Letters @~Letters this time covering impatience in computer games, party @~RPGs, some news and festive wishes from The States, views on @~mapping and current games, comments on last issue, and @~adventure creation on the Amiga. ------------------------------------------------------------------ From Alex van Kaam, Holland Today I got your letter and Darkside of Xeen. I still had an order standing at Special Reserve form last August, it was for Captive II, I changed this to Darkside. The program made The World of Xeen on my disk, fortunately it didn't change Clouds of Xeen so I could continue with the solution. (I had backed up my save game just in case there were some changes to Clouds of Xeen) One thing that really bugged me in Clouds of Xeen were the hands rolling the scroll across the screen, It was very pretty but after so many times loading the game (switching from solution back to the game) it really got boring and took up some loading time. It is strange, on my first computer I had a game on cassette, it took 19 minutes to load !!! and after 18 minutes I sometimes got a loading error!!!! But that all didn't seem to matter.....until I got my first disk drive, wow, was that fast..... And after that came my hard drive (an Atari one, probably the slowest ever produced) this was even faster than the disk drive. And so on and so on, now it even bugs me if the game takes a little time to load those hands I've seen so many times before. Is this only me or............. @~No, me too. For anyone who hasn't seen Xeen, when you load a @~save game during play, the screen is 'rolled up' like a scroll @~by a pair of hands, and then unrolled to give the new game. It @~looks effective but takes (or seems to take) ages when you're @~itching to get on with the game. I used to wait patiently for @~the Spectrum to load cassettes, the plus 3 disks were quicker, @~then the ST disk drive, then the PC hard disk. Now I find I @~notice the hard disk accessing during Xeen. At the moment the @~CD-ROM seems fast but in another year, perhaps I'll be getting @~impatient with that too?! I was thinking, the makers of Ultima and the makers of Xeen should get together and make a new kind of RPG, with the depth of Ultima and the graphics and playability of Xeen, now that would be something...... All the magazines I read always price the Underworld so very high. My opinion is that the scrolling is very realistic but the graphics are not, and most important you only have one character to care about and the combat is therefore so very limited, or you have a good fighter or you have a good spellcasters but it is almost impossible to create a good fighter/magician. This is what I like about Xeen, you have six characters and you can create a very well balanced party. @~The graphics of the Ultima / Wolfenstein engine Shadowcaster @~seem much better than Underworld alone, shame the game itself @~doesn't seem to be up to much ... has anyone played it and can @~write in and tell us what it's like? @~I prefer party RPGs too. As in life, it's better to specialise @~in one thing and be good at it than be passable at several. I @~used to think that a, for example, fighter/magician, would have @~the best of both worlds but he always turned out to be too weak @~to survive a fight and not very good at spellcasting. With a @~party RPG each character has his or her own strengths and @~weaknesses, and they balance each other out. @~If anyone else has any comments, please write in so I can expand @~the letters section next issue. Are there any collaborations @~YOU'D like to see? ------------------------------------------------------------------ From Dave Leary, Adventions, USA Enclosed please find a complimentary copy of The Horror of Rylvania - just in time for Christmas! I've also included a disk with the demo package for inclusion in your library. We received a favourable write-up in the December issue of Computer Gaming World, a big PC magazine over here. We're still keeping to our plans for more games. Ulien and The Legend Lives should both be ready for spring - summer at the latest, I promise - and Unnkulian Unventure 3 by fall. Hope all's well with everyone there. Say hi to Neil, Marion and the whole gang and wish everyone happy holidays from us Adventions folks. @~Horror of Rylvania will be Alan's yearly adventure review for @~this year. As you know, I always drag him to the computer and @~'persuade' him to write a review some time over his Christmas @~break! @~If any of you haven't tried any of Adventions games - what are @~you waiting for? I can't praise them highly enough. Please give @~them the support and encouragement they deserve. ------------------------------------------------------------------ @~And next a letter from .... Mongoose Dear Readers, In reply to Alex, I also like to make my own maps while playing adventures and RPGs, but if you use the auto mapping feature in the game it should not stop you from making your own maps showing useful objects etc. and other things not shown on the game map. Now to the main point of my letter, a gnomes spear, Lands of Lore. This starts off as a usual RPG with you the hero being given the job of killing the baddies, saving the king, and restoring the world to peace and plenty. The graphics are excellent, the controls are excellent and the game is excellent. You have four characters to choose from at the start, e.g. mage, fighter, all-rounders or thief type person - I picked the all-rounder. The game starts off very gently and you just wander about doing