Chronicles of The Sword - Psygnosis, street price about œ35

                 ... Arnie rides again ...

The latest offering from Psygnosis is set in Arthurian Britain,
nothing new about that. What is new, however, is the treatment of
the highly romanticized characters Lancelot and Guinivere.  She is
portrayed as a flighty teaser only interested in getting to know
the younger Knights a little better than royal protocol allows.
Somehow that sounds a little familiar. Lancelot is worried about
the rumours and the lipstick on his face.

Anyway the main character is young Gawain, a newly appointed
Knight who has the task of finding and executing the evil Morgana
the King's half sister.  Gawain is set a number of quests by the
broody Welsh wizard Merlin, these tasks involve a lot of
exploration and it seems a lot of walking.  No wonder Gawain does
not wear armour.  Once he has proved himself worthy of the tasks
he is then sent upon the main mission to find and destroy Morgana.

Part one of the two CD game is not too difficult but part two??.
I have to confess to the odd phone call to the dreaded 0891 help
line and must remember to hide the phone bill before herself sees
it.

The game options are fairly standard with two difficulty levels,
music, speech and sound effects toggles. Sadly there were a few
options I wish had been included such as the speed of the
character movement, volume levels and a better memory management
system. I must have spent hours looking at black screens waiting
for the next scene to load. According to the box minimum system
requirements are minimum 486DX2/66 Pentium recommended, double
speed CD, 4 meg ram, SVGA card and Gravis or SB sound card. Now I
have a Pentium 60, 16 meg mem, quad speed CD, Sound Blaster asp
and a 2 meg ATI Mach video card. It was slow so God knows what it
would be like on a minimum spec machine.

Enough moaning and back to the game.


The graphics and sound were superb, wonderful etc.  The character
voices were the best I have heard on any game since the advent of
CD games, sadly no credits on the box so I have no idea who played
Merlin. The scenes include all the various interiors of a castle,
while outside forests, caves and waterfalls all with their own
sound effects. The various characters include Arthur, Guinivere,
Lancelot, yourself as Gawain, the surly blacksmith, various
jobsworth guards and the streetwise Wilf stable lad extraordinaire
and not forgetting Merlin.

The game has been approached in a life-like way, not all King's
Quest nicey nicey, as Wilf has this propensity of scratching his
parts when you talk to him and Merlin shouts and screams at you
for not listening to him. Also as I mentioned earlier you get the
feeling that Guinivere is not as faithful as she might be. Oh and
all the female characters appear to have their bust sizes modeled
on Pamela Anderson.

Game play is excellent although especially in part two you end up
pixel hunting for a hot spot and your nose pressed against the
screen, at least I did.  Another thing on the technical front that
annoyed me was after installing the game it refused to run, a
message 'Game font not found' appeared. So I manually dragged it
from the CD to the Hard drive and it ran, then later on another
message 'Support sprites not found', then 'video palette not
found'. I uninstalled it and cleaned both the CD and the CD head
on my computer. This time it went well, but the next day I got
similar messages and cleaned everything again. Now no other CD has
any problem on my drive indeed the second CD of the game runs
perfectly so I wonder if the quality of disk one is all that it
should be. However now it is day 5 since I bought it and all seems
to be well now.

The game does not run under Windows 3.11 but DOS and Win 95 only.
All in all I rate this game very highly from the non technical
point of view and even though I have not yet finished it at the
time of writing I strongly advise all you gamers out there to buy
it as soon as possible.

                              - o -