Angband
           (RPG for Amiga (v2.7.4) on Disk 903a/b
                 and PC (v2.4) on Disk 665)

                  Reviewed by Bill Commons

This is the third Amiga game that I have seen lately that has been
programmed on an Amiga 4000. Not knowing what sort of computer
this is I looked it up in a two year old Amiga magazine. At that
time my Amiga 600 cost œ279 from Comet. The A4000 basic machine
started at œ2089. I could not get the game to load but there was a
read me file to print.  This did not help me a lot as I am not
very bright where programming is concerned, but it did say that it
should run on any Amiga. It also said it requires 1.5M memory
this would probably rule out 90% of the computers as most have
only 500K or 1M.

It also had an Email address and a web page. The latter seemed to
be in Finland but with no mention of this game. I left a message
for help to get it running but I have not had a reply from a month
or so ago. There was also a manual to print out and although it
was 397 K long I did this. It filled up fifty A4 pages and on
reading it I knew that I had to get this game running.

This is the way the introduction describes it. The game of Angband
is a single player dungeon simulation. A player may choose from a
number of races and classes when creating the character, and then
run that character over a period of weeks, even months, attempting
to win the game by defeating Morgoth, the Lord of Darkness, who
resides far below the surface. The player will begin his adventure
on the town level where he will acquire supplies, weapons, armour,
and magical devices by bartering with the various shopowners. Then
the player can descend into the Pits of Angband where fantastic
adventures await his coming. It then goes on to describe the many
monsters that roam the dungeon and the many magic weapons and
armour that can be found. Also by mining with a pick and shovel
many fabulous gems can be found.

It mentioned that it was based on a Mac game called Dungeons of
Moria written in 1985. But now it was in full colour.

I managed to get it loaded in the end and here the big let down
started. I was presented with a black screen with a grid over half
of it, with lots of coloured ascii characters dotted over it. I
went back to the manual and saw that it was one of those dreadful
ascii adventures where I was represented by a white blob and a
giant ant is shown as the letter "a" in magenta! The commands are
also entered as a single letter from the keyboard such as "b" for
bash. I could not put this into practice as the game crashed after
three or four moves. I am now faced with the puzzle as to why a
person would use such an expensive computer to transfer a ten year
old game and use a huge amount of memory to play a game that could
be played on my old 32K BBC computer with better graphics.






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