The Legacy - MicroProse RRP œ44.99
                     (RPG for PC)

                   Reviewed by MerC

The trouble with other people's reviews of adventure games is that
you tend to take them at face value, forgetting entirely the old
saying "one man's meat is another's poison".  I had just this
experience in September. I'd recently upgraded to a PC, and on
recommendation from an experienced adventurer, bought The Legacy.
I hadn't even tried it when along came September's SynTax. My
heart sank on reading Roy Sims' review, to such an extent that it
was several more weeks before I actually tried loading it. And
this is where the problems began.

On the positive side, I have to say that this program taught me
more about the PC and its memory management than any before or
since. It is large, atmospheric and enjoyable. On the other hand,
I don't see why one should spend hours trying to load a game, then
have to ring the software company only to find that the manual
forgets to mention at least one feature vital to letting the game
run.

The Legacy is highly sensitive to available system resources.
There is a separate technical leaflet which explains all this,
mostly in terms of config.sys and autoexec.bat files, which, to a
new PC owner, might almost as well have been written in
hieroglyphics.

However, to summarise :

1. A DOS mouse driver is required, and must be loaded. The Windows
driver alone is not enough. Legacy, we are told, is not run under
Windows (I found it does so perfectly well, though I can't explain
why), and if you don't load Windows, its mouse driver is not
loaded either.

2.  You must also load a keyboard driver, even if you are not
using the keys for movement. The copy protection requires you to
type in words from the manual.

3.  The "NumLock" (normally defaulting to ON) must be set to OFF.
The manual does not mention this, and it is vital.

4.  The best way to achieve all this, and still to have other
configurations that will run Ultima Underworld, Windows, CD ROMs
etc. is to have a boot-up menu controlled from config.sys, and
described in the MS-DOS User's Guide.

5.  To appreciate the advanced features of the game a sound card
and a 1mb video accelerator card are necessary. I should imagine
anything less than a 33 mHz CPU would not run sufficiently fast
for smooth movement.

Installation is straightforward, if long-winded. There are 7
high-density discs to unpack to your hard-drive, and you need
around 25mb of free space for the full game, and 18mb if the
introductory sequence is removed, as it may as well be, since once
run it plays no further part. I found the game runs perfectly well
from a compressed drive. There is then a bit of configuring to do,
but once done properly, that's it. Your first step is to choose a
playing character, and you are presented with a choice from a
suitably mixed list. I found I could never get very far unless the
character I chose at the beginning was the toughest.

Once you're in, the atmosphere is suitably moody, with excellent
music and sound effects. The authors have taken pains to present
an authentic Edgar Allan Poe feel, (and succeeded), the main
problem with this being the entire absence of humour. The scenery
is well drawn and realistic, and once you get used to the method
of movement, you are drawn in to a fascinating and authentic world
of Gothic horror. The Legacy is not a quick and easy game, nor is
it linear in the style of Dungeon Master and clones. There is no
obvious order of solving the various areas of the mansion, and you
will keep returning to the central area.  It pays to find a couple
of suitable rooms as a base to store the dozens of items you'll
pick up.

The first floor with its ray-traced mummies serves as an
introduction to combat and, once you get the knack, they are
easily dispatched. The bat-demons on the next floor hurl electric
blue spheres in your direction and are a nuisance until you find
the method of removing them. Weapons are an important part of the
game, and finding and using the best one for a particular creature
or type is essential. Some (notably the Japanese items) are
tremendously enhanced when suitably treated. Should you find an
area is too difficult, it probably means you got there too soon,
so it pays to leave, gain more experience and return later. By
then you may have discovered the method of making it safer.

On the down side, there are one or two areas where the game could
have been considerably improved. (Why is it that software houses
never seem to get "real" adventurers to do their testing?) The
conversion of experience points into either spells or strength is
crude, and the large number of different skill bars seems mostly
redundant.

I never made any real use of the "rune windows", but you should
not try to kill their guardians. The numerous notes you pick up
should be kept in a convenient place, as they come in useful for
mapping a maze (where the built-in mapping system doesn't).
Unfortunately, you cannot annotate the map, though this is
unlikely to be too much of a handicap. There is no compass.

So there you have it. I liked it, it kept my interest over several
weeks (part time!), and I feel it represents value for money.
Nevertheless, you do need a full spec machine to appreciate it
properly, and need to be familiar with how to alter your machine's
memory. And - no matter what the blurb tells you - it is meant to
be played at 33 mHz.









                              - o -