Bob's Dragon Hunt - Neurosport
  Graphic RPGish adventure for the PC on SynTax disk 1143

             Reviewed by James Judge on a 486sx

Oh dear. I have a confession to make - I haven't played this game
very much before booting Windows, loading Works and reviewing this
game. The reason? Well, the game is complete and utter tosh.

You play Bob, who lives in the town of Wontbe. After a
particularly harsh winter dragons start to prey on the village
and, due to their ferocity, nothing can be done to stop them.

That is until one day when you, Bob (what a name for a hero!), go
a wandering and find a ring. You place it on your finger and
become a legendary hero. You take it off and put it back on again
and become a different hero - the village is saved! Grabbing your
ring you dash up to the dragon's lair, pop the ring on, become a
warrior and enter the cave.

That is the story behind this pitiful game. It is meant to be an
RPG (well, it's in the RPG section and Sue said that she was going
to send me four RPGs to link in with my RPG guide), but I doubted
that as soon as I typed in <DRAGHUNT> to get the game to run.

@~I've now moved it into the graphic adventures section ... Sue

From the internal speaker came the noise of a 'phone, someone
answered it and said 'You got it!', 'Wow!' and a couple of other
phrases.  What point this has isn't clear - the sound has no
bearing on the game and in the end I wrote a small .BAT file so I
wouldn't have to listen to ANY sound during my entire ordeal.

After this strange start screens and screens of text followed that
was completely boring and summed up my two paragraphs above. To
make the reading of this text even worse they had certain key
words highlighted in a horrid yellow. Words such as BOB and
WONTBE.  My, how my attention was drawn. Also the whole story was
written in upper-case letters. SOMETHING I TRULY HATE AS IT SHOWS
THAT THE WRITER CAN'T BE BOTHERED WITH PRESSING THE SHIFT KEY FOR
CAPITAL LETTERS. ALSO IT MEANS YOU HAVE TO USE HORRIBLE YELLOW TO
HIGHLIGHT CERTAIN PARTS. (Oops).

Anyway, on I pressed. Oh yes, before I forget there was also a
'tune' being farted from the internal speaker during the STORY so
it was only after I had been able to disable the sound I read the
dramatic prose <ahem>. After that, horror of horrors, two dragons
flew towards me from out of the screen.

They were so lifelike! I mean, I have always thought that dragons
looked like a Blue Peter experiment with cornflake packets
undertaken by a 4 year old on drugs. Now my belief has been
confirmed by these strange apparitions floating out of the screen.

Barely able to contain my excitement I changed my underwear and
was thrust into the dragon's cave. After figuring out the VERY
strange control method (see below) I wandered around, kicked a few
cardboard boxes, was kicked by some boxes and died. I then did it
again, and again, and again, in the hope that there was something
different, but there wasn't. This, sadly, was all that this game
entailed - walking through a landscape that is boxy to say the
least, kicking cereal packets (but not actually seeing you hit
them, and having to read a text box to see just what is going on).

Now, this wouldn't have been too bad - after all Doom was based on
the same principal and I thought that the programmer of this 'RPG'
had been before his time - here is something along the lines of
Wolfenstein and Doom, but from the mid 1980s. I then read the
documentation and it seems that this 'game' was finished halfway
through 1992. Not so innovative and just why have we been treated
to sound and graphics from the mid-eighties? Don't ask me, I'm
just the reviewer.

Apart from missing the boat by seven or eight years, the author of
this game must have been on some kind of trip when he threw this
game together. The controls are made by someone without any common
sense, for people with the same amount of sense (why, I ask you,
would people buy this game?). Unlike most other 3D games where the
left, right and forward keys are together, with the left key on
the left and the right key on the right, this game throws all of
that out the window. The forward key is somewhere on the main
keyboard (I've forgotten where) and the left key is the <-> key on
the keypad. The right key is the <+> key. Strange or what? Also
you need to utilise various other keys to fight and examine
objects.

The gameworld is a very plain place with brown box walls and a
one-tone floor and ceiling. Moving around proves to be a pain as
the game moves erratically. Actually moving and fighting takes a
while to be updated on the screen, but the text messages of who
and what has hit you zip by - too fast to read. So, you need to be
able to relate what you can't read to what is about to happen on
the screen, all while making predictions about what you should be
doing, and then doing them. To say this is nigh on impossible is
like saying the return of Conservatives to Scotland is imminent.

Along with this difficulty of fighting and moving, I have yet to
be able to get anything to work in the <EXAMINING> department (or
the digging department, come to that). There are various squares
on the floor which I take are there to be dug or examined, but I
am unable to do anything with them at all. Maybe it's me (or maybe
it's the game...).

Apart from the graphics, sound, playability, user-friendliness,
depth, innovation and the whole game there's nothing really wrong
with Dragon Hunt. It comes on a rather nice thing called a disk,
which I'm sure I'll put to good use storing my '300,1 Ways In
Which To Open A Door' compendium. And don't fear, there are
another three 'Virtual' games to keep you going once you've
completed this game as well as a 'Virtual Newsletter' to keep you
abreast of all the latest developments.

I can't wait to send off my $15 registration fee and $5 newsletter
charge, just so I can get in contact with this rather poor
programmer.

Buy it, you'll regret it!


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