Game Builder Lite on SynTax PD 667 (A Point'n'Click adventure creator for the PC) Perused by James Judge Well, first thing that strikes you about this package is the way they spell Lite. Hah! Other than that you've got a shell program that allows you to compile your adventures and a paint package to paint your animations, backgrounds and object and a very helpful .BAT file that, when run, tells you that you're not meant to run it. Hmmmmm. Upon loading the main program you are confronted with a very nicely done VGA picture and you think 'hey, I may be onto something here!'. You expect swish drop down menus in a Windows style environment, funky fonts, multiple windows and the like. Instead you are given a boring old DOS screen that can't be used by the keyboard really and the mouse control is, to say the least, shoddy. Still, it may get better (and pigs might revolt, take over the world and release honey smoked humans). In a letter that did accompany it Sue did mention a sample adventure that came with it so, after a few errors, I was able to load it up then it started to crash. Whenever I moved my mouse the game went wonky and if I pressed certain keys it also froze. After a few attempts I was able to listen to a rendition of the Hornpipe blasting through the PC speakers (great!) and then, right after, a rendition of Popeye The Sailor Man. Both made me want to wrench the PC apart and remove the speakers, but alas, the 'music' stopped before I found a screwdriver. Then I started laughing. Then I laughed a bit more. Then I started pitying the people who wrote this and the people who said you could create good point'n'click adventures with ease and adventures everyone would want to play. Why did I laugh and pity? Well, to begin with the EGA graphics weren't the best in the world. Then we had the wonderfully large action buttons along the top of the screen for and . Then, after clicking on the button you could move your character around the screen. What a task that was! Forget the naff animation but the speed at which the little guy moved was abysmal - this is one system in which you don't want to go from one location to the next more than once! Then there was picking things up. I positioned my little pirate over what looked like a metal pole, but probably was a telescope. Then I clicked on and then the grey thing. I was told I wasn't close enough. No matter how much I moved my character there was no way I was going to get the blasted thing unless I selected each pixel in a 20 pixel radius - something I wouldn't want to do for fun! Then I had a little treat. If any of you can remember games such as Space Quest and some of the later games by the company who did Simon The Sorcerer you'll know that if you were still an avid text fan you could type in your commands and a pretty good parser would then process your instructions and you'd see them carried out on the screen. GBL allows you to do the same thing, but the parser doesn't allow for synonyms of any kind so after moving your pirate with the mouse (can't do it with the keyboard to any degree of accuracy) you then had to type in and then try to guess what the object was on the floor. Not something I'd like to do for every poorly drawn object in sight! In the actual sample adventure I was unable to get off the first screen. The inability to pick anything up and accurate positioning of the character made any task nigh on impossible, let alone frustrating. As for the game building system, well, it isn't much really. You draw a grid size, assign a background piccy for each location, put a few objects in the locations, chuck in a cardboard cut-out of different characters, do a few three frame animations for things like fires, your main character and people talking and assign a few attributes to objects and places. Oh, and you can try and make some sound burble from the speaker but unless you are patient, have a mediocre understanding of music and like inflicting pain on people via the ear drums you will find that an arduous task to say the least. I have not tried a sample adventure as I know that, due to the constraints of GBL there is no way I would enjoy doing it, let alone contemplate sending it to Sue even if she did was to chuckle at it. @~(I'm very disappointed ... I could do with a good laugh! Sue) What has also put me off is the poor quality of the documentation. 'You need no programming knowledge' says the program, well, you have to learn a basic language to get the games up and running. The instructions aren't clearly set out and are often confusing with no good examples and, basically, is a load of rubbish. If you expect to create masterpieces in the vein of the Monkey Island duo or Sam & Max or Beneath a Steel Sky, well, you are definitely looking in the wrong place. If you expect to create things that even the creator would find boring and limited then this, ladies and gentlemen, is for you. Send off $50 for the privilege of having this useless pile of gnat excretion sitting on your HDD, why don't you - you know you want to. In all seriousness, this is definitely a 'package' that I would avoid like the plague. It will annoy and frustrate not only the creators but the players and anyone who has to listen to the awful din coming from the speakers. Save your $50 and save for a few more weeks until Klick'n'Play comes along. From what I've heard it is a very nifty piece of software that will make point'n'click creation very easy and the results have looked very good so far. Poor, no, not poor, dire! - o -