things that are requested of you, these lead you to the swamp, the oracle, forests, keeps, and back to where you started. From now on, good luck. The early problems are the Ruby of Truth, solving the problems on visiting the oracle, and the mines - all this and you have not even begun on getting past the magic gate yet ... but as usual I will give no solutions here, but I would recommend this game very highly. The other game that I have been playing lately, Return to Zork on CD is also an excellent game. Its only failing as far as I could see was that the controls would not always do what you wanted. NOTE TO RICHARD, THANK YOU FOR GETTING ME PAST THE FIRST SCREEN ... we all need help sometimes. I will write more on this game in my next letter ... If any help is needed in Lands, just get in touch, and then we can both share the problem, not solving it, but halving it, ha, ha. Best wishes to all, Mongoose ------------------------------------------------------------------ @~Next, comments on last issue from: Simon Avery, Chudleigh A reply to J.G.Johnston's Deja Vu article in issue 27. An interesting article by J.G about various things, but I would like to correct him about one or two things regarding PCs, which were mentioned. I realise that the writer may have been exaggerating slightly, to emphasise the point, but I would like to clarify some of the points raised about the production of PC Software. There are very few `adventures', even in the loosest terms, which require the "latest PC with minimum 12 meg memory.". I can only think of two RPG/Strategy games which need a 486 PC, let alone the latest P24 or Pentium based machines. Nearly everything, including the latest games with flashy graphics etc, run fine on a 386, though Sue mentions that The 7th Guest runs rather jerkily on her 386-16mhz PC, but this is possibly to be expected due to the detail and sheer size of the game. As to needing "12 meg memory", I can think of NO program that would need such massive memory, with the possible exception of some DTP programs that hold an entire page in memory prior to printing. The normal memory requirements for some of the new games is around 2meg, some needing four. The vast majority of games need only the base 640k to run however. "A monitor with 600 DTP resolution and 1275 colours"? Please! PC graphics are rated by the type of graphics card fitted to the machine, not by the monitor used. VGA is currently the standard, though SVGA and `true colour' (16.7 million colours) are becoming more popular. Nearly every PC produced these days, and for the last two years, has had VGA fitted as standard which can, under normal circumstances, only manage a mere (?) 256 colours. It is assumed that if the correct card is fitted, then the monitor complies with it. "A 1000k hard drive"? Nope, certainly not. 1000k is classified as a megabyte, and you wouldn't get a 1M hard drive if you looked for it! The normal basic size is 40M, but large sizes up to 2.5 Gigobytes (2500 megabytes) can be fitted. "A CD ROM"? Ok, I'll concede that point, CD ROMs are becoming increasingly popular, due to the huge amounts of data they can hold, and also to deter piracy. But they are not, and will not be for several years to come, the main media upon which software is supplied. "games will cost you around 150 quid each"? As far as I am aware, there are no GAMES costing this much available. Utilities, such as word processors, spreadsheets, DTP packages etc cost far in excess of this, even into the thousands mark, but games usually sell for around œ45. To my mind, this is still too much to pay for entertainment, but they are obviously selling or the `money men' as the writer of that article so fondly refers to them as would not be making any `money'. As I said, J.G. was probably exaggerating to stress a point, but one thing I cannot abide is people spouting ill-informed figures with such enthusiasm without any knowledge of the subject they are referring to. As regard to "those magic `graphic adventures' for the Atari/Amiga/PC with their badly drawn characters", I can only ponder at what quality of software he has been using. I cannot speak for STs or Amigas, never having owned one, but the quality of the graphics in modern, commercial graphical adventures and RPGs is, for the most part, superb. @~As you say, Jim was exaggerating to make his point. However, @~it's worth remembering that it wasn't THAT long ago that PCs @~came with 1 x 5.25" and 1 x 3.5" floppies, a 40 meg hard disk @~and minimum memory and we thought we were well away. 40 meg goes @~nowhere now and even my two hard drives, 144 meg total, are full @~to bursting. More and more games need 4 meg of memory and I @~think CD-ROM will take over sooner than you think too. It's hard @~keeping up with today's technology but it makes life exciting @~(if expensive!), doesn't it? ------------------------------------------------------------------ @~And finally, Amiga adventure writing from: From David Froude, Shepperton A couple of years ago I bought an adventure writer package called 'Hatrack II' from Heyley Software and have enjoyed writing and re-writing adventures, never completing any to my satisfaction, and wondered if any other of your readers had heard of or used this utility which originated from an adventure creating system for the BBC range of computers called Adventurescape. @~I know Grue used 'Hatrack II' for his Amiga version of 'Four @~Symbols' but I don't know of any other readers who have used it @~... Grue also reviewed it in Issue 13.