ChronoQuest


Title           ChronoQuest
Game Type	Adventure
Publisher	Psygnosis (1988)
Players		1
HD Installable  Yes (no installer provided though)
Compatibility	All (512 KB)
Submission	daveyw@ihug.co.nz

Review
Psygnosis was one of the first publishers to specialise in games for the
then-new 16-bit machines, and ChronoQuest was one of their first efforts.
It came at a time when the gaming world was still marvelling at "The Guild
of Thieves", the swan-song of the text adventures. ChronoQuest was
designed to be an adventure with an all-graphic environment, with little
or no text, controlled entirely through a point-and-click interface.
Commands are issued through a toolbar, and objects are manipulated by
little icons. ChronoQuest thus anticipated the more sophisticated games
Secret of Monkey Island, and Myst.

The first thing you should know if you are planning to buy this game is IT
IS IMPOSSIBLE TO COMPLETE. In order to juggle all the objects, you need to
drop some at a certain point. So, you'll need to make room for a
necessary object, by dropping another necessary object. Unfortunately, if
you drop an object, it vanishes from the game, meaning that there will
come a time when something you need has been dropped and gone forever.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.

However, should you still decide to try the game, you'll first need to
confront the copy protection. ChronoQuest features one of the most unusual
copy protection schemes ever. In the packaging, you'll find a transparent
plastic sheet, marked with a grid. On the cover of the box is a picture.
Place the grid over the picture. The game will prompt you to select the
colour which matches that of a specified set of co-ordinates. Given that
the specified location will probably contain about 4 different colours,
and that none of them will match the colours you have to choose from,
you'll need a lot of patience to get through this. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

OK, if you're still with me, and still actually want to play ChronoQuest,
then you'll find the game is actually not too bad. The graphics are so-so
by today's standards, breathtaking when the game was first released in
1988. The sound is passable, with atmospheric tunes playing throughout.
The storyline begins in France, 1922. Your father is dead, murdered by his
assistant Richard. He has escaped into the future. To follow him, you must
use your father's time machine and travel into the past and locate parts
of the computer programme that will propel the time machine on toward the
final confrontation.

ChronoQuest is severely let down by stupid programming errors, making it a
worthless game to own. It's hard to imagine that the Psygnosis that
produced this debacle now makes hi-tech PlayStation games. Not recommended.




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