| ★ AMSTRAD CPC ★ GAMESLIST ★ THE WORM IN PARADISE (c) LEVEL 9 ★ |
Amstrad Action |
The Cowled Crusader was positively trembling with excitement as he loaded up this game A massive vocabulary a highly intelligent parser and the promise of a great game with 220 graphics locations AND it's from Level 9. Can it be as good as i! sounds because it sounds out of this world Well, out of tins world it certainly is. The third and final game in the Silicon Dream Trilogy (after Snowball and Return to Eden). The Worm in Paradise is set once more on the planet Eden. Many years have passed since Kim Kimberley's arrival on the piano: and there is now an advanced technological civilisation flourishing here -administered largely by robots, with everything for the benefit of the human inhabitants.
At the start of the game you find yourself in a garden with no apparent means of escape. Four wails enclose an area of typical Level 9 beauty - roses lilies and a magnificent apple tree in the centre. You also find yourself staring at the familiar Level 9 graphics and wonder ing when they re going to sharpen their pencils a bit and start producing some decent pics. I have to admit that some of the drawings in Worm are better than previous material, but graphics is still one area where Level 9 can't match the competition of say , Interceptor , or Adventure International. There's the usual imaginative Level 9 game design that becomes evident from the very start in Worm. The garden is only a fantasy, and within a few moves you find yourself Waking up in Reveime's Dream Parlour in the heart of Enoch, capital city of Eden There is. incidentally, another way out of the garden if you persevere - but J'll leave that up to you! If dreams came true here on Earth as they seem to do on Eden. I'd readily plump for a holiday in Enoch There's certainly plenty of tourist traps, from a casino complete with one-armed bandit (and I MEAN a one-armed bandit') through to the museum where you can ogle an inflatable plastic replica of Kim Kimberley, and the pet shop where you can fix yourself up with a cute little Dagget (an electronic dog).
Travelling around in the capital city is a bit like discovering the London Underground for the first time - you're continually getting lost on north-bound pedways, east-bound pedways. south-bound pedways. and so on. What's more, one intersection looks very like another. but with the aid of a pencil and paper you'll soon find yourself feeling very much at home You can even try and go to work if you want, but to start with you're unlikely to do All this takes place using Level 9's new system It does have some very attractive features. First, the graphics and text are displayed in parallel, so that you can enter a command while a picture is still being drawn. This is a great help if you want to move round in a hurry but still want to get a glimpse of the scenery if you really want to get a move on you can turn off the pictures altogether using WORDS. Secondly, you can input multiple commands separated by either AND. THEN, or full stops/commas This is a very flexible system - in fact the most flexible that I can think of (bar Infocom, of course, and Lord of the Rings) The best thing about it is that the program really does make sense of what you 're typing most of the time so errors are few and far between unless you' re careless. The final big difference over previous games is the size of the vocabulary You can LOOK, of course, but you can also LISTEN and evenSMELL, and that's only the beginning. Suffice it to say that I did not have vocab problems once while playing the game, which isn't surprising since Level 9 claim that the program will understand over 1000 words Just to put you in the picture that's certainly on a par with early Infocom games, and about five rimes as much as most other present-day cassette adventures. What's more, even if you do use a word that the program doesn't understand, it will tell you why it doesn't understand it rather than simply rejecting it. For example, you may be told that the word has been used simply as a descriptive word in a location text and is not really significant in the game, or perhaps that you're trying to use a word in the wrong
Even for dedicated Pilgrims, I reckon there's a good few days1 work here. The aim of the game is to discover your identity, work your way up in society and change the world! And there s certainly quite a lot you'll want to change. From the moment you leave Reveline's Dream Parlour you'll begin to appreciate that the pleasure of Eden are very double-sided. Try popping into the local pie shop (located in the park) and you'll see what I mean - looks delicious, tastes vile, and that about sums up Eden society. There's just one thing about this game that makes me uneasy. Suppose you lived on a planet like Eden, where everything was plastic and soulless. And suppose you wanted to change things. What would you do? You'd probably sit down and play a game like this one , wouldn't you? BW, AMSTRAD ACTION #5 |
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