~The Psychotron (CD)

Video Adventure by THE MULTIMEDIA STORE


By Lu Richardson


Just so that you know what kind of rubbish is being published these 
days, I will tell you about this game.

For a start, you have to play it through Windows, which means you 
will be peering into a little box.  Inside that, the main action 
takes place in another little box 3 inch wide.  If you don't end up 
ruining your eyesight, you'll be lucky.  I really can't imagine 
what possesses game publishers to work with Windows...

Well, enough of that.  This is an adventure game in which you can 
play by yourself or in the company of up to another three players.  
You have to investigate the loss of an instrument called a 
Psychotron.  It all starts with a briefing, to put you in the 
picture, and this takes the shape of a video sequence.  Very 
impressive:  but don't be tempted to enlarge the picture to cover 
the whole screen, though you will have that option, or you will 
certainly ruin your eyesight.

The next sequence is the first scene you have to investigate.  You 
get nice pictures of various offices, beautifully rendered, very 
much in the style of Myst.  You just poke your nose around and, 
whether you've extracted all the information available or not, you 
get moved on to the next scene.  

Here you start interacting with the players, in short video 
sequences, and you have a choice of questions to ask.  Depending on 
the choice you make, your score which go up a lot or a little; and 
if you don't ask the right questions, you'll never find out what's 
going on.  The game goes on, regardless.  If you failed to do 
certain things in the beginning, you will get very stuck at the end.
But, although you could make mistakes so gross that you wind up 
dead, you could actually get to the end by sheer chance.  

The plot is interesting enough, but all the time you feel that you 
are missing something because you are unable to ask all the 
questions you'd like to.  You could argue that you can always load a 
saved game and try another tack - but once you realise how long each 
section takes to play, you will decline having to go through it all
again.

In spite of playing with a quad speed CD-ROM, a Pentium 100 and the 
fastest harddisk I could get, the whole game is unbearably slow, 
which much churning of the harddisk every time the screen changes.

It could have been an excellent product, but it has too many 
shortcomings.  The most idiotic of all is that, when you find the 
Psychotron, it's smashed - yet, in the next scene, it's in full 
working order.  Don't waste your money unless you are desperate for 
an adventure game, any adventure game.


Copyright (c) 1995 Eurowave Leisure Ltd.