Level 9
64K Cassette
£9.95
The Price
of Magik is Level 9's sequel to the best-selling Red Moon. I am
pleased to say that it is a very worthy successor to that excellent
game. You are alone in a hostile world full of monsters and magic
but, worse than Red Moon, you start the game with no knowledge of
magic and have to learn what the spells are, what 'focus' objects
are required to use them, and even what they do!
Your objective is simple, defeat the evil sorcerer, Myglar. To do
this you will have to travel through scores of strange locations,
defeating numerous dungeon denizens, and gaining vast magical
powers. As with Red Moon, the game is rather large, over 200
locations, over 2 dozen inhabitants, over 40 artifacts, and 18
spells. The implementation is very similar to Red Moon, text scrolls
up from the bottom of the screen, optional pictures (simple line
drawings, but quite colourful) are drawn at the top of the screen,
and your keystrokes are read into a large buffer and actioned quite
speedily, AND it does it all simultaneously. You don't have to wait
for the previous command to complete, if you know where you are
going you can key ahead as fast as you like! The only thing to watch
out for is that, if you are the violent type and have killed lots of
monsters by force, their ghosts will return to plague you - probably
while you are typing ahead!
The scoring system on The Price of Magik is a novel one. You start
the game 100% sane and 20 years old. Every time you achieve
something useful - reaching somewhere inaccessible, finding a spell
focus, discovering or casting a new spell, etc., your sanity goes
down by 1 or 2 percent and your age goes up by 1 or 2 years! Madness
and Magik go hand in hand, but somehow you have to avoid dying of
old age when you reach 100, while trying to achieve 0% sanity!
Obviously you can set yourself the challenge of finding, how to lose
all 100 sanity points, but in fact you don't need to find every
single point in order to defeat Myglar and win the game. Once you
know most of the secrets, it is possible to play through and defeat
Myglar while still 70% sane!
One of the nicest things about the game is the wide variety of
solutions to some of the problems - I compared my solution with
someone else's and discovered that we had solved about a dozen
problems by different means. As you improve in your knowledge of
magic you will find more and more ways of achieving certain
objectives. For example, there are at least four different ways of
getting the Claymore from the Statue! On the other hand there are
some quite difficult problems which only appear to have a single
solution.
Initially your magic will be fairly weak, and you will probably find
it necessary to fight some of the monsters. The combat system is
very Dungeons and Dragons-ish - weapons, armour, Hit Points, and
random dice throws by the computer. As you learn how to defeat or
bypass the various creatures, either by magic or by logic, you will
almost certainly want to avoid physical combat - the ghosts of the
defeated can be very annoying, and once you know all the secrets you
can avoid ALL physical combat. One of the best 'monsters' is the
army of ants. You can only kill one at a time, and there are 128 of
them! Your chance of surviving 128 rounds against them is not worth
measuring so even the most blood-thirsty adventurer will be forced
to turn to logic or magic in the end.
The game's understanding of English is
excellent (within context) and Level 9 are now being slightly more
moderate in their claims - 'The program copes with a wider range of
English sentences than any other cassette-based game I've seen' -
with which I have no argument. There are a couple of bugs which you
should be aware of. 'The hilt in the ceiling' should say 'The hilt
is still stuck in the ceiling', '658;stone' should say 'Stone'.
Another concerns GET. I always use GET. I know it is not very good
English, but it has one major advantage over TAKE, it is shorter! If
you always use GET, you are likely to get extremely frustrated
since, when you finally work out how to get the WHEEL from the mist
and have the means to achieve it, you will find that GET WHEEL
fails. At this one point in the game you must use the word TAKE - a
very strange bug! One other minor point is this, the first time I
succeeded in defeating Myglar I was most surprised to find that the
game did not end! Some clue as to what is going on here might have
been helpful as I wandered aimlessly for some time trying to work
out what to do next. I had killed him by physical force but,
presumably because his ghost still exists, this is not adequate. You
MUST defeat him by magical means for the game to finish.
This game is Level 9's first use of the LENSLOK. Just in case you
haven't encountered one, a LENSLOK is a small device containing
prisms, used to decode various patterns on the screen. Without this
you will not be able to complete the adventure.
At less than ten pounds this adventure is excellent value for money.
Congratulations on another great game, Level 9. (P. S. Loved the
Blue Box!)
top
