The Shadow of Yserbius - Sierra
          RRP - Can be as much as œ50 but Premier
              currently have it for under œ10
                        (RPG for PC)

                   Review by Bill Commons

Sue Medley has a lot to answer for! First she convinced me that I
needed an ST, then my PC, and through SynTax she has been the
reason that I have bought about 90% of the adventures and
role-playing games to date. Just think of all the creatures that I
have slain over the years.  It was no surprise that I decided to
follow in her footsteps into the dungeons inside the volcano of
Yserbius. As I wandered along the many lengthy passages and
corridors I thought that perhaps I would see a message scrawled on
the wall as by the infamous Kilroy, SM was here.

I must admit that for the first few weeks of playing this game,
that I hated it, due to the fact that I seemed to be killed by
every other band of nasties and each time was thrown out of the
dungeon and had to travel over the same path again and again
fighting the same monsters.

To start you have the usual choice of what race, sex and guild. As
I have had many fights with Orcs, Dwarves etc I could never choose
to play one, I have to go for the nearest thing that I represent
in real life, that is a male human knight in shining armour and in
Harmony. I also won in my travels a Pearly Breastplate and I
quickly sold it as I thought it's not quite me. I then read that
Sue considered it good armour and I had to go on a mini quest to
get another. Unfortunately this took a long time and by the time I
got another, my levels were so high that if I wore it my skills
went down.

The game is played out in the now familiar split screens of
movement arrows, spellbook, weapon and inventory icons. There is a
forward facing view of the dungeon and a location map in the top
right hand corner of the screen, this is where my attention was
kept most of the time to see where I was going and had been, so I
probably lost a lot of the action on the main window and the text
messages. The monsters are varied and range from polar bears to
cute little female elves in trilby hats and yashmaks.

The game is huge and I managed to blunder through most of the
puzzles more by luck than judgement but some I found too hard and
had to refer to Sue's solution. In fact the final gem is still
eluding me although I seem to have carried out the set tasks.

The results of the many encounters seem to be random although I
always had first hit, this is alright if it connects but in the
hard fights sometimes I got the message you attack but miss or you
cast a spell but it fails. When this happens I just sat twiddling
my thumbs while I was poisoned, petrified or paralysed, cursed,
controlled and confused until I was very often killed and thrown
out once again on my ear.

One group of Hellwolves and Tyrans and cobras caused no problem
the first time I met them but I was killed a few steps on by a
group of dragons. It then took me three weeks and several levels
on to manage to defeat them again.

It's funny but in every adventure I fall into the same trap. My
hit points are about 20,000 and I strut along feeling invincible,
suddenly I meet a band of villains and they deliver 7 blows each
taking 3000 HP and, wham, I'm dead. I think what a stupid game,
how can anyone do this game?

Then later when I am much stronger and my hit points are about
30,000 I meet the same group. I nonchalantly go bam bam and there
they are dead and it only cost me a 1000 points but I know in the
next game I will still be convinced that it is impossible to
continue, that is why I keep buying the games.

There are several places in this adventure where the adrenalin
starts to pump, one is where you have to cross a void on a shaft
of light. You know that one false move means that you have to
start from scratch and that is a long way back, it is very tense
and even when you have crossed it there is no save game so until
you have cleared the area the tension still builds up.

This game is nowhere near the class of the Dungeon Master, Eye of
the Beholder types but it is still very addictive and worth the
tenner it costs from the software houses or the fiver I paid at
the All Formats show.















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