Roman Mystery - Goodman International œ4.95
          (PD Educational/adventure programs for ST)

                 Reviewed by Matthew Pegg

This is a collection of programs with a small adventure at the
centre. It is educational software and as such may not satisfy
those of us who lust after a good battle with a slavering orc
before tea. It does however offer an interesting alternative to
standard adventure fare. Children have to cover the Romans as part
of the National Curriculum in History. So if you have children of
school age it might be a useful addition to their school work. I
just enjoyed looking through something a bit different.

The program centres around real events in 305 AD around Hadrian's
Wall. Remains were discovered of a couple buried beneath the floor
of what used to be a shop.  The broken point of a sword blade
still remained in one body, leading archaeologists to suppose they
had been murdered and the bodies hidden. It is around these events
that the Roman Mystery is based.

There are three disks in the package. The first one contains
digitized images of various aspects of Roman life. These can be
imported into DTP packages to be used in the preparation of
worksheets etc.

The second disk contains two 3D Construction Kit programs: a
section of Hadrian's Wall and a Roman Fort to wander about in.
These are the weakest bits of the package: the buildings are
featureless blocks and you cannot even enter them in the fort. If
you shoot a building you get a little bit of information about it
but it is hardly enough to maintain your interest for very long.
It could have been much better if there was a bigger area and more
activity involved. On this disk there is also a version of hangman
which uses Roman words and a disk magazine which gives you
valuable background on the period, including poems and snippets of
information from various sources from Rosemary Sutcliff through
Kipling to Livy. There is also the background story to the mystery
and it is important that this is read before you tackle the
mystery itself.
This is contained on the third disk. It is intriguing in that it
was created using TCos, a PD graphical Database. Each location has
one or more 'pages' of text attached to it. On each page there
are 'buttons' which when clicked on take you either to a new
location or to a digitized picture or to the next page of text
associated with that location. The whole thing works as a kind of
tree diagram.

It is very simple to find your way around. You play a slave
running an errand to a shopkeeper who seems to have disappeared
with his wife.  Your task is to gather information about his
possible murder.  As this is educational software it has been made
deliberately simple. Children should find it easy to find their
way around the program. There is no interaction with the program:
when you revisit a location you get exactly the same text. The
experience is a bit like playing one of those Fighting Fantasy
game books.

There is also no real end to the game but this is fine as it has
been devised to act as a stimulus to further activity. Children
could speculate as to what exactly happened from the slightly
different versions of the story they get. In the meantime they
should have picked up quite a bit of detail about life in Roman
Britain. One suggestion by the author is that they could write the
end of the story when they have decided on their version of
events. It could also act as a good stimulus for a variety of art
and drama work.

The ST is not widely used in schools but those who do have one
will find this a useful program: its open-endedness makes it
very flexible. For everyone else, don't let the 'educational' tag
put you off trying something a little different. 'Roman Mystery'
provides an interesting model for PD adventures of all kinds:
instead of one central program why not have a suite of
programs around the same story? What about a little disk based
magazine to go with your main adventure? Or a 3D section? This
package demonstrates an imaginative use of easily available PD and
commercial utilities and just for that reason I'm pleased I had a
look at it.