Treasure Of The New Kingdom - on SynTax disk 94
            (text/graphics adventure for the ST)

              Reviewed on an STe by James Judge

It is present day Egypt and you play the part of an intrepid
explorer.  You have come to The Valley Of The Kings to seek out
the crown of the legendary Pharaoh Menes (daa! daa! daa! dum!)

The crown was said to have been guarded by the priests in the
Temple Of Karnak but in the latter years of the New Kingdom (about
1000 B.C) attacks by fierce bands of tribesman became more
frequent and soon the crown fell into their hands. The tribesman
then hid the crown deep in one of their desert tombs.

Nobody knew what happened to the crown until a scroll was found
listing the crown as one of the treasures buried in the tomb of
the little known High Priest Herihor.  You must now search out the
tomb of Herihor and recover the crown if you can (sounds daunting
doesn't it?)

You start the game on the west bank of the Nile with your ferry
speeding its way across the Nile to the east bank.

From here your only exit is a road west, so off you toddle and you
appear in... a market (ooh).  You go west again and you're on a
road that leads west, north and back the way you came. If you go
north you end up obtaining a ducks feathear (a spelling mistake on
the part of the programmer, and one of many).

West leads you to a myriad of tombs which you may or may not enter
due to some being closed to the public.

After going through some fifty or so non-essential locations your
adventure begins with (unless you're lucky first time out) your
death. So back to the beginning you go unless you have saved your
position.

Anyway after a while you will feel like turning the computer off
and sitting down to watch the latest episode of Eldorado. I must
admit I have not completed this game due to the many down points
and it just does not hold your attention long enough to be
interesting.

Right from the credits screen there is a plethora of spelling
mistakes due to the obvious lack of play-testing. These include:

             creater instead of created
             feathear instead of feather
             fore instead of forth
             funnery - what on Earth is a funnery??

and there are one or two sentences that make no sense at all:

             ...the only exit from her is up.
             ...a group americans.

There are also many ways that the programmer has spelt Ramesses
(or is it Rammeses, Rameses or Ramessess?)

If you type in 'sit down' any time during the game you will get a
message telling you that "You are already sitting". 'Oh no' you
think 'I've been dragging myself around the game on my bum!'. So
you tap in 'stand up' and guess what, yep the computer says "You
are already standing". Hmmmmmm.

Also in the game there are one or two locations that (for example)
tell you that you can go southwest so you type in 'sw' and you get
one of these two responses a) there is no exit in that direction
or b) you go southwest and you find you can get back to your
original location by going southwest!

I know that these are all small niggles but even in the part of
the adventure I have done I filled an A4 sheet of paper with
spelling mistakes and other such inaccuracies which (when you put
'em all together) is a major turn-off.

There is adventure data on the disk so if you want you can change
all of these errors, alter the font and completely redesign the
game!

If the programmer had gone through the game two or three times or
got a friend or two to help him play-test the game it would have
been far better. Also if he cut down on the number of rooms in the
adventure that do nothing at all would improve the game even
further.  At the beginning of the game I think there was about
fifteen tombs of the Ramesses (or was it Rameses???) Pharaohs and
from what I have seen none of them do much or nothing at all.

A few good points about the game is the ability to change the size
of text, a smattering of graphics and if the data about the tombs
Pharaohs etc are correct I take my hat off to the programmer.

The game is better than some I've seen but there are many that are
better than this.

          Graphics    - 5/10
          Sound       - 0/10 (there is none except the key click)
          Playability - 6/10