Abandoned Places - ICE, RRP œ34.99
                   (RPG for Amiga and PC)

                  Reviewed by Bill Commons

In the early Eighties in the magazine BBC Micro User there was an
adventure column written by someone called Alice. She openly
admitted that she hated adventures and only reviewed them as a
means to earn a living. If anyone wrote to her and said that they
were stuck and could she help, she would say that if you were
silly enough to play adventures you got what you deserved. Luckily
she did not last long.

However while playing Abandoned Places her words kept coming back
to me. This was the most unfriendly game that I have ever played.

The story is that twelve adventurers have been frozen in stone for
centuries and now with the return of the evil Bronagh, Arch Magi,
Prince of Evil, you can choose four of them to reunite the people
and overcome the evil one.

The game starts in a dungeon and I thought, oh good, it's like
Bloodwych, a past favourite of mine. But when you escape from
below ground the scene changes to a view of a map with a small
icon of a man with a pointer in one corner and at the end of the
pointer is your position on the map. This is where my troubles
started. There are lots of ships sailing around the map and you
are on an island and need to get to the mainland. The manual
states that you should position the pointer over the ship and
hopefully an icon of a ship should appear.

I spent the next two hours carefully placing the pointer over the
ship only to have it sail away and I had to wait until it came
back, then I would minutely adjust the pointer and the same thing
would happen. Finally I gave up and clicked on an icon of a flying
horse hoping that I might be able to fly off the island. This was
the mode of travel icon and it led to three icons to be displayed
a man, a horse and a ship, and I was not all that close to the
ship!

Every four mouse clicks the day passes and you must sleep. Another
two and you are surprised by wandering monsters. I was, because in
most cases they are hiding behind bushes and until they are killed
you cannot go back to the map.  This made me use up all my food
and you have to pay to get into town to buy some more, so it was
not long before I was wandering penniless in the wilderness, with
an endless string of text messages telling me that I was starving.

The program has no protection so it asks you to look up a word in
the manual to start play, this is alright but although you can
save the game it does not have a restore game option except from
the loading menu, and you have to reload each time including the
dreaded manual for which I had to put on my reading glasses as the
text is in small print.

I had to restart the game but this time I included in my team a
cleric who could cast a create food spell. Even this did not work
at first as I was told that I had failed to cast the spell. This
was because of my normal practice of giving my rear ranks a knife
to throw in battle, it was some time before I discovered that they
were stabbing the two front members in the back. The hand needs to
be empty to cast the spell.  I also sold some food to the shops in
town to get some cash but this was a waste of time.

The shortage of money at the beginning is soon replaced by another
problem, as soon as you have acquired about five hundred gold
pieces, a suit of armour and a couple of weapons you are
overloaded and go into the red on the weight chart.

The game continues by visiting one of three wise men or sages and
they give you advice on where to visit. Then you must find secret
dungeons on the map and go below to explore. The delights in these
are invisible buttons, rooms that seal you in if you tread on
invisible floor pads, keys that take ages to find and when you use
them you find that they are to empty rooms and you needed those
keys on a different level. Of course each mistake means reloading
the game.

I always thought that I could remember the layout of most dungeons
after exploring it a few times but some of these are so twisting
and circular that at first I had to make maps to see where I was
going, also some of the puzzles involve pushing a switch on one
level and seeing what happens on the level above or below.

After I had been playing for about three weeks I couldn't find any
entrances to secret dungeons although I had been told where to
look, this happens by visiting a sage, a vision or a dream. I was
convinced that I had been taken on the longest red herring trail
ever. I then looked up Brian Burke's excellent solution in SynTax.
I was quite surprised to find that he had visited a different sage
at the beginning and had been given other locations to visit.

Again I restarted and followed his path up to the entrance to the
dungeon I previously could not find. When I found it I marked it
on the map and went back to my own game and sure enough it was
there this time, my team were two levels on due to the time I had
spent fighting monsters in my search. I must thank Brian for the
help because he must have untold patience in working out some of
the long winded puzzles that I would have given up on, left on my
own.

The battles with the monsters on the outside part of the game are
the most boring encounters that I have ever come across, in the
end I backed into a recess and turned the sound up and waited to
hear a cry from my team while I left the computer to do something
else. Sometimes this took half an hour, but when you think that
every six moves on the map usually resulted in an encounter you
could not blame me.

All this easy going finishes on the final two locations, first The
Tower of Rage took me three days of moving my pointer over every
tiny pixel on the monitor screen several times on an island six
inches long by three wide to find the entrance, and then the
action is horrific. I lasted about five seconds.  I seemed to be
attacked from in front and behind and I only had a forward facing
view so when I had killed the monsters in front of me I was
surprised that my rear ranks were dead. Add to that constant fire
bombs and teleporters all over the place mapping for me was out of
the question. Thankfully in this dungeon and the final one,
Bronagh's lair, the practice of looking up the manual on loading
is dropped. These locations are quite large and until the final
chamber is reached the manual can be put away.

In spite of the points I have made, the game will be one to remain
in my memory for some time.














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