Below is my attempt at a review review of a computer game, and will be glad if you can help me with it.
«Its up to you, we would like to keep a similar type of style, eg the basic intro about the game, what you have to do and then your views on it and also perhaps some of your 'rose tinted views' of the game back in the day as that will jog some great memories for people. We're not professionals either, we want to create a book full of fan reviews, their memories/experience of the game.»
And here's the review itself (I have subsituted the game's name so that this thread will not pop up in any search engine):
[GAME] was released in 1995 by a Russian company Step Creative
Group (which has now made a PC remake of the game) immediately
bringing fame to the developer among the Russian Spectrum
owners. Personally I do consider it the best text adventure for
ZX Spectrum.
I was nine back then. My father bought me this game and we
started playing together. Oh, how fun it was! When guests came
they would join the adventure swarming me with contradictory
suggestions and advice, and I remember one day I lost several
times in the same way, drawning in a pit full of cold swampy
water, and uncle Oleg called me a submarine )
[GAME] was a huge game considering its platform -- it occupied
a whole 720K diskette. And the whole genre of text adventure
was absolutely new to the most of Russian Spectrum owners
because they didn't know English well enough and could play
only those English games that didn't require a lot of reading.
The game impresses from the very beginning, opening with a
great music score and a long animated into that shows how an
Artang interceptor attacked the hero's spaceship forcing him to
crash-land on a nearby planet in the escape pod. The whole
scene is drawn not only with skill but with inspiration and
therefore lets you immerse at once into the game's dark and
dangerous atmospehere.
You play the role of a secret agent of the Central Union of
Human Colonies who has just found himself on an unknown planet
near his crashed escape pod. So the game begins...
It is a text adventure in its nature, as I have said, but from
the common text adventures it differs immensly in both the way
you input commands and the way the result thereof is reported
back. The game is graphical, and every location and event are
described both textually and graphically.
A beautiful GUI panel occupying the lower third of the screen
graphically shows the hero's stats, the time of day (which can
be midday, evening, night and morning) and allows the player to
perform various commands by choosing them from a list. The
whole idea wasn't new, for back in 1993 Legend Entertainment
had developed a similar GUI interface for its advetures, but
for me (and many other Russians) in those days the Spectrum was
the only computer and we could only dream of the IBM PC. Maybe
it was due to this scarceness that we endowed Speccy with such
life-prolonging enhancements like the disk operating system
TR-DOS... After all, it was on the Speccy that I got first
acquainted with games like Prince of Persia and X-COM.
All possible actions in the game may be divided into two
categories: time-consuming and momentary. Walking and sleeping
belong to the former category and both take a quarter of the
astronomical day, so that if you set out in the morning you'll
get to the destination by day. And if you decide to lie down to
sleep at night you'll wake up in the morning.
All other commands take no time. They either gather information
(Examine, Look Around) or manipulate objects. The GUI system
doesn't diminish the flexibility of parser-based engines
providing means to carry out commands that require indirect
objects. For example, to cut a wire with a piece of glass
you'll have to pick the "USE" command, and then specify the
direct (piece of glass) and indiect (wire) objects --
everything in a GUI manner, with no typing.
The game world is large and dynamic. Things do change with
time. A night visit to a location that had looked safe and cosy
during the day may proof fatal for beasts of prey prefer to
roam under the darkness' cover while men usually sleep. The
hero's stats reflect his (mis)happenings as he gets hurt in
deadly fights, wears himself out in restless marches or
tolerates cold and hunger and thirst on a windy night lying on
the ground having stuck his open eyes to the strange sky.
Rarely will he find food to succour the life in his body and
time to relax and restore his vigour. Together with a real-time
(though rather dumb in my opinition) fight system this makes
[GAME] partly an RPG.
Such a "living" world coupled with the RPG elements adds
another dimension to the gameplay, because you have to
carefully plan your actions, alternate times of excertion of
all forces with resting, eating and healing. You have to keep
track of time to get to right places at the right time and to
meet enemies while not tired too much least they should defeat
you.
The graphics are good and atmospheric, so I will not support
the common opinion that adding GFX to a text game will only
spoil it, hindering the player's imagination by forcing it to
stick to scences already drawn instead of reconstructing them
from a text description.
The game texts are a bit naive and sometimes even childish,
which can be ascribed to Step CG's lack of previous experience
in the Interactive Fiction field. Also there are some very
unnatural and unfitting puzzles, but the overall game plot is
good and adventruring is pleasant.
For me, the essence of a computer game lies not in technical
playability, but rather in the artistic beauty of the game
universe, the feelings that the game arouses and the impression
that it leaves. Adventrue is an especially powerful genre in
this regard, and [GAME] is no exeption.
