DogStar and Dragon Quest - StoneAge Software (DogStar is on Disk 819 and Dragon Quest on Disk 820) Reviewed by James Judge on a 486sx Righty-oh. These are two games by the same company which you can purchase separately from SynTax but I have decided to review them together as (a) they look very similar (b) they play more or less the same and (c) they are both formed from a pile of unadulterated, steaming tosh and seem to relish in this fact. No, I don't like these games... They both run in Windows and have been written using Visual Basic so they look OK. There are separate little boxes for the room descriptions, inventory, commands and other bits and bobs like that and ALL input is via the mouse. While these look like text adventures to enter a command you must click on one of the commands provided in a little command box. How dinky. Oh, and just to give you a quick idea of how sophisticated these games get they were designed to work on the Commodore PET which, if memory serves, was a computer that was around in 1978 with about 4K of memory. And no, the games haven't been updated - just given a Windows interface to make playing the game more intuitive and enjoyable for the gamer. Ahem... DogStar ------- Right, this game, so it says in the help file, is "intended to let the adventurer use a SMALL amount of logic and imagination to solve the obstacles". This translates into: "this game is intended to provide a challenge only for those people who find it difficult to operate a mouse. Everything is spelt out for you in either the game or this help file and you will, in fact, have no difficulties in completing the game unless (as I said before) you are mouse- challenged. The only piece of imagination you will need is imagining just why I decided to program this game. I don't know why I did it. It seemed a good idea after half a pound of cocaine and the orange banana that was sitting on my shoulder shouted to me in utter silence that YES, I SHOULD produce a game which is completely and utterly rubbish. Hey - I could even do a few more games like it (or so the banana suggested) and have my street-cred decrease exponentially from its already pitiful depths. It sounded good to me at the time and the bright darkness in the corner agreed..." What you have to do in this game is to rescue a childhood friend who has been kidnapped by a bunch of aliens. With a name like Captain Argonaut I don't blame the aliens for kidnapping him and doing horrible things to him. Captain Argonaut - how I snigger. Anyway, old Argy had a few important items on his ship that you must also retrieve to complete the game as well as some fuel for your ship and a communicator to tell your mothership to provide covering fire and not to destroy you. This, boys and girls, boils down to a TREASURE HUNT. Hooray - get some items and win the game. Aahh, I love these kind of games.... You start off in your Falcon (your spaceship) and must explore the enemy's ship finding all the items listed in your Personal Information Manager. Interaction with the game is provided by a bank of buttons which allow you to perform certain actions. In all you can go North, South, East, West, Up, Down, get things, shoot things, copy a disk and press buttons and that is it. That's your lot. You can't do anything other than those ten rudimentary things. As you may guess this doesn't lead to any difficult problems. Oh, there's a button - let's press it. Wow, that's solves 10% of the game. Now, let's shoot this guy and that's 20% of the game finished. And this is how the game goes on. In all it took me ten minutes to complete this game and that includes installation time. And, sadly, I'm not exaggerating. To complete the game it is just a matter of clicking through the locations (most of which are empty and they all have a one sentence description), double clicking on a few items to pick them up and then doing the obvious - pressing a button, copying a disk when it says 'disk is ready to copy' and shooting some Stormtroopers which only attack you after you have attacked them. All in all it's very sad. What makes it worse is the sheer banality of the game. One sentence locations, mazes which you don't have to enter and, in reality, have but one location, locations which aren't logically connected (ie you go from room A to room B by going WEST and then going UP from B to get back to A), a limited parser and 'puzzles' which don't present any difficulties what-so-ever and even if they did (which they don't) the answer will either be in the one sentence room description or in the help file. Oh, and that's another thing, there are some spelling mistakes, grammar errors and the way the helpfile goes on and on trying to make a thrilling story out of a trite situation really gets on my nerves - especially when the writer starts to have problems with 1st and 3rd person... Let's not mention the fact that rooms aren't given names, you can't pick up ammo before a weapon for some odd reason and never need to actually load a weapon and when you encounter a monster it is sheer luck whether you shoot them or not - if you miss (there's a 20% chance of this happening) you get thrown back to the Program Manager. In my version I couldn't load or save a position (as if I needed to...) so I don't know whether this is because they don't work or they have been disabled because it is the shareware version. To register you need to spend out $20 for the game and if you'd like the VB source code (you know you do...) send off $105 plus $15 for the game. To be honest this is one of the worst text games that I've ever played. I thought the Stephen Neighorn collection of five games were bad, but these.... Get at your own risk - nearly everything that is bad with text adventures is present in this 'game'. And this festering pile of twaddle is only paralleled by another game by the same company... Dragon Quest ------------ Here, yet again, StoneAge prove just how in the StoneAge they really are. This looks and plays just like DogStar, with all of its inherent cock-ups. Really the only thing that is different is that (a) you have a new story and (b) there are three or four new commands to make the game slightly longer. Another thing that makes the game larger is the sheer amount of empty rooms in this game - I counted about 25 before I came across an item... they have no function apart from making the adventure seem larger with an increased VFM - as if. Again the locations are not logically connected and, so, map making becomes nearly impossible or, at least, highly annoying and leading to plenty of screwed up pieces of paper. The story goes that Barth (a dragon) is the son of Bard (another dragon, surprisingly). Ariasus (a king) has plenty of money and Barth (the son of Bard (a dragon) who is now deceased (Bard (a dragon), that is)) wants. So, Barth (the dragon) nicked Ariasus' (the king) daughter Heather (a princess again, surprisingly). Heather (the princess) had a few special attributes - her breath smelled, for instance (well, in the help file it says "Her smile was a perfume"...), and so Ariasus (the king) wanted her (Heather (the princess)) back. This is where you (an idiot/knight) step in to rescue Heather (the aforementioned princess). Ain't that cute? No, not really. I won't go into details but this game is just as tiresome as DogStar apart from now there is a weight limit so you won't be able to carry anything and to carry small item you need to get a pouch. How thrilling. Other than that DQ is just like DS - a veritable piece of trash. Avoid at all costs - your sanity hangs on it! Oh, registration is priced the same as DogStar, so start making out your $125 cheques everyone... - o -