in a total of 180 mini puzzles to solve. There are fewer types of puzzles than in Fool's Errand, the graphic puzzles have gone leaving only mazes and jigsaws. I personally missed the dexterity puzzles and the card game which added variety to Fool's Errand. The puzzles that are included are 3 x 3s, blocks, concatenations, codes, crosswords, jigsaws, jumbles, mazes, polygons and word searches. Overall I thought that the puzzles in At The Carnival were more difficult and not just because there was no text to give clues. In those puzzles that involve button pushing, as in the concatenations and polygons, the allocation of actions to buttons is random with each new game so it is not possible to write down the solution to these puzzles as a sequence of which buttons to push. Rather you would have to note or draw the correct resultant actions that make up the solution to a puzzle. Some of the word searches are made more difficult by containing words that tend to be American specific. The Parking Lot contains car names, Tourist Trade contains the names of American states and some of the ailments to be found in the First Aid puzzle are more than just a little odd. The Men's Room contains, surprisingly, men's names, and any chap who has been named "Gaylord" by his parents would have good grounds for claiming justifiable homicide! The word searches are made easier by the inclusion of control keys to highlight rows although I sometimes found the colour clashes blinding. The humour can be more than just a little bit gross at times with some of the rides being named "Alpine-Upchuck", "Loop-O-Puke" and "Roto-Vomit". And, the minimal sound effects, on the Amiga version, are limited to the odd belch, burp and scream. The original idea behind Puzzle Gallery was that it should be the game disk, initially released with Puzzle Gallery, with various data disks to follow. However since its first release in 1989 on the Mac, there has been no news of these data disks. Likewise there has been no mention of Tarot, the sequel to Fool's Errand. In conclusion, whilst At The Carnival is good and very enjoyable it pales in comparison to Fool's Errand as it lacks the latter's central linking storyline. One thing that At The Carnival does highlight is the limitation of the whole concept of Puzzle Gallery. How long will gamers put up with the same kind of puzzles, the word searches, mazes, jigsaws, etc, but with a different topic without getting bored. Whilst similar puzzles, in printed format, are very popular their cost is a fraction of that of a computer game. Perhaps that's why we have seen no data disks! However it still gets my "thumbs up" for being a welcome break from the usual adventures and RPGs that I normally play. As with Fool's Errand the biggest problem to solve is finding the game in the first place! Neither has been advertised and both have had minimal coverage in the computer gaming press. Even when you do find these titles the prices can vary wildly from RRP to bargain bin prices. I have seen the Amiga version of At The Carnival selling for ten pounds, and the ST version of Fool's Errand for as little as three pounds. So, keep your eyes open for a good buy! Alternatively you can contact the UK distributors direct, they are:- The Software Business Ltd., Brooklands, New Road, St Ives, Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire. PE17 4BG. Telephone - 0480 496497.