WHAT? NO LOW ALCOHOL MINERAL WATER? by SLYsoftware A text adventure on PCPD 287 / STPD 570 / AmigaPD 591 Review by Bev Truter on PC The short version of this review: Great title! Pity about the game though. The long version: W?NLAMW? is NOT about a group of yuppies lost in a wine-bar, despite the title; and the game has one positive point - it has simple but effective little graphics throughout, and a passably good graphic of a mineral water bottle on the title screen; but as for the rest....... Let's begin at the beginning with this mouldy oldie, courtesy AGT and the SynTax library. Although Mineral Water has been around for ages I've never seen any review, hints or solution for it; so putting floppy disk to hard drive, I proceeded to discover exactly why. Atrocious spelling, garbled plot, overly long AND garbled introduction, poor programming and unbelievable storyline is why. Plus the fact there were so many bugs in the final 2 locations that it was impossible to end/win/finish this game. It's also impossible to get the full score, which claims to be 10000 points. Ha. The most you can get is 8000-and-a-bit. AAARRGGHHH!!! What to do? Out with the old AGT decompiler, and some major surgery later (pass the scalpel, please) - Voila! The PC version is now finishable - but who would want to? In my surgical fit I resisted the temptation to improve on anything else - so the original grammar, spelling, and botched commands still remain in all their glory, except now you can't accidentally lose a vital spell permanently by entering the command "cast spell" - in the original version it just lay on the ground pathetically, unmovable and irretrievable after you'd attempted to use it. Oh yes, and there were umpteen ridiculous ways to die and get returned to the desktop - unexplained and unexpected pits at almost every turn; pits full of lions and tigers, pits full of snakes and scorpions, pits full of mud, pits full of quicksand, etc. etc. So all sudden death situations have been altered so there's now an option to restore a previously saved game, instead of getting automatically tossed out to DOS. So on with the review of this (unintentionally) funny game. Once upon a time there were two Irishmen (no, truly, this isn't a joke) who decided to join forces and write a small text adventure. One of them liked SF, so he wrote the beginning and end bits. The other man preferred traditional fantasy, and he wrote the middle bit. After a whole afternoon's hard work they cobbled the two bits together and called the result "What? No Low Alcohol Mineral Water?", for no apparent reason except it sounded a good idea at the time. At least that's my impression of how this game was constructed. I'd hazard a wild guess that this is a first attempt at writing a text game for both these blokes, although they optimistically refer to themselves as SLYsoftware, and describe themselves as ..."a new software company dealing in text adventures". Although I don't recall any request for payment for Mineral Water, they do give their address and phone numbers, urging you to contact them if you'd like a text adventure designed especially to your own specifications - "....makes a wonderful birthday/Christmas pressie!". Thanks but no thanks, guys. I'm not knocking the game-authoring system AGT (Adventure Gamewriting Toolkit) which is definitely capable of producing better stuff than this (eg, check out "Disenchanted" written with AGT), or the two budding authors - they probably did their best. But I have the feeling that given a lot more time and thought this could have been so much better. As it is, it's just a poorly-written game, with most of the entertainment springing from the incredibly bad English it contains. See what they do with the adjective "masochistic"!!! Wonder at the mysteries of "furriating speech"!! (Infuriating? Furious? Fulminating?). Revel in the splendour of the noun produced from the adjective "miniscule"!! Ponder the impossibilities of scoring 10000/10000!! Shudder at the no-ending ending! And then there's the location descriptions. Not bad, but just so illogical. For example, going up from a forest deposits you at the top of a pyramid. Two moves north from there you're in a shack, which has no less than three doorways - must be a palatial little shack. Then one move north from the shack you're in front of a throne. Muddled locations aside, there's no coherence or logic in the plot either. Although the story begins with distinct SF leanings, it rapidly gets derailed into fantasy of the elf/magic variety; then abruptly returns to the sci-fi track right at the end. The ideas behind the story seem fairly original, but they are buried under an avalanche of terrible programming and hopeless design. If you're still plodding grimly through this review, here's the basic plot of Mineral Water: You wake up in the middle of the night, to find a strange character dragging you outside to your back garden, where a ray of light from the clouds engulfs you, and you wake up later in a bar on a strange planet where everyone appears to be drinking mineral water. You taste some of it, but the character who brought you here explains it's rocket fuel, and says the barstool you're sitting on is really a 'galatrek' travelling chair - it will send you to a holographic representation of wherever you want to go. But there's a problem. The computer controlling these chairs is malfunctioning, so you gradually sink deeper into the chair, eventually waking up in a large nest at the top of a tree. A booming voice informs you that you're inside the computer's data banks, and if you want to get out alive and save this strange world from destruction, you'll have to find several stones the computer has hidden in its landscape, change the stones into a micro-chip, and place the chip in a machine. Yes, well, I DID say the plot was muddled and incoherent, and trying to mix the two different genres (SF and fantasy) just doesn't work in this game somehow. You begin the game stranded high and dry up in the nest, wondering how to get down - and I'll keep you out of suspense by revealing here and now that you do manage to save this world (and yourself) after just a few hours and a couple of hundred moves. That's if you could be bothered. I thought of adding that this game might be suitable for beginners, but on second thought it would probably scare them off text adventuring for life. All in all, with its unintended humour and buggy programming, Mineral Water could almost qualify as one of those cult games - the ones that are so awful that they gain recognition for being outstandingly bad. ENJOYMENT 1.5/10 ATMOSPHERE 2/10 DIFFICULTY 1/10 FINAL COMMENT Ummmmm - Nice title. Pretty title-screen. - o -