ESCAPE FROM MOUNT DOOM and SPACEJEST - SynTax Disk 832 (Text adventure and RPG for Amiga) Reviewed by Steve Clay using an Amiga 600. Spacejest is a text only adventure written using AMOS. You play the part of a space bum who has lost his vital fuel money gambling and the result is a crash landing on a small island on an uncharted planet. Your ship is wrecked with only a translation device surviving. Your aim is to find a way of escaping the island and planet. The island you have crashed on is a strange place. Lots of forest, a small house and a fortified compound are some of the early locations you come across. There is a hole in the ground that can be climbed into but climbing out is not so easy unless you explore thoroughly the locations the hole leads you to. The house has an odd surprise in the attic and given the primitive nature of the island the object found here seemed out of place. However you should leave the house suitably equipped to tackle the fortified clearing. The old trick of putting a required item as far away from the puzzle as possible has been employed and thus you get to partake in much trudging around. Inside the clearing are a few tribesmen, a smattering of mud huts, a watchtower or two and the town hall! Upon entering one of the watchtowers you are given a maths puzzle by a sentry as a test. Success here will give you a piece of rope and cancels your invite to dinner. Fail to answer within the limit of three guesses and you will be the main course at dinner. Another place of interest is the town hall which houses the chief. He, like matey boy in the watchtower will offer you a challenge. You need to give the correct proportions of a recipe to make a meal for the chief. You are allowed several attempts before the chief knocks things on the head and ends the game. Here, however, is a useful bug. When you have been killed you are asked if you want to quit, restart or resume. Select resume and then type an invalid filename and you'll find yourself dumped back in the town hall where you can obtain the item that you would have received if you had guessed correctly. This probably works with the watchtower chap as well but I got that right first go so I had no need to find out. The game is easy to map with no illogical connections and the text descriptions are lengthy although you only seem able, as in many AMOS games, to examine items mentioned below the heading 'You can also see:'. There is the odd spelling mistake but not as many as you normally see in PD stuff. There seems to be an odd quirk that I have noticed on a couple of other games whereby all the m's are printed as n's. Overall Spacejest is a nice traditional adventure with a fair collection of puzzles and interesting locations. Worth a look and one of the better PD adventures around. ------------------------------------------------------------------ The second game on this disk is Escape from Mount Doom by John Scott. This is a RPG of sorts. The aim is to free the princess who is about to be sacrificed by a band of Trolls who seem to think that such a course of action will stop their mountain home from being destroyed. The Read _Me file mentions that the author was aiming to reproduce the playability of the early computer games from the days of the ZX-81. To an extent this has been achieved. However before I give away the punchline let's have a look at what it's all about. The screen is split into three. On the left hand side is a 3x3 plan view map of your surroundings. Nice idea but this was very confusing at first and even now I am not totally sure how the map works! Finding a 'Useful Map' within the game helps clarify things a little as this little scrap of paper means the map co-ordinates are printed on screen. The centre of the screen is the command menu. You have four arrows that control your movement around the caverns. There is also a status button and a search button. The first gives you a list of your stats and also what you are carrying. The inventory also has a notepad feel to it as any useful information you discover is reprinted here such as 'The princess is at 6,6'. The search button obviously searches your current location. You need to use search in every location and sometimes several times. You'll find all manner of things from keys to passing creatures who fancy a dust up. Upon entering combat you are given another menu from which you can attack, defend, cast a spell or flee. You can attack high or low and the enemies will take a varying amount of hits before they scarper. Your spell book has but two entries, healing and combat. The combat spell inflicts x amount of damage upon your opponent while the healing spell restores some of your health. Try using a spell you haven't got and you will do permanent damage to yourself. The flee option will take you in a random direction, if there is an exit that way then you will flee successfully otherwise you'll be crashing into walls and doors thus giving your opponent a free swipe at you. The right hand side is given over to a graphical representation of what you can see. This boils down to a few graphics depicting walls and doors. The graphics representing the monsters you meet are of a good standard but the location graphics become repetitive. The author's aim of creating a game that you want to play again and again has been achieved although my early 'one more go' moments had more to do with figuring what was going on. Later games found me more concerned with completing the quest. The random elements keep this game playable even when you have rescued the princess. A different game that is eventually fun to play, coupled with Spacejest this is a must have disk. - o -