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Gaming budget reviews

Andy Spence takes a look at the APDL CDs and Wizard Apprentice

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Wizard Apprentice

Wizard Apprentice is a puzzle based platformer following the popular style of moving blocks as a means to progress through a level and collect all the bonuses. Such games have been popular in the RISC OS PD scene - PushyII, for instance - but will this simplistic puzzle genre stand up in the commercial world? The game was originally overpriced at £30, but the sensible people at APDL have put it down to a more reasonable £7.90. For your pennies you get a CD case, manual and game. You will need a lot of memory free on your hard drive to install this game as it hogs almost 200MB of space, which is a bit over the top for a simple bitmap platformer in my opinion.

The initial menu screen will cause a mixture of confusion and frustration. What seem like good ideas have all gone wrong. The black outlines around the text don't go well over a bright colourful background. Worse still it uses the most exotic, illegible font and once the different options are rotating round in 3D it's barely possibly to make out what they do. Once you've peeled back your eyelids and flicked through the manual you can attempt to understand the menu, so onwards to the game.

There is a scene-setting screen with two wizards in a 'Hero Quest'-style graphic which doesn't seem to fit in with the modern 3D pre-rendered graphics of the rest of the game. The in-game graphics and animation are surprisingly good, running in 640x512 in 256 colours. The smooth moving wizard is professionally animated and his accompanying blob is comically well animated. The impressive animation is mirrored in the bonuses and other scenery through out the game.

Each level is slightly bigger than one screen and as you move up and down the screen scrolls slightly. Each of the 100 levels has a certain way of completing it. By pushing the right blocks in the correct order and making the most of your 'blobby' pal in later levels you can work your way through them. The large expanse of levels is split up into five different worlds with varying themes and landscapes.

It's the learning curve and quality of the puzzles which brings out the enjoyment in this game. After cracking a few puzzles you find yourself utterly addicted, where you suffer from 'just another five minutes' syndrome. My only moan with the game play is that the characters have the speed of a snail with chronic constipation, so you will find yourself rustling your hair in an impatient manner. Again, the poor out-of-game design hits home between levels. On completion of a level, a screen is created using an assortment of blocks from the levels as a background, but unfortunately this means you can barely read the text on front of it. I don't understand how this could happen when the in-game presentation is excellent.

The music is neither annoying enough to ruin the experience or amazing enough to enhance it. There are a total of 10 tracks all different to suit the varying worlds. The music tends to get better towards the end of the game, but the 80s style rock/techno that you would expect to hear in an ancient Jean-Claude Van Damme film leaves a lot to be desired. The sounds are also nothing special, but the occasional 'whoosh' and 'squelch' after collecting objects can be satisfying. The game is also supplied with a level editor, so anyone who thinks they have a mind for puzzles can have a go at creating their own taxing level. The manual is in black & white but has a nice high-quality front cover, not bad for a budget product.

Gaming World Profile

Verdict

Take away Wizard Apprentice's nifty graphics, paper thin plot and 'waiting room' style music and your left with your basic block pushing, mushroom collecting, puzzle game. Ignoring the bad menu designs, this is an excellent game and is well worth the new improved budget price. You can play the demo version which is in the SOFTWARE directory on this CD.

Gameplay:		75%
Graphics:		65%
Sound:		60%
Value for money:		80%

Overall: 70%

APDL Best Games Collection CD1

This is a collection of the so-called best PD games. Cashing in at £7.90, this may seem a little steep seeing as there are only 20 games on the CD, taking up a stingy 1/6 of the CD capacity. Here is a run down of the games:

Archieman This is a well-programmed clone of the classic PacMan. It runs in the desktop with a well-designed game layout that fits into one window. The graphics are suitably poor for a PD game with 'Archiman' looking a bit freakish with a massive set of dentures and an uncanny resemblance to Zippy from Rainbow. There are several levels although the map is always the same, just with faster ghosts. An average PD game.

Castle Blackheart

This is a top-down maze game which was probably influenced by Attic Attack from the Spectrum. Your mission to run around pointlessly collecting treasure, throwing an endless supply of spinning knifes at purple skinned mutants and munching on the occasional sunday roast for your health. I'm left to assume that the aim is to try and get the highest score.

Splodge

An original game where you play a pile of goo which can take different forms to travel around the single screen levels and to avoid being killed by rockets and other hazards. The graphics are rather plain, but 'splodge' is well animated with a number of humorous squidgy shapes. Despite a lack of sound on my Risc PC, this is a fun little addition to the CD.

