Innocent Until Caught - Divide by Zero/Psygnosis RRP œ37.99
      (Graphic adventure for PC and Amiga (1 meg required))

             Amiga version reviewed by Paul Vincent

First we had Simon the Sorcerer on 9 disks, now here comes
Innocent Until Caught on 10 disks. Where will it all end? The
latest graphic adventure, Beneath a Steel Sky, comes on a
hernia-inducing 15 disks, so thank goodness this upward trend is
accompanied by the software houses' tardy acceptance that hard
disk installation for Amiga games is just as essential as for
their PC equivalents! But after Innocent Until Caught's marathon
installation session, accompanied by several cups of coffee and
packets of biscuits, is the game worth the wait? Let's have a
look; we'll go through the Round Window ...

In essence, IUC (as we'll call it for brevity's sake) is another
animated graphic adventure, in the general style well-established
by the likes of Zak McKraken via Monkey Island, through to Simon
the Sorcerer. This time we're in Science Fiction territory. Our
hero, Jack T. Ladd, is an intergalactic tea leaf with a taste for
booze, women and large sums of money. Having been recently
assessed by the Interstellar Revenue Decimation Service, he's
particularly in need of the latter as his tax bill would probably
write off the Third World Debt for the next few hundred years! The
mission is clear, then: starting, penniless, in a spaceport on a
gloomy planet in the back of beyond, Jack must raise enough money
to pay off the revenue men, or face a rather terminal penalty.

A few minutes into the game, the first couple of drawbacks start
to become evident. First and foremost, the mouse pointer movement
is incredibly jerky, and difficult to control. This can only be
down to sloppy programming (none of the above mentioned games have
any problem delivering silky-smooth mouse control), and seriously
undermines the overall impression of gameplay - the mouse pointer
is, after all, the player's main means of manipulation of the game
world. The second serious problem is that some important objects
are only a few pixels in size, and have no discernible "detect
radius" around them, so that the pointer must be positioned very
precisely in order to manipulate them. Combined with the drunken
pointer control, this makes it almost impossible to even discover
that some objects exist, let alone manipulate them. In two or
three cases, even when a printed solution (courtesy of "The One"
magazine) referred me to an object on a particular screen, it took
as long as ten exasperated minutes for me to locate and pick up
said object. I believe this renders the game impossible to
complete by someone lacking such a hint sheet.

And the irritating niggles continue ... The inventory box, into
which objects' icons are placed, is non-scrolling. This causes it
to become extremely cluttered unless the player is continually
tidying up the contents, which doesn't exactly help you to forget
that this is a computer game you're playing (as happened in, say,
Monkey Island and Simon).  Rather than using verbs, the player can
set the pointer to operate in one of several modes - Scan, Look,
Operate, Talk, Pick Up / Drop, Go To - and this works rather
clumsily at times. For instance, the information panel only
identifies the object under the pointer when in Scan mode.  Hence,
having found an object, you then have to switch to Pick Up mode,
and blindly hope that pointer is still in the exact correct
position to pick up the object. Steady hands are tested to the
hilt here!  Also, when in Scan mode, if the cursor is over, say,
an object which can be operated, the Operate icon will be
animated.  Nice idea - it's a pity there are several frustrating
exceptions.  In one sequence, a door needed to be Operated in
order to open it.  However, in Scan mode, the Operate icon did not
animate, so I wandered around baffled for quite some time, before
trying to Operate the door, regardless, out of sheer frustration.
Open Sesame!

Talking to characters works quite nicely. The scene changes to a
"head to head" depiction of yourself and the other party, with
multiple choice word balloons moving the conversation along. When
the other person's reply contains keywords about which you can
discover more information, you can move the pointer over the
keyword.  This is then highlighted, and the pointer changes to a
question mark. Click on this and Jack probes deeper.  Good, eh?
Yes, but the problem is, I discovered this by accident, plus a bit
of trial and error, as this feature is not even mentioned in the
manual. A great pity, as much of the plot can only be discovered
using this technique. Didn't anyone beta-test the completed
package, checking that the game was fathomable with "only" the
manual for information? I suspect not.

One plus point of the game is the subway system on the main
planet. Once all stations have been visited, you can travel to any
station instantly by clicking on the subway map. This is obviously
a lesson set by the example of Simon the Sorcerer. Let's hope this
feature becomes standard on games in this genre.

Finally, I have to say that the humour - obviously intended as a
major selling point - fell flat, for me at least. Most of this
alleged humour consists of not-terribly-inventive abuse, and
feebly sexist chat-up lines (happily, these fail to work, just as
I hope they would in the real world!). Simon's sketches and
one-liners had me convulsed, but IUC's jokes left me stony-faced.
Sorry, guys.

In the opening paragraph of this review, I posed the question of
whether this huge pile of disks would prove worth the wait. Well,
I have to say that in spite of the clunky control problems and the
lack lustre jokes, the plot had a fair amount of depth and I did
find myself wondering what would happen next. But ten disks? For
comparison I ran through Sierra's old Space Quest game - the
original version - and found that the older game packed more
humour and just as many plot twists onto a single disk. No doubt
the graphics are more splendid in IUC, and the soundtrack's fi is
indeed hi-er, but where is the huge depth of gameplay promised by
such a heap of disks?

Recommended only for those who MUST play every graphic adventure
released.







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