Those 8th Day adventurists are here again, with their usual value-for-money package. Apart from a 20-page booklet and the main game in its two 128K parts, you get two separate playable demo's of forthcoming titles (Ardonicus III and The Weaver Of Her Dreams) and a bonus program, 'How to Play Adventure Games.' New players with a 128K machine start here.
    The Raven is the first of a promised series of 'Detective Tales', and in this you get a chance to play Sherlock Holmes yet again. As the latest Infocom game also features a Sherlock story, there's obviously life in the old 'tec yet. And he's conveniently out of copyright, of course! (I wonder, when Holmes indulges in his notorious opium habit, does that makes him a high tec?)
    This story begins with Holmes at home in Baker Street, when the inevitable letter arrives. This one's from a Professor Vybes, known for his interest in the criminal mind, and he's invited Holmes to be present at the announcement of a remarkable new method for treating the criminally insane (though it doesn't specifically mention YS readers). The announcement is to take place at The Manor, Claxton Grove, on Friday at 7 o'clock. The letter's dated Wednesday 11, 1893, and is conveniently reprinted in the booklet.
    The game is played against the clock, and you can switch between two time modes using FAST and SLOW commands. You'll really need to study the booklet as The Raven is a pretty complex game. FAST can be used when not much is happening, and SLOW when things get a bit chaotic, but of course you'll have to experiment first to discover which is best. The day and time are displayed on-screen, and you'll find out right at the start how things work, as you're in a bookshop just before 6pm on Friday. If you wait around too long you see the clock tick away, till at six the proprietor politely turfs you out and locks the door so you can't get back in. But where's that cloaked stranger who entered and left the bookshop in that short space of time? If you follow him he seems to disappear in the graveyard. Is this an early glimpse of the Raven?
    The game is written with PAW and so the parser copes with most things you can throw at it, like GET THE BLACK BOMB AND OPEN THE MATCHBOX AND GET THE MATCH THEN LIGHT THE BOMB WITH THE MATCH AND THROW THE BOMB AT THE AARDVARK THEN QUICKLY RUN WEST. You can, indeed must, talk to the other characters in the adventure, and the scale of a 128K game is shown by the fact that one of these characters has 10K set aside just for himself. To think that whole adventures have been written in less space than that! While some adventures just look like it.
    You must allow yourself half-an-hour for the cab journey to the manor, and if that sounds lengthy then bear in mind that it doesn't cost you anything! Once there you can explore the manor, though be sure not to miss the other guests and the meeting with Vybes. At the meeting Vybes produces Edgar, who he's been experimenting on and who he says he has cured of his criminal tendencies. He's very secretive about his methods - could be a case of bad Vybes, if you ask me.
    Holmes can stay the night at the Manor, although a note left in his room warns him not to sleep there that night. If he makes a rendezvous somewhere creepy at midnight, he might learn something about one of the other guests. An equally creepy meeting the next morning will also help the plot to thicken.
    The Raven is a game that seems to me every bit as complicated as Sherlock, and would have been greeted with cries of amazement if released at the same time. It shows how far Spectrum adventures have come in the last year or two, that a game as good as this now costs just £5.50 and is written on a utility that's available for anyone to use. It's far from perfect - some of the messages scroll too quickly off the screen, there's no RAMSAVE option, character interaction is the usual hit-and-miss affair, there are some spelling and punctuation mistakes and you can't switch the graphics off - as good and as quick as they are, sometimes I'd like to play without them. I could ignore the faults, however Sherlock wasn't exactly perfect, was it? I'll stick my neck out and say this is better than Sherlock - no 128K adventurer should be without it.
    
PAW PAUSE
The disk version of PAW's just arrived from Gilsoft, which is great news for Plus 3 owners. A quick look at the differences between this and the tape version reveals that overlays will naturally now be loaded in from disk when required, either from the master disk or you can copy them onto your data disk for ease of access. You can't use the Plus 3's RAM drive as PAW wants it all for itself. It also wants a bit more memory from the system, so it takes away Page 7 and 4K from Page 6, but it looks to me like you could do most of your work on disk and then just switch to tape when close to finishing, if you needed to regain that extra bit of memory.
    The EXTERN command won't work with Basic programs when the Plus 3's in 128K mode, but machine code routines will still be okay. You can't use the VERIFY command if working from disk, but of course you can save to tape and produce 128K games or 48K games if you like. Working on disk yourself will make everything so much easier and quicker, but there seems to be no option for using the spare disk space to produce disk-only games that are bigger than 128K. At least, not yet!

Ratings given by other magazines

8/10

Info supplied by the SPOT*ON database