@~It's 'double-review' time with two reviews of the strategy / RPG @~game Ethos, first one from Phil Richmond, then the second from @~Bill Commons. ----------------------------------------------------------------- ETHOS - author W. Jordan (Strategy/RPG/trading game for Amiga only on SynTax PD 756) 1. Reviewed by Philip Richmond Ethos is a simple Shareware 'adventure' written by an Australian 'Blitz Basic' coder. It is basically a strategy/role-play/trading type game based upon the myths and legends of Ancient Greece and purports to contain several quests. Once the game has loaded (via Workbench) you can read the background info, select one of 6 difficulty levels, and choose your Character's occupation and name. You can be a traveller, merchant, warrior, priestess, amazon or sorceress. You start the game with some gold coins and 0 experience points. (EPs) Control of the game is easy. You just click the mouse button to select a destination or choose options from the various menus that appear. You need to visit places, collect items, and gain knowledge to increase experience. You are also subject to fortune, good or ill, and the consequences of your own actions. You may need to appeal to your personal deity for help out of a tricky situation. There are various creatures, humans, deities, animals and monsters that can help or hinder matters, also. The first thing you need to do is to discover what your quest actually is - so you need to visit ports, taverns, markets, temples, mountains, forests, plains etc. and explore, obtain objects and 'interact' with other characters. You can buy/use/offer items as well. Sounds rather interesting doesn't it? Shades of 'Dungeon Master', 'Bard's Tale' or 'Monkey Island' you may be thinking. Well you'd be wrong! This is by no means such a grandiose affair. Whilst the concept is a rather good idea, the game didn't live up to my initial expectations, and the glory of Ancient Greece sadly failed to translate itself to the screen. This is due largely to the poor quality graphics, brief text descriptions and dull repetitive gameplay. The pictures are quite awful renditions of locations and characters, quite primitive, childlike, and simplistic. Nothing to rave about there whatsoever! The buildings and scenery look very similar in each region and town you visit. This is a pity, as the pictures are quite obviously meant to be an important element of the game, and, indeed fill up a very large chunk of the screen viewing area. The author, like myself, is no artist, by any stretch of the imagination. Text is sparse with just a couple of lines of facts relating to your actions and progress. You soon get bored reading one-liners like : 'You have met a ' 'You have found a ' 'You decide to leave town' etc If a message is more than one line long you have to click the mouse to reveal the rest of it. This gets infuriating after a while and spoils things. There are no animations or music either, although some sampled effects crop up now and then. This is quite a tedious game. I've played much better and seen far superior graphics on the Spectrum 48k. Only a die-hard fan of this genre would want to persist with it. Whilst I can appreciate the intricacies of coding a game such as this, I found it to be a disappointing and painful experience. After just a few minutes of monotonous exploration I gave up in despair. Amiga owners deserve better than this! I wish I could be more positive and complimentary about 'Ethos', but there are far better games around. Its main weakness is the graphics which are pretty abysmal. It also lacks something in the originality department and is altogether not a very good example of a program coded in the 'Blitz' language. The author requests 25 dollars to upgrade to the latest version with full printed instructions. I would advise anyone contemplating sending for this to seriously THINK TWICE! Phil's Rating: 31/100 ---------------ooooooooo--------------- 2. Reviewed by Bill Commons This game is Shareware and is a non starter for me. It has to be loaded through Workbench and is mouse driven. The opening page says that it is a game of Greek mythology, and the player adopts the role of a character who travels around the world of Ancient Greece. The character must journey by land and sea to complete his quest and discover quest two. There are seven quests in total. They must brave encounters with all kinds of creatures, humans, animals, deities and monsters. Also the elements must be braved. That was the exciting bit, then you see a crudely drawn map with a menu asking what you want to do. The choices are visit a town, forest, swamp or mountain and each choice goes to a childish drawing of the same with further menus asking if you wish to explore, leave or appeal to a god for help. If your choice is a town then you go on to more drawings and menus all with further sub plots, completely boring. If your choice is to sail on a boat you choose the destination from a map and if you reach that place you get the same graphics and menus as before. The encounters are portrayed by a drawing of whatever the enemy is and a noise. Then a question of what to do, if your choice is wrong then the game finishes. Sometimes the program crashes because it cannot find the right file. If you want full instructions you are invited to send $25 to Australia for them! - o -