Producer: Ultimate
Retail Price: £9.95
Author: Ashby Computers and Graphics Ltd
Sabreman is back! After escaping from Underwurlde via one exit which took him into Knight Lore and problems with a spot of lycanthropy (LMLWD), he can now set out on the quest for the PENTAGRAM.
Leaving Underwuride, Sabreman pauses only to snatch up a copy of the Grand Arch Wizardry before stomping off into the forest. No pith helmet for Sabreman this time - he scampers round in a hooded cloak, and can defend himself by hurling sparkling balls of magical energy.
And defend himself he must, for the forest is inhabited by a variety of unpleasant creatures that have a habit of suddenly materialising at just the wrong moment. Witches riding broomsticks and sleepwalking zorhbies can be zapped with a quick burst of magic, but their touch, like that of the unzappable spider creatures, is deadly. Sabreman only has a stock of five lives to hand, so care needs to be taken when killer nasties are in the vicinity.
Other manifestations, including ghosts, giant lice and amorphous blobs also turn up in the game from time to time, but they are not deadly - just a nuisance, making life more difficult. They, too, can be despatched with a bit of well-hurled magic.
As is usual with Ultimate games, the inlay doesn't contain too many hints about the quest on which Sabreman has embarked, but it seems that sections of the PENTAGRAM must be gathered up and bathed in the waters from a well that lurks behind a wall of mantraps - runes must be found too, and then the PENTAGRAM finally becomes Sabreman's personal possession.
The forest locations through which Sabreman passes on his quest are presented in the same 3D perspective Ultimate used in Alien 8 and Knight Lore, and the control system is also similar: the robed adventurer can only walk and jump forwards, and has to be rotated until he is facing in the appropriate direction before a move is made.
Progress through the locations is not always straightforward - sometimes sheets of spikes or mantraps block the pathway and have to be hurdled. Objects, including tables, logs and blocks of stone can be moved by shoving them or firing a blast of magic - handy, because getting through some locations is a problem in itself. Evil looking dogshead guardians patrol some of the entrances and exits, making trips between forest locations rather tricky.
A tune plays on the title screen and once the start key has been depressed, a few seconds elapse before the game begins - Sabreman doesn't begin his adventure from the same part of the forest each time, and the objects that have to be collected aren't always in the same location. As objects are gathered up, they appear in the left hand status area, under the little icon that represents the number of lives remaining. Each time a nasty is sent on the trip to oblivion with a blast of magic, points are added to your score, so it's not just a matter of gathering up the fragments of the PENTAGRAM: high-score chasing is part of gameplay.
The existence of Pentagram was first alluded to in Underwurlde, and now, nearly six months after it was first advertised, it has arrived. But Sabreman's trials and tribulations are still not over: Mire Mare and the future beckons the intrepid adventurer...
COMMENTS
Control keys: Z, C, B, M left X, V, N, SYM SHIFT right, second row to walk forward, Q, E, T, U,O jump W, R, Y, I, P fire, number keys to pick up/drop, CAP SHIFT, SPACE to pause
Joystick: Kempston, Cursor, Interface 2
Keyboard play: no problems
Use of colour: monochromatic, hence no clashes
Graphics: 3D style made famous by Knight Lore
Sound: tuneful start and finish music, plus spot effects
Skill levels: one
Screens: rather a lot
Ultimate have finally released one of the follow ups to Knight Lore and what a good follow up it is too. The graphics are of course in the Ultimate style, but people shouldn't complain 'cos it's a good idea and why shouldn't they use it over and over again? Ultimate, I feel, have put in more of a range of detailed graphics than the other games, and the nasties that keep materialising are very good and add to the whole game immensely, which means that there's no hanging about in your quest for the PENTAGRAM. I don't think you'll get bored with this at all. At ten pounds it presents better value for money than their other releases, and it's a must for all arcade/adventure players.
Well what a long wait, but at last it's here! Pentagram is not that different om the rest of the trilogy of 3D games: nevertheless it presents a considerable challenge to complete and map. I still think Ultimate lead the field at this sort of game, although Ocean's Batman is perhaps the best of the rest. The scene is well set by the packaging which creates a good atmosphere. Sabreman is controlled easily and precisely with no delay, although I noticed that the action tended to slow up when there was a lot on the screen, but that's not such a bad point - it gives you a chance to realise where everything is. Definitely another one to add to your Ultimate arcade adventure collection...
Ultimate's latest offering is definitely cast in the same mould as Alien 8 and Knight Lore, and as such bound to appeal to anyoe who enjoys a good rom through a maze of locations, solving puzzles along the way. The graphics are all pretty and well designed and solving the puzzle contained in the game should give even the smartest of Alecs ten pounds worth of satisfaction. It'd be nice if Ultimate came up with a totally new and different concept for the next game, though...
