Fleece Quest - Simba/AGT
      (Text adventure for ST(332), PC(331) and Amiga(544))

             Reviewed on the ST by Linda Turnham

In this game you play the role of Simba Pachyderm, an elephant
working in the automated library of a place called Glumdale
Skewels. Your colleagues are various other animals including a
dragon, the office type presumably, and you get on very well with
almost all of them. However this may well be because the majority
of them don't speak the same language as you which would make
arguments a little difficult to say the least. Some of these
creatures have also changed their eating habits, with cats about I
wouldn't give much for Fita Fish's life expectancy and why does Ms
Bunny spend so much time hiding in her closet?

The only fly in the ointment here is Fleece, a highly political
sheep, who is fond of causing controversy, breaks all the rules
and is disliked by all. Fleece, it seems, has gone missing again
and if you can find her and punish her you can have the rest of
the afternoon off. This offer is not very generous considering the
amount of overtime you seem to have been putting in lately but you
can't resist the chance to get your own back, can you?

The first problem is how to get out of your office, unless you
remember the command GO DOOR that is and then you are free to
explore. You find out that apart from having poor eyesight you are
a very strange elephant indeed as it seems you have hooves, also
as you are wearing a blue cape you might assume that you are male
but a trip to the wrong convenience soon puts you right on that
score because you are in fact a female elephant.

You can meet interesting creatures? like rude students, faculty
members who are too stupid to read notices, members of staff who
like to dress up in white sheets and belong to the Koffee Klatch
Klan, and even a ghost. Visit exotic locations! Well, not in this
game, the place is a mess with broken equipment and stuff lying
all over the place. The downstairs toilets are disgusting, they
are called Dannys here, is this a new slang word for John or
perhaps having removed all the diphthongs from the language,
Americans have decided to swap vowels around as well, thus Dunny
becomes Danny. This would seem to make sense as Union is referred
to as Onion elsewhere in the game.

Anyway, nothing has been cleaned for ages, perhaps this work has
been contracted out? The Tusktodian whose job it should be if all
the mops and buckets in his room are anything to go by, is also
missing, there is a pile of rags in one of the Dannys which Simba
thinks is Fleece's discarded underwear. I'm not so sure, I think
the old Tusker died in there and nobody has noticed yet. If by
this time you are so desperate that you have to use these
facilities you are rewarded?  with a lavatorial ditty of the
schoolboy type.  There is plenty of reading material to keep you
occupied, after all, this is a library, however keep your mind on
your main objective as some diversions can prove bad for your
health.

Well, back to the purpose of the game, Fleece. She is President of
the Union representing Classified Staff called CSEX (well, sex had
to come into it somewhere I suppose). Apparently she wears a very
short skirt and when not being political likes to 'play' with
Vietnamese boys. She's left her current favourite manning her desk
and judging by his name, My-Long Dong, his main attributes lie
below the waist anyway and his appearance would certainly seem to
bear this out. Quite why she prefers Vietnamese boys to other
oriental males is not clear but I suppose being mainly Bhuddists
and therefore Vegetarian she can avoid the fate of one of her poor
relatives found moldering in the staff room fridge. If you follow
all the clues and discover Fleece's secret hide-out you can do
what you've always wanted and also with the aid of a little magic
get rid of her for ever, BAA-BARIC.

It was nice to discover that my name-sake in this game was a cat
and not a hippopotamus or something but to find out at the end of
the game that as Simba I was married to a slug quite put me off. I
thought it could at least have been a Lion or Tiger depending on
whether I was an African or an Indian elephant of course. Never
mind, as I hadn't yet managed to eat anything I suppose pigging
out on Tacos is the best I can expect. If I can ditch the slug I
wonder if My-Long Dong is free for dinner?

This game was written using the Adventure Game Toolkit v 1.3 and
uses typed in commands with use of the function keys for the more
common ones. It is a very simple game with a vocabulary of about
400 words and a few special commands, which are all mentioned in
the text and 'all the clues are there' to paraphrase David Frost
[sorry, Sir David Frost] in Through the Keyhole. Most of the
descriptions are mainly to set the scene and are not really
relevant to solving clues. However, I feel that I shouldn't be
over critical as I have never attempted to write a game myself, I
don't think I could be original enough and after all you are not
being expected to fork out a lot of money. Also I feel that this
game is not meant to be taken too seriously but treated in a light
hearted manner.

A couple of things about this game really did annoy me though, I
found the help file, which admittedly you are told may confuse,
was totally useless and a complete waste of time.  Next was the
secret message, the clue leads you to think that you should use a
mirror to read it but no commands I tried would work so I had to
assume that it should just be read backwards, then I had to work
out its significance. In the end I had to resort to peeping in the
program, you can finish the game without this particular
information but an extra clue here would have been nice.

I also had trouble with saving, this worked while playing the game
but on returning the next day the saved game could not be
retrieved, most frustrating. I felt that there were a couple of
missed opportunities here as well, for instance I would have
provided a nasty fate for failing to check-out books and for
eating the candy. I quite enjoyed the descriptions of some of the
characters in this game and there was a very novel way of fixing
broken equipment, which I wish worked in real life. Not a game for
serious adventurers but it did while away a wet afternoon.