@~Only one AGT review this issue as John Betteridge and I take a @~look at ... Mop and Murder - A Masterful Mystery In One Room author Brad Friedman on SynTax Disk 352, (Only PC version has pophints) 1. Reviewed by John Betteridge If you count the Corridor, there are actually two rooms, but let's not quibble. You take the part of a Janitor in the CIA Headquarters at Langley and as you leave work for the night you notice an open door. You now have two choices. Go home and forget it or look inside and investigate, and so it starts. On entering the room and turning on the light you discover the occupant of the office shot dead on the floor. You now try to discover who did it using the clues secreted about the office. Reading the instructions on how to play are important as the game was written with the AGT utility. I found the game fascinating to play and it wasn't until I had nearly finished that I found out how to use the POPHINT help utility. At the end of the Game, when you finally uncover the murderer, there are two possible solutions. Both, I feel, a bit of a let down. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Reviewed by Sue Mapping is one of the bug-bears of an adventurer's life. You know the sort of thing - you start your map in the centre of a large piece of paper, go west and hit a dead end. Then you find that, to the east, are 60 locations which fall off the edge of the paper. You either end up re-drawing your maps umpteen times or Sellotaping several sheets together. After such fights, Mop and Murder is a mapper's delight as it is subtitled 'a masterful mystery in one room'. Actually this is a slight misnomer as there are two rooms if you count the start location. But I won't quibble ... well, not much ... In this game, you are working for the CIA at their headquarters in Langley. An exciting life, you might think. Well, not really. The most lethal weapons you're allowed to pack are a mop and bucket, because you're not a CIA agent, you're a member of the maintenance crew who are responsible for keeping the building clean and tidy. You work hard, long hours, and late ones too, not finishing work until day-break. But your work for this week is over. It's Friday, you've clocked off and are heading home to your loving wife. But there was one office you weren't able to clean during your shift - Mr Shannon was still working when you strolled into his office some hours ago and yelled at you to get out. You realise he must have gone home now; his light is out but, strangely, his office door is slightly open. Since this is a high security area, you wonder what you should do. Call security? Ignore it? Or .... You see, despite the fact that, over the years, you've risen as high as you can up the janitorial ladder and can go virtually anywhere in the building, you know you're not one of Them. A true CIA man. You'd love to trade in your mop and bucket for a secret ID and a gun. Maybe this is your chance. You push open the door and enter the dark room. Fumbling round, you find and turn on the light switch. It's a normal office - desk, chairs, bookcase, plant stand, end table, shredder, dead body .... dead body?! It's Shannon, alright, a gun lies by his side. In a typewriter on the desk is what appears to be a suicide note - it looks as though Shannon was in some sort of trouble and was afraid he couldn't clear his name. But it all looks too neat. It's time to test your skills as an investigator and find out if you've got what it takes to be a CIA man. This, then, is the start to Mop and Murder. Since there is really only one room to explore, it's clear that your time will be spent examining and manipulating objects rather than in finding your way around a series of locations. Don't let this make you think the game will be easy! The author, Brad Friedman, has cleverly organised the objects and messages associated with them so that you can examine them in sequence, each subsequent action uncovering more detail. The game was written in 1991 using the shareware utility AGT and was entered in the AGT contest for that year, where it gained an honourable mention. It exhibits both the good and bad points of that utility. For instance, the desk has four drawers - the top drawer, file drawer, top-left drawer and bottom-left drawer - and they must be referred to in that way if you wish to manipulate any of them. You can't cut corners and use 'all' and if I had a quid for each time I forgot a hyphen, I'd be rich by now! However the parser will allow you to construct quite complex phrases. 'It' is also recognised. A few sound effects (bleeps and the like) have been included at appropriate moments. The screen display is a very basic and uninspiring white on black. However, AGT allows you to change these with the 'colors' command. There is no scoring as such; you either solve the crime or not. Your moves are shown on the status line at the top of the screen. The number of moves taken is vitally important in this game since after 30 moves you'll hear footsteps in the corridor outside and a couple more moves later a security guard will arrive and, needless to say, will be very suspicious to find you there with a dead body. Fortunately there is a way around this encounter but you'll have to replay the game many, many times if you're to bring it to a successful conclusion. Should you hit a complete standstill, help is provided in the form of pop-hints which can be brought up by pressing the ALT and H keys together. This creates a large swap file on the disk so the game plays better from a hard disk or high density 3.5" disk. The pop-hints will provide a series of topics on which you can get help, the clues being given in more and more detail until you finally get the full answer. This is a much better system than a basic 'help' command which can tend to either give you the answer right away or be so vague as to be useless. With sequential help, you can choose exactly how far to read. On the other hand, is it just a bit too tempting to have help so readily available? It's a debatable point. However, I can virtually guarantee you'll hit at least one sticking point in this game. There are a few illogical moves and unexpected commands in it; reading the instructions helps but who reads them?! I don't know about you, but I generally only read docs and manuals as a last resort. A nice touch on the programming side is that the author has trapped certain responses so you can't cheat and use knowledge gained during one session of play to solve a puzzle during a second session eg using codes you haven't officially found this time. No registration is asked as such but the author mentions that, should you write for help, a $5 donation might bring a quicker response. In summary, not my sort of game, I prefer a bigger area to explore and am not keen on investigative games anyway. But it is well thought out and certainly a change from the more usual type of text adventure. Armchair detectives will enjoy it, I'm sure, as it is a complex game and I'd rate it on the tricky side. - o -