Ghost Town - AGT/E L Cheney
        on SynTax PD disks 307 (PC) and 308 (ST)

                      Reviewed by Sue

As a prospector, you're always on the look out for a bit of
adventure and hopefully some profit. So when another old
prospector tells you tales of a mine and nearby ghost town, both
of which contain riches galore, you decide to trek there and see
for yourself. Though the ghost town is said to be deserted,
rumours of strange noises, gunshots and screams heard from it
suggest that might not be quite true. You also hear of the strange
disappearance of a local rancher's daughter in the neighbourhood.
Though some people suggest she has merely taken off with a
travelling man, maybe the answer is more sinister and might be
found in the town.

So off you set and after a long trip arrive on the prairie. Taking
care to avoid a deadly snake you make your way down a cliff path
and into the desert.  Stumbling on the mine entrance, you make
your way cautiously inside. A trunk promises wealth if you can
only get it open but a lone miner will have to be dealt with if
you're to leave the mine alive.

From here it's only a short walk to the ghost town, though a
ghostly, semi-transparent lion will try to stop you entering, and
after all the rumours you're not really surprised to see smoke
rising from one of the buildings and to find you're not alone in
the town. A senorita lounges in the lobby of the Brimstone Hotel
and a gunman challenges you to a shoot-out in the main street
while the ghost of the bandit Black Bart lurks in the run-down
saloon and threatens to tear you limb from limb, merely because he
doesn't like the way you walk.

Meanwhile clues abound concerning the missing girl and as well as
trying to make your fortune by collecting objects of value, you'll
have to rescue her from her captor and get her back to the safety
of her family.

E L Cheney has written several other AGT games including Deena of
Kolini. Ghost Town is a standard level game of 88 locations,
including several pseudo-mazes, and quite well programmed apart
from the fact you can't score full points due to the
over-weighting of some of the treasures that you should be
carrying at the end.

However, it suffers, as did Deena, from several 'Cheneyisms' -
basic grammatical errors and punctuation, spelling mistakes and
typos. Some more notable ones include two different spellings of
prospector in the introduction, paths which 'twist an turn', a
location 'bounded buy a deep canyon', a '12-guage shotgun' and a
bottle of whisky which must be spelt 'whiskey' if you want to do
anything with it. I still haven't managed to work out how he
managed to program it in like that; with the way AGT is designed,
it should be impossible.

Because of the vocabulary restrictions imposed on standard level
AGT games, it is quite hard to get stuck since, when in doubt, one
can just try pushing, pulling and turning everything and using all
objects as weapons until something works. There is one strange
instance right at the end of the game when you have to manipulate
something unexpected to get the required result but apart from
that the game is pretty straight-forward.

In summary, Ghost Town is a better game than Deena though some of
the ideas are a touch juvenile in places and if you can force
yourself to ignore the mistakes in the text you'll find it a fair
piece of entertainment.











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