| ★ AMSTRAD CPC ★ GAMESLIST ★ MANDRAGORE (c) INFOGRAMES ★ |
Amstrad Action | Popular Computing Weekly | Amstrad Acción |
Mandragore: a laugh or a bore? How would you like a weekend in a French chateau? Yes, I thought you would, and so would I. which is why I looked with more than passing interest at Mandragore, the first program from Infogrames, a French software house now selling to the UK. The only trouble is. of course, that this chateau is not a very restful place: instead, it's your typical dank, rat-infested. monster-ridden heap which seems to be just sitting around waiting for an adventurer like youl And if just one of several dotted about the landscape of Mandragore, each of which holds a dark secret to be winkled from the shadows and fleeting wraiths. I first saw this game on the Commodore, and the thing that struck me then was how much like the Ultima series from Origin Systems, the American company ,It was. The quest is undertaken by four characters, and these may be named and defined by you. or you may accept the built-in profile which comes with the program. This is a typical party of human, elf, wizard and thief, each of which has a certain quota of points covering the well-known intelligence, strength, experience and so on, all of which should be pretty familiar to anyone used to Dungeon and Dragon-type games in general (though it should be stated now that Mandragore is really not at all like that classic) and Ultima in particular. Once the party is selected, you'll find yourself in the land of Mandragore, and it is now up to you to explore the landscape in search of weapons, food, spells, treasure and so on. At first, the screen display depicts your party, in the uninspiring shape of a matchstick person, jerking character-square by square around a badly-scrolling landscape of symbolic marshes, mountains and lakes. Dotted around this Lego-like landscape are several villages (type V to enter) and chateaux (type C). The scene will then change to show each character under your control and any objects and other characters at the location. At villages, you may buy. steal or barter for. equipment, food, weapons, and medicine and converse with shopkeepers and doctors The castles are where the serious monster-bashing and treasure-get-ting takes place, although each of these must be loaded in separately, which is a bit of a chore even for disc owners: for cassette users, this facet of the game is interminably dull. Utilising the various attributes of your party can be quite intriguing, though the strategy and adventuring aspects of the game leave a lot to be desired. I'm afraid to say. and these are the very things I was looking forward to seeing Generally, the program looks very dated, with commands being input via the keyboard rather than the joystick, and awful blocky graphics looking more like a Commodore game of three or four years ago. The manual is helpful, but tries to cater for every version from Commodore to Amstrad and Sinclair as well as Apple and MSX, which makes things very confusing. Several chapters of story preface the instructions. and these apparently contain useful clues to use in the main game, but the story reduced me to helpless laughter long before anything of worth could be extracted from the Franglais: the proof-reader is obviously Benny Hill's scriptwriter (come on, Infogrames. even Bram Stoker wouldn't have dared to use "viscous humours")
Popular Appea Tony Bridge, Popular Computing Weekly |
|  |
Page créée en 407 millisecondes et consultée 6557 fois L'Amstrad CPC est une machine 8 bits à base d'un Z80 à 4MHz. Le premier de la gamme fut le CPC 464 en 1984, équipé d'un lecteur de cassettes intégré il se plaçait en concurrent du Commodore C64 beaucoup plus compliqué à utiliser et plus cher. Ce fut un réel succès et sorti cette même années le CPC 664 équipé d'un lecteur de disquettes trois pouces intégré. Sa vie fut de courte durée puisqu'en 1985 il fut remplacé par le CPC 6128 qui était plus compact, plus soigné et surtout qui avait 128Ko de RAM au lieu de 64Ko. |
