SILVER

                 Reviewed by Stefan Herber

I've had a wonderful weekend - my car was burgled, my toothache
was playing up and the cats were particularly noisy. But something
went right - I finished Silver which can now be deleted from my
hard disc never to return this side of Hades.  Certainly there
were times when I wished the programmers an eternity in purgatory
having to play the final battles over and over again like I just
seem to have done. Yes - you've guessed it - Silver not only has
no automatic save game facility but the last point at which it is
possible to save is just before the last two very tough battles.
That means that to see the hero sailing off into the sunset you
have to replay the same battle over and over again as, believe me,
the last baddie is very tough. Of course preparations one normally
makes for difficult battles, like getting the best spells and
healing materials, don't help here as you have no recourse to
them.

The game is obviously heavily influenced by the FF series. I was
rather surprised to hear that FF7 was a commercial failure on the
PC (or so one of the magazines says) which means that Silver
probably sold even less well. Maybe cartoon graphics don't go down
well with PC RPG fans. The story here is old hat - a vile wizard
has kidnapped your wife and to defeat him you've got to find the 7
missing magic orbs. That means an eternity of humdrum fighting
including all manner of end of mission nasties. Apart from the
last two battles, which took me nearly a week to win, I spent up
to an evening trying to kill some of them. The game is otherwise
relatively short so you have to be a persistent maniac like me to
persist with it.

I'm really not sure which market this is aimed at.  The characters
are pregenerated; statistics are automatic; there is a choice of
which characters you can have but you don't need to be a genius to
work out your best party.  Magic is important but its use is so
simple that no RPG veteran is ever going to be stretched. Was it
intended for children? I doubt it, as the combat is very difficult
at times and not really reliant on hand-eye coordination.  There's
no blood so the sadistic element in society is going to be
disappointed.

Yet somehow it got excellent reviews. But then I have given up
trying to understand professional game reviewers. Myself, I doubt
I'd give it 2/10. I note I haven't mentioned the bugs like random
crashing, failure to load and one particular section that on some
computers is apparently impossible to complete. The excellent news
of course is that no official patch is available.

Is there anything positive about it? Well the music is good...








                              - o -