Blobby 2 This is probably one of the best PD games since Tom Cooper's crop of games a while back, and is the sequel to the original game Splodge. It is a vertical scrolling platform game where your character takes the unique form of a blob of goo. This makes you very versatile as you can ooze around the platforms, catapulting yourself into the air then morph into a parachute shape and drift safely back to earth. Its basically an improvement over the first 'Splodge' game, but now it's a harder race against time and the bottom of the screen. The game is full of little novelties, for example the game checks your computer's internal clock and it snows in winter time. With a stunning soundtrack this is without a doubt the best game on the CD.

Bouncy

Bouncy is a simplistic game where you are a ball and you have bounce off all the platforms on the screen to convert them to a nice light blue. The game is completely drawn in vectors and the basic sound is likely to provide you with little more than a few minutes of entertainment.

Goop

A uninspiring clone of Blobby 2 but with bad programming, graphics and sound. How this could ever be counted as one of the 'Best PD games' is beyond me. You can take comfort in the fact that it can't get any worse than this.

Cyberwar

Another simple game which seems to me like a spin off of an old PD game a few years back, CarWars. There are two propeller-like spinning objects that move around the a chequered board. You can fire little blobs at each other and collect various power-ups. You can either play against the computer or a friend. Likely to put the average game player into a coma.

Invaders

This is basically a form of space invaders with a scrolling background which gives the false illusion of a scrolling shoot'em up. It is a very simple invaders game where you have to shoot flying saucers out of the sky, pick up their power-ups and avoid their shots at you. Nice graphics for a PD game.

Lemings Not a typo, this is a clone by Tom Cooper of the original lemmings, made a while before the official conversion of the game. A very nice clone and I have nothing but praise for Mr Cooper's work. Like all his other PD games definitely worth a play and if you liked the originals, you'll like this.

Minesweep

Yet another clone of the original Minesweep game. Runs in the Desktop with the only unique feature to this version being a high-scores table in a separate window.

Mosquito

Made with the early 'Sims Flight Kit', this is an old 3D flight sim. Very simple and amazingly irritating to control, the flight of the mosquito is something that probably won't even provide short-term excitement, unless you're a flight sim nut.

Powerball

This game is a desktop version of the classic bat, ball and brick formula. Poor graphics and a messed view of physics results in the ball moving unpredictably across the screen. Not the best in this genre of games, but not the worst. You can play this game.

Swarm

This is another game made using a game-creation kit. Swarm is a rocket pack game which has been given a new lease of life from the old-style game with nice pre-rendered graphics and a professional look. A unique feature of this game is that it uses the mouse to control the main character and as you get to some of the later levels its is guaranteed to make your hand sticky with sweat.

Tanks

A 3D plain polygon tank game. Very simple shoot-'em-up game from the makers of Starfighter3000, this is one of their first 3D efforts. Not much to it, but increasing enemy numbers makes for some fun. However, there is a later version of this game available from the VOTI web site.

Thrust An unfinished Thrust clone, where you manoeuvre a ship without hitting the surrounding landscape using the mouse. You must collect the sphere, shoot the factories, then fly into the sky to complete the mission. The graphics are very attractive for a PD game, however the five missions won't last you a lifetime.

Willy

A dodgy conversion of Jet Set Willy from the Spectrum. This RISC OS version does not include ropes and it's a little easier to die, which doesn't help the cause. You have to collect 99 objects in order to complete the game, but whether your eyes can cope with this is another matter.

XOR

This is a bizarre desktop scrolling maze game where you have to collect the pieces to a map and all the masks on each level. The creator of this game was probably on some sort of illegal substances and the thing that makes this game not only disappointing, but insulting, is the fact that it crashes out unless you're in a 256 colour mode.

Bombz

This is a top-down bomb type game. However, this varies from the usual style as the bombs are already placed around the level and you have to pick up a limited number of detonators and pick which bombs you want to destroy to progress though the levels. An original game which I found enjoyable with the added bonus of a level editor.

Firebolt

This is a spin-off of bomberman. It can play from 1 to 4 players simultaneously. With good graphics, 40 levels and a level editor this addictive multiplayer game is one of the best on the CD.

Gaming World Profile

Verdict

Although this CD does contain a couple of the best public domain games, it is by no means value for money. ISV is offering 140 PD games on one CD with a RISC OS front end for a couple more quid. Bearing in mind that this selection isn't the best and all of them are available for free on the Internet, you can't help but wonder what sort of people would be prepared to give up the £7.90 for this. I can only assume that the target customers are insanely rich and because of the average playabilty of the games being so poor I conclude they must also be dead.

Gameplay:		40%
Graphics:		30%
Sound:		30%
Value for money:		25%

Overall: 31%

Andy Spence