Ultimate
£9.95
Once again, that 'perennial', not to say 'darned persistant', hero Sabre Man has his eye on the next Ultimate adventure. (Well, they say the Devil finds work for idle Sabre Mans!). With just a magic wand and a few spells for company, he schleps into this latest maze hooded, as a true neophyte, in his chintzy shimmering blue robes, in search of the ancient Pentagram. Exactly why he might want the Pentagram in the first place is a little unclear, as the instructions to the game are shrouded in Ultimate's rather confusing 'poetry'. But want it he does, and in order to get it he must retrieve its four sections, and combine them in the correct way.
You have the now traditional left and right keys to rotate your hooded Sabre Man so he's pointing in the right direction, plus other keys to walk forward, fire, and jump. All this rotate-and-walk business is an annoying way of controlling a character, not to mention flippin' slow as any Asteroids veteran will tell you! Not too good if you're in a tight spot, with a spider chasing you while you're struggling around to point the right way for a quick exit. It would've been far better with the four direction method of a game like Batman.
You'll face many and varied hazards in your quest. But, by far the worst death-dealing creatures are the spiders. I'm not quite sure whether they follow you or not. Actually I think that it's just the way they whizz around... that and the fact that they're invulnerable to your blasts. That really gives me the willies. One slightly odd feature is the dragon heads that seem content to sway from side to side in doorways - making timing crucial when exiting or entering a room.
I'm gonna level with you. There are a few reasons why I don't go overboard on this game. The 3D style arcade-adventure has its fans I suppose, and you know who you are, but the rest of us need the odd spark of originality in a new game before we go ga-ga. The gameplay looks a bit, well, rushed shall we say? And I really didn't like the way the baddies just fall gently from the ceiling like flakes of plaster.
I also found it irritating that the more stuff you see on screen the slower and more laborious Sabre Man's movements become. As this display problem includes the bolts you shoot at the bad guys, rapid fire is out of the question. Still, having said all that, of its type it's not bad. Provided you're persistant, the puzzles are challenging enough and almost anyone will enjoy solving them - eventually(!).
Label: Ultimate
Price: £9.95
Memory: 48K
Joystick: Kempston
Reviewer: Gary Rook
There was a time when the release of a new game from Ultimate was a major event. A time when it seemed Tim Stamper and his team could do no wrong.
Certainly Sabre Wulf, Underwurlde, Knight Lore and Alien 8 must rank amongst the best games for the Spectrum ever. So what of the latest release from Ultimate, Pentagram? Can it make up for the extremely disappointing Cyberun, which marked a retrograde step, using Jet Man style graphics?
Well, I'm afraid that the answer is a resounding maybe.
Pentagram is in fact a slightly changed version of Knight Lore. 'So what'. I hear you cry - Alien 8 was too. and that's great.
Maybe it's OK to copy your hit once. But twice?
Alien 8, while sharing a common graphic style and underlying structure, had a totally different plot line and very inventive screens, all high-tech space ship backgrounds and angular robots as opposed to the gothic mediaevalism of Knight Lore.
Unfortunately Pentagram looks like some poor minion has been handed Ultimate's Graphic Adventure System, shown Knight Lore, and told to deliver a best selling game by the previous Friday.
I may be being unfair but the graphics certainly look rather simplistic compared to the other two games. Our hero the Sabreman is wrapped from head to foot in a cloak, which avoids the need for any fine detail. Not only that but the monsters are distinctly disappointing - spiders with stubby legs, rather primitive looking sheet style ghosts, and distinctly dull Frankenstein monster lookalikes.
The backgrounds, too, seem to be lacking in imagination, being basically rehashed from Knight Lore: the furniture has been changed, but only slightly - sawn off tree trunks replacing chests, and giant man traps instead of enormous spikes.
As for the problems, we've seen them before: None of the 'how the hell do I get through this?', more 'ho hum, another one of those.'
The only major difference in Pentagram is that you are at the mercy of wandering monsters as well as the inhabitants of the rooms: if you stay somewhere too long, a new creepy crawly materialises. Some of them are more dangerous than others - the ghosts just push you around, while just about everything else zaps you if you collide with them.
The addition of these roving killers makes it very difficult to survive at first - which is obviously the idea.
But, cynic that I am, I can't help feeling that it's another example of the laziness that seems to underlie the game - make it more difficult by adding more monsters which appear randomly and you don't have to bother with designing elegant puzzles.
What the plot of the game is I really can't tell you, beyond saying that it has something to do with searching for a mystic pentagram, and that somehow you will be able to get clues and/or help from the various wishing wells dotted about the game.
Basically, it all boils down to a matter of invention. Two's company, three's a crowd and there's nowhere near enough new material in Pentagram to excite me. Of course, it has to be admitted that it is far better than many of the run-of-the-mill Spectrum games around. The question does remain, though; How long can Ultimate rely on being the only company in the market capable of sophisticated graphics like this?
If they want to get back in the lead, they're going to have to bring back the sense of wonder that their best games invoked in people.
MACHINE: Spectrum 48K
SUPPLIER: Ultimate Play The Game
PRICE: £9.95
Well, Ultimate may play the game, but I suspect most Spectrum owners have become more than a little weary of this style of program.
The storyline is peripheral and uninteresting. Yet again, you take the role of Sabreman. This time, though, he is dressed in a wizard's costume. The "idea" is to track down the Pentagram. Why Ultimate are unable to simply explain this looks like a mystery to baffle reviewers and gamers the world over. (Well, France and Germany in fact - Ultimate have kindly translated the instructions).
The title page is rather average, and the initial screen, offering joystick and keyboard options is only marginally more inspiring. Into the game proper, then, and what do we find? A 3D layout, "cute" graphics and single colour rooms. So many surprises!
The bizarre lack of directional control (you just spin around and move forward) makes things ever-so difficult. Presumably, the idea is to allow the player to run, jump and fire without stretching out to the keyboard every few seconds. Whilst considerate, I found it rather self-defeating; the effort exerted to reach the keyboard would be considerably smaller then the frustration caused trying to control the manic character.
Graphics are nothing special. They are high quality, though, and quite pleasing to look at. Occasionally, a fiend of some sort will descend from the sky and scuttle around your feet.
Bearing in mind the amount of time Ultimate spend producing their games, and the money spent on packaging, I am disappointed by this offering. Steer well clear. Ultimate are going down.
AT LONG LAST ULTIMATE HAVE FINISHED PENTAGRAM. WAS IT WORTH THE WAIT?
Ultimate/US Gold
£9.95
For a long time now we've all been waiting for Ultimate to come up with a megagame that would have all our minds as totally boggled as Knightlore did when it first appeared. Since then many other software houses have leapt on the 3-D bandwagon and the novelty of that style of graphics has worn off. What's more, Ultimate themselves have tarnished their reputation somewhat with a number of distinctly non-mega releases (mainly for the Commodore 64), but through it all we've sat patiently waiting for Pentagram, the latest in the Sabreman series and the direct sequel to Knightlore.
The trouble with reviewing this game lay in the conflicting expectations that had been built up. On one hand we all expect a lot from Ultimate because of their past reputation, whilst on the other there's the memory of those recent disappointments, so it's quite tricky to forget all that and just judge the game on its own merits.
As usual the introduction and instructions on the cassette inlay are obscure to the point of irrelevance. There's nothing wrong with the instructions being vague, since that's always added an extra twist as you attempt to unravel all the intricacies of the games, but I can't help thinking that since US Gold took over the marketing of Ultimate's games the cassette blurbs have become just so much badly written waffle. There are references to stars and runes and stone shapes, but the grammar's so awful it's unclear what it's all about.
Starting to play the game reveals that there are slightly fewer control options than in past games. Instead of the directional control that allowed you to move Sabreman in the direction that you move the joystick, there's now just the rotate option: this means that moving the joystick left/right rotates Sabreman anti-clockwise or clockwise and pushing the stick forwards then makes him walk in whatever direction he's facing. Jumping is performed by pulling the joystick backwards. I found this a more difficult way of controlling Sabreman's movement and got myself killed off a fair number of times as a result, though to be fair this game requires less of the precision timing and movement that Knightlore and Alien 8 required. In addition there are controls for firing magic missiles and pick up/drop.
The Sabreman's latest adventure sends him searching for the Pentagram of the title. The Grand Arch Wizardry spell book tells of 'silvery waters' drawn from ancient wells, runes and stars, and of the Pentagram taking on solid form once more. Thankfully Pentagram is a return to the Knightlore format, rather than the style of Nightshade and Gunfright. The graphics are in the now familiar Knightlore style - a view of each location from a point that is just above head height, though not directly overhead. Locations are drawn in just one colour to avoid attribute problems.
The Sabreman, now kitted out in a pointy hat and wizard's robe, is wandering around a forest landscape, dotted here and there with lily ponds and snare traps (fatal of course) and some castle ruins with all the usual spiky blocks, crumbling walkways and moving stairs. I always found the complex sets of obstacles the most enjoyable part of playing Knightlore and missed that element in Gunfright and Nightshade, so I was glad to see that they were all back in Pentagram, though there is slightly more emphasis on monster zapping in this game than in Knightlore.
Apart from these obstacles most locations are empty when you first enter them, but after just a few seconds all sorts of ghosts and ghoulies start to appear and chase after you. There are witches on broomsticks, zombies, ghosts, giant spiders and what appear to be giant pear-drops which bounce around after you. None of these are instantly fatal