HAND OF FATE

                   Review by Graham Raven

Being a sucker for a bargain I just had to have this game when I
spotted in my local Staples bargain bin. œ4 for a brand new (old)
game sounded too good to miss. It probably isn't exactly RPG-ish,
which is my out and out favourite type of game but at that price I
could still give it a try. Little did I know what was in store for
me.

Normally when I install a game on my machine I don't like changing
the screen resolution, number of colours, config settings etc. No,
I'm not that much of a technophobe that I dare not change
anything, but rather I expect a piece of software to run on my
machine 'as it is', ie. I've got things set up to my liking, so
why change anything? (this is related to the well known "If it
isn't broken, don't mend it!" syndrome) By far most of the
software I run on my machine has to be simply slipped into the
appropriate drive, 'clicked' and hey presto, it runs! Why some
programs have to alter all your settings in order to work beats
me. Oh I'm sure there are good, solid and profound technical
reasons as to why this is necessary, but I'm still far from
convinced. Many has been the time when an installed game has
demanded the settings changing on my computer and I've binned the
game in response! This time I should have stuck to my instincts!

The game installed fairly easily and quickly and then proceeded to
inform me that the machines config files would need changing and
that Windows would need restarting in order for the changes to
take effect. Sounds innocent doesn't it?

I restarted Windows, all the while wishing that the darned thing
would hurry up so that I could see if the game was any good or
not.

And then the machine informed me that I didn't have a CD drive!

What? I've just installed this damned game using the CD drive!
How can I not have a CD drive? I promptly screamed for my son
who's a bit of a wiz with all that IT nonsense and sure enough, my
machine now believed that it didn't have a CD drive! Absurd? Yes
indeed! (and other terms which have been censored) Some time was
then spent removing every trace of Hand of Fate manually from the
system (you couldn't use 'Uninstall Programs' for some reason -
the game didn't appear in its listing), and then we had to
'Install New Hardware', eg the CD drive which the machine believed
we had just fitted!

Thankfully everything worked fine after that. Hand of Fate will
shortly be nailed to a log and then burnt in an open fire ....
probably!

Rating: Unrepeatable!





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