100 Ways In Which To Scream

                       by James Judge

Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh, ooooooooooooooooooooh, nnnnnnnnnooooooooooooo,
gaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaargh, brrrrrrrrrrrr, neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,
iiiiiiiiiaaaaaaeeeeeeeeeeeeooooooooooowwwwwww!
WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY????

Ahem, please excuse that small outburst, but I'm very annoyed at
this moment in time. Why? Well, one of my favourite games has
produced a bug that has frustrated both James Jillians and I
after extensive hours playing the darned thing.

Whilst talking with other adventurers about this certain game I
noticed that no-one had attempted to complete it the way that
James and I had. Mm, maybe I should tell you what the game is so
that you can follow this rant.  The game, oh wonderful readers, is
the game that both James and I have praised on numerous occasions.
The game, ladies and gentlemen, is the one, the only, Bloodwych.

The problem is that I completed the one player game and James
nearly completed it. Then we thought it would be fun if we ran
through the game together in the revolutionary (well, at the time
of producing the game it was, and still remains to a certain
extent today) two-player mode whereby we can see each other and
chase around the dungeon together.

My, what fun we had. After a serious bout of monster killing and
remembering how to solve certain problems, losing each other and
having a good old chortle at the way the other performed, we
indulged in beating each other's groups up. It was great fun. We
lost each other in the dungeon, slept and prepared spells and then
declared a free-for-all where we just had to kill each other. To
my shame I lost most of these death-bouts as James' fireball spell
had a wonderful way of killing all my characters (but doing very
little to the actual monsters). On the other hand I had a really
good disrupt spell that got both parties out of more than one
scrape but did nothing to James' group of morons, erm, I mean
adventurers.

Anyway, even with bouts of frivolity between the two groups we
progressed at a cracking pace (with an increasing number of
insults thrown at each other as we discovered each other's
weaknesses) and speculated that if more games had this great
two-player feature him and I would be an unstoppable duo.

As we neared the final tower we decided to give the original a
rest and went on to the data disk. After figuring it would be
better to complete the original first so that (a) James could see
the Entity and (b) we both got a few more spells, we reverted to
the original.

Relying on memory I proclaimed that we were only about ten minutes
away from Zendick and his Chaos Gloves, so we slept and saved the
game. We then progressed into this small antechamber and the game
froze on us.  Looks of disparagement were traded and we tried the
trusty re-boot. No go, the same thing happened. A few choice words
were traded and another re-boot (this time from the GEM desktop)
was called for and still nothing happened.

Ever the optimist I said 'hey, no fear, we'll try it on my
version!' but still, that led to no avail.

So, here James and I are trading choice words over Mirrorsoft and
the guys who programmed Bloodwych, wondering whether it is worth
going on with the data disk as I feel we would end up trying to
flush the computer down the toilet if that failed too!

So, I now call upon Bloodwych players the world over. Have any of
you who have completed this game tried to complete the game with a
friend? And if you have, did you actually manage it? The place
where the game freezes for this dynamic duo is about halfway
through Zendick's (the final) tower where we are just about to
come across the tower's namesake. If you have managed to complete
it what system were you playing on, and which version of the game
were you using? Oh, and has anyone got the programmers' addresses
as I feel like sending out couple of death threats.

                              - o -