Dragon Cave
              (Puzzle game for Amiga on PD 583)

                  Reviewed by Nigel Parker

Smaug the dragon needs your help, his caves are in a right old
mess with treasure chests full of gold and jewels everywhere.
Unfortunately Smaug happens to be allergic to gold, so he needs
you to push the chests around until the caves are tidied to his
satisfaction. He has marked the floor so you will know exactly
where he wants the chests moved to. As an incentive he promises to
reward you generously if you will help .... and to roast you if
you mess up!

The first thing that strikes you about this game is the excellent
presentation, practically all the graphics have been borrowed from
that all-time classic Dungeon Master. But the game is no RPG, what
we have here is a puzzle game based on (I believe) the Oriental
game Sokoban.

The caves are all 18 x 15 squares or less featuring narrow tunnels
and wide expanses. The chests can only be pushed one at a time and
not pulled, so if you push a chest into a corner you can't get it
out again! Thankfully the game provides an Undo feature which
allows you to undo up to 1000 moves, but obviously this has a
detrimental effect on your score. The five best high scores are
saved to the disk on completion of a level.

When first starting a level I found myself staring at the screen
for an age before making my first move (in fact several times my
screen blanker would cut in!), as the first move is often so
crucial. Get it wrong and the cave can become unfinishable. If you
can't finish a cave the game allows you try any of the others.
The game features 100 caves, the first fifty of which have been
designed by the programmers, the second fifty are available for
your own caves which you can design using the cave editor
included. The game can be played using either a 3D or 2D viewing
perspective.  The 3D view gives the same outlook as Dungeon Master
and also gives a small map of the level viewed from above. But I
found when playing with this viewpoint I tended to be looking at
the small map practically all the time, it is much more playable
from the 2D position.

The game is very user friendly in that it can be played using
joystick, mouse or keyboard. Personally I found the keyboard was
the easiest. Also from Workbench using the games Icon tooltypes
you can define exactly how you want the game to start, by-passing
the intro ... 2D ... at cave No 37 etc.  I could not however get
the game installed onto my hard drive as trying to copy the file
"Data" would bring up an error message saying there was a read
error on disk block 1661. This (I think) was put in deliberately
by the programmers as occasionally the screen would flash up the
message "see DragonCave_ReadMe file for more details of this
error", but there is no ReadMe file on the disk! But this is no
great problem as the game only accesses the disk for a few seconds
after every level.

All in all I enjoyed Dragon Cave but it should be noted that some
levels can give you serious brain ache!
                              - o -