Simon the Sorcerer 3D

                  A review by Peter Clark

This is the third game in the Simon series and the first one to be
played in a 3D environment, hence the name. The story so far, for
those who have not played the first two games is as follows: -

"Simon's life was pretty ordinary once. He did ordinary 12-
year-old things and thought ordinary 12-year-old thoughts until,
on his birthday, a dog appeared on his doorstep carrying a package
in its mouth. This package turned out to be a spell book. Simon
didn't understand what was in it so it was relegated to the attic
and the dog was adopted as a pet. Some time later the dog went
missing and was subsequently found by Simon in the attic looking
at the spell book. Simon found that he could now understand the
book and being inquisitive, he uttered the words of one of the
spells. This opened a magic portal and through he went. It
transpired that the dog belonged to a wizard called Calypso who
was being held captive by a nasty sorcerer called Sordid.

Simon managed, after many adventures, to rescue Calypso and, as he
thought, dispose of Sordid. However, a couple of Gods called
Profitos and Cashinor had a bit of a game with Simon and allowed
Sordid to try and get his revenge from beyond the grave. And so it
transpired that a rather ignorant farmer burnt the spell book thus
reviving the evil wizard's spirit.  His son, Runt, left the farm
with Sordid and hatched a plan to bring Simon back to their world
using a magic wardrobe.  Although Simon was brought back, he
arrived in the wrong place and was sent off on a new quest by
Calypso. He had to find some magic fuel so that the magic wardrobe
could take him back home. Unfortunately, he fell foul of Sordid
and Runt and lost his body to the evil sorcerer. Sordid then left
for our dimension leaving Simon bodiless and set up for Simon 3D."

Simon 3D is a very large game and starts in the Temple of Life
where Simon, played by you, has to find his way from the inside of
the building to the High Priest where he is told that he needs to
eat a sacred peach before his body can be joined to his spirit. To
get to this point you will have to solve several quite nasty
puzzles.  At certain times during the game your Fairy Godmother
will appear to you and tell you how to accomplish certain actions
and which keys on the keyboard do what at different times? This
information is contained in the handbook but the Fairy is a good
idea as it stops you having to refer to the manual a lot. The High
Priest also tells you that Calypso wants to meet you in the town
of Poliganis.

The game takes place in two main areas. There is the town of
Poliganis, which covers quite a large area and has many shops,
warehouses, inns and the like. It can take quite a long time to
navigate around the Town or the Forest on foot and so the
programmers have thoughtfully provided telephone boxes.  Entering
a box gives you access to a map of the area. You are able to click
on a location and go directly there. You cannot, however, use the
telephone boxes to travel between the Forest and the Town or vice
versa.

Initially you will start in the Forest at the Temple of Life and
have to make your way on foot to the Town. The Fairy Godmother
meets you early on in Poliganis and tells you about Rain Birds.
These can be summoned and used to fly from Town to Forest or vice
versa.

There is so much contained in this game that it is impossible to
cover even a small proportion of the story. There are plots within
plots within plots. You will, however, have to catch butterflies
and sprites, get magic beans to swap for a cow, go metal detecting
for gold coins, enter a Gnome Firing Contest and help a Dwarf blow
his way out of a cave. Later on you will have to do some tightrope
walking and complete a spell in the witches cottage. This *will*
involve the kissing of frogs!

There are many other characters in the story. There is Calypso, of
course, the Innkeeper, a vacuum cleaner salesman, a hedgehog kid,
a wig seller and who is it that snores in the next bedroom at the
Inn? One of your problems is how to steal a cart from the
cheese-man and block a river with it. He makes a lot of money by
**not** selling cheese. You also have to help someone steal lead
from the church roof.

Apart from Calypso and Sordid you will meet up with several of the
characters that inhabited the previous Simon games. The two demons
are reincarnated as fairground proprietors. Of course they are
corrupt and you will find yourself trying to circumvent their
dodgy fairground attractions to win objects that are necessary to
your quest. Swampy takes a starring role as the owner of
McSwampy's Restaurant. He is also an activist trying to stop the
development of the swamp as a housing estate. Goldilocks also
appears locked in the town stocks and guess who has to help her
out by stealing a key from under the Sheriff's nose.

New characters include a drunken druid, a very fat wizard called
Porkins, Sodinell the dragon and a Princess with a fixation for a
hamster. There are the Heroes that you have to recruit. Coneman,
Melissa, Jar Nin and Prince Brave, the Valiant. There are, of
course, many other characters in the game and I can only think of
one that you don't have to interact with. That is a streetwalker
that seems to frequent the area around the Dog and Fruit Inn.

Puzzles in the game are many and varied. Ranging from the, "Get
something and use it to get something else" puzzle to a variation
of the "Slider" type puzzle where you have to slide barrels and
boxes around a cellar so that you can reach a tap on the far side.
Others include tight-rope-walking Simon across a gorge, running
around jumping on piles of sweets, getting keys from inside a
sleeping dragon, working out which sequence of fireworks to use
with some music and working your way through a dark tunnel without
attracting the guards.  These are only a few of the dozens of
puzzles that you will have to solve before finishing the game. The
game in the fairground where you have to shoot ducks took me
several hours over three days before I found out an easy way of
doing it. The duck sequence is purely arcade but answers to some
of the other puzzles are so complicated that I defy anyone to
complete them all without referring to the Internet for help. I
needed to do just that on many occasions over the couple of months
that it took me to complete the game.

As I said earlier, this game is so large that it would take
forever to review every aspect of it and there is an awful lot
that I have not mentioned in this review. I will have to let you
discover the rest for yourself. The humour within the game is very
good.  Simon has a cutting edge sarcastic sense of humour that had
me in stitches many times. I only have a few criticisms. There
are, for my taste, to many difficult arcade type sequences and, in
some places, I found that the placing of Simon had to be pixel
perfect. When you are working against the clock in a timed
sequence, as you have to in some puzzles, this can mean the
difference between success and failure. One of the last puzzles,
where you are running through the inside of a computer against the
clock with the lights going on and off all the time is
particularly taxing.

Another failing, certainly on my computer, is that many of the
scenes take place in very dark areas and, even with the brightness
turned fully up and the Gamma control in the game fully on, it was
almost impossible to see the whole screen clearly and several
times during puzzle sequences this led me to make silly mistakes.
The game is very picky with regard to video cards. I was using a
Voodoo 3000 card and found that I could only run the game with the
card set to 256 colours. Maybe on a more modern card some of the
brightness problems won't occur. I don't know.

Again sometimes the sound clipped and I would put this down to the
computer although I am using a Pentium III 700Mhz so it's not that
ancient. There is a patch available on the Simon 3D Web Site and I
would suggest that this be downloaded before you start the game as
you can very easily lose your saved positions if you leave it
until you have started the game. You will need the patch whatever
your computer to get around some of the game's bugs.

You can get the patch from SynTax as well ... Sue

Did I enjoy the game? Well, yes, overall I think that I did. I'm
not sure whether the 3D lent anything to the overall fun. I
enjoyed Simon I and II just as much without the effects. There
were times when I nearly gave up but this was almost always due to
the technicalities of the game rather than the story. Will you
enjoy it? I don't know, but if you are a lover of adventure games
or have played the previous two Simon games and liked them, then I
would give it a try. Just make sure that your computer is up to it
first.

















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