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 ight,
you lot! Get ready for Chuck Vomit's special culture
spot. Oi! Get that turkey leg out of your nose, you
at the back. It's not every day you get your hands on
a bit of learning from Vomit himself.
Cast
your mind back to a land of myth and mystery. A time
when Arthur ruled from Camelot, when the mystical powers
of Merlin held sway and the virtuous queen was Guinevere.
A time when jousts and contests were held everywhere,
when damsels relied on knights to free them from distress
and a nobleman's virtue was measured by his deeds. Into
the midst of all this peace and harmony rides a knight
called Lancelot. He is to become the greatest knight
of the kingdom, he is to search for and gain a glimpse
of the holy grail, and he is to betray his king on two
counts -- once as his friend and once as his subject.
Level
9's adventure is divided into three parts. In the first,
you're just a novice pipsqueak of a knight with a reputation
to gain. Rescue enough damsels, knights and ladies,
and you might just make it through to part three and
the quest for the Holy Grail itself.
It's
all the more absorbing because the text gives a constant
indication of how well you're doing. If you behave dishonourably,
you not only score minus points, but get called Lancelot
the filthy, Lancelot the dishonest, Lancelot the cowardly
-- and so on. Can't see what all the fuss is about myself
-- what's wrong with lying, cheating and cutting people's
heads off? As for that other business -- Courtly Love.
Bleuch! Count me out of that. All that mooning and sighing
and wearing namby pamby ribbons! Yuk! Down here, if
you're after a she-troll, you just bash her over the
head with a billy-goat -- it's the only way to make
her blush.
The
packaging comes complete with a map, so if you can't
be bothered to make a detailed plan straight away, you
can launch right into the action and use the GOTO and
RUN TO commands to visit any location named on the map.
Play this way and you really get into the questing atmosphere.
Puzzles
are graded in difficulty from the very easy to the pretty
hard with all the usual emphasis on interaction. Also
pretty much as usual, I reckon that this would be quite
hard to get into if you hadn't come across Level 9 before.
Although none of the tasks in the first part are all
that demanding, there are so many redundant locations
and so many possible starting points that it's quite
hard to work out what to do first. Still -- that's something
you could say about all Level 9 adventures, not just
Lancelot. If you've played and liked all their other
games, you won't care; if you haven't, try this out
before you buy.
Oh
yeah, the parser. Well, it's good but not that good.
You can type in all sorts of really complex commands,
speak and ask questions, but over something as basic
as ENTER TOWER, the program gets a bit confused; it
only recognises enter -- any word that comes after just
doesn't make sense.
Can't
say I was bowled over by Lancelot when I first
saw it (it takes a ten-ton truck to bowl me over, anyway)
but the more I got into it, the more I began to enjoy
it. Well designed and unusually constructed, it really
makes you feel as if you're riding around in a medieval
world -- and you get some dead atmospheric graphics
to boot, or should I say spur? Maybe I shouldn't. After
the relative disappointments of Knight Orc and
even Gnome Ranger, Level 9 are really getting
their act together. It makes a refreshing change to
get away from all those cutey gnomes and bashful elves.
In fact, I've always fancied myself as a bit of a knight
errant: Sir Vomit, the Chuck -- noble gobsmacker and
keeper of the honour of the Holy Snot . . . Whaddya
think?
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