MOLD 1 - An AGT adventure for the ST by Declan Stanley
                (Text adventure on PD 161)

                 Reviewed by Ivan Broad

It is the 23rd Century and Mankind has spread through space to
colonise the Moon, Mars, and even the asteroid belt.  Now an
expedition is set to take the next "Giant Leap" to Alpha
Centauri.  In a blaze of publicity you, a microculture expert,
and five other crew members blast off from Earth on the long
voyage through endless night to the prospective new home of
Mankind.

Awakening from your interstellar slumber you find no newsmen, no
holographers, not even sleep-technicians, in fact there is no-one
at all !!!!!!!!!!

You are all ALONE in all that space.

You try to sit up but only succeed in hitting your head on the
closed lid of your deep sleep capsule.  The capsule has not
opened automatically as it should - maybe something is not quite
right????

Luckily the ship's designers had the foresight to install a manual
opening button inside the capsule just under your hand.

Having finally discovered how to get out of the control room
(the second location), only with the help of Sue Medley, I was
next faced with a rapidly decompressing corridor.  I "died" here
several times before I had worked out where to go and what to get
en route.  Note this section is not completeable in one go.  You
must find the location of items before trying to collect them as
you do not have time to examine anything and escape alive.

These first two problems I thought showed real promise of a
difficult game to follow but the rest proved to be just mapping
with no further problems to be solved.  I say this with
reservations as I only visited 84 of the 112 locations (it is
possible to "win" the game by visiting only 16 locations).  In
itself this is not too bad as the maze is rather complex with
corridors that curve and cross without intersecting.
Descriptions of actions and particularly of dying are very good
and imaginative.

The problems with this game came close to spoiling it for me but
overall there was promise and I felt that I just had to complete
it.  Declan's spelling is in places appalling (really indefensible
when using AGT or so I'm told), and his grammar leaves something
to be desired at times.  Then there is, in my opinion, the poor
planning of having difficult problems at the very beginning of the
game with nothing to follow them up.  Doors seem to be Declan's
favourite trap, especially airlocks which can only be passed
through in one direction, so there is no going back for whatever
reason.  Finally the save routine seems to have been trapped also
such that the game can only be saved and restored from certain
locations otherwise you end up back on the Atari Desktop (but
with black and white reversed).

My last thoughts are that despite all the pitfalls in the game I
just had to finish the game, which many would say is the sign of
a good game.  Mold 1 is really just a preview for Mold 2 which is
available from Declan at a cost of 5 pounds.  I hope Mold 2 is
bigger and better than Mold 1 and that more care has been taken
over the typing.