Amerzone

                 Reviewed by Stefan Herber

I had forgotten I even had this adventure until an impecunious
friend who loves serious adventures (he considers Myst the
greatest game ever and finished Riven without a walkthrough)
returned it to me. Now I buy a lot of games and as a result the
backlog can get frightening especially if you decide that you
can't wait to play that 300 hour RPG you've just bought. So the
time for discipline comes and you ignore the RPG pile and load
something else. Also - it's nice to play an adventure from time to
time in which you know you won't be killed at all and where even
if you get stuck you don't have to retrace your steps to the
position you were in 6 hours previously.

And - sadly - that's about all I can say positively for
"Amerzone". It's an intriguing enough plot - as a journalist you
meet a dying man whose final wish is that you return the egg of a
mythical bird which he stole many years previously in a South
American country which is now despotic. One of his fellow
explorers is a minor missionary still there and the other has
become the power-hungry dictator of the country. The problem is
that the puzzles are either totally straightforward or the
ridiculous variety. And it doesn't for one moment make sense - two
examples of this are finding a jerry-can of petrol in a deserted
jungle hut and finding computer floppy discs hidden in a deserted
village, presumably placed there on the previous visit. But the
previous visit was in 1934... The frustrating puzzles are often
due to trying to find the "hot spot" - as you can only access
certain machines from a particular angle this increases the
frustration; there is nothing worse in an adventure game than
knowing exactly what you want to do but not knowing how to get the
game to do it. Add to this the most interminable maze through a
swamp (which can't be mapped as there is no clear sense of which
direction is which) and for me you have another reason why the
adventure game is on its last legs if not dead already. Will the
new Simon or Myst change that? One lives in hope.

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