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his is another of those disk-based American adventures
that looks great but falls down badly when it
comes to programming. You start off in a hotel
room, gazing down on a dead body which belonged
to a hired assassin by the name of Ivan Tupickemoff.
Beneath his body you will, in your role as a sharp-eyed
detective, also notice, the infamous Commodore
split screen glitch, which flickers annoyingly
as you try to read the skimpy text below.
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The
format of this game is very similar to Mindshadow,
but whereas Mindshadow had some powerful and
unusual commands, Masquerade relies on two-word
inputs and a small vocabulary. What's more, it doesn't
give you much help if you run into linguistic problems
- enter 'Zxxrtw', for example, and it says happily 'I
can't do that right now!' I'm not surprised.
As
you explore your hotel, you discover a time-bomb in
a phone booth, set to go off at 6.l5pm. Since your watch
says 5.20 or thereabouts, that gives you just about
enough time to rush out into the street, get stabbed
a few times, visit the zoo, and indulge in various verb-noun
encounters with attendants and sinister figures. There's
no doubt that the graphics are very good, but if you've
got a disk-drive you've probably played a game like
the disk Hobbit, or perhaps even an Infocom game,
and you'll be expecting more for your money than the
simple set-up you get here.
Perhaps
I shouldn't be too hard on Masquerade -- it does
LOOK good, after all. And there is a certain atmosphere
about it, mainly induced by the thought of being blown
up at 6.15, but a masterpiece of programming it ain't.
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