Dungeons Of The Unforgiven - Moraffware
                     (RPG on Disk 906)

             Reviewed by James Judge on a 486sx

You've seen me waffling on about all these ASCII RPGs which I've
reviewed over the past couple of months, and you know by now that
ASCII RPGs take the form of top-down affairs.

Well, here's a new one for your books - an ASCII RPG from a first
person view. The idea of the game is exactly the same (plunge into
the depths of the dungeon amassing wealth, wisdom, magic and
abilities to defeat the evil monster) but now we do away (nearly)
with the map and look at the game through our character's eyes.
Cool.

There's very little I can say about DOTU apart from the fact it
looks pretty good and plays well. Once you get used to the
psychedelic text and colours (you can turn down the brightness of
the moss to please the eye) as well as the slow(ish) scroll rate
the quality of the graphics become apparent. All the monsters and
the location graphics (for shops and temples) are drawn in a
distinctive style that add a touch of class to the game and give
it a good head start on all the other RPGs I've seen.

While wandering around the dungeon you are, in fact, presented
with not one, not two, not even three but four (yes, that's huge,
throbbing four) views - the view in front of your character, to
his left, his right and from behind. This helps a lot when
figuring out where monsters are and, in fact, is far more
realistic than the viewpoint offered by old 1st person 3D affairs
such as Bloodwych as in real life you tend to have a wide view
instead of the enclosed view imposed on you with games such as
Bloodwych.

Apart from the four viewpoints there are few innovative features
in this game, apart from the help system which is really good. You
can get detailed info on all the major monsters on your level as
well as hints and tips for every action you can perform.

The only down points of the game is the sound (a few bleeps from
the internal sound) and the way you must go back up to the town
level to progress character levels and this can be a real pain as
by the time you have gotten back to where you were (especially
when you are lower down the character levels) you have amassed
enough XPs to go up another level - this happened to me about four
times before I explored the dungeon further!

A 'different' ability is being able to dig down to subsequent
levels if you are trapped or feel like a challenge. The monsters 
get progressively harder as you go down so you will become more 
and more outclassed as the large balls, dustbins and female 
warriors start taking larger chunks out of your body with each 
step. There's a nice range of races and character classes to 
choose from to give both the new player and the more experienced 
hacker a fair challenge and there are also two difficulty levels 
- ordinary and hard.

Registering the game (this version is the complete first module
with only some annoying messages included to try and harass you to
register) brings further modules and (maybe, depending on how many
soundcard owners register) SB support.

Pretty darned good for the odd half an hour, but sometimes lacks
the one-more-go feeling due to repetitiveness (which you find with
most pure dungeon delves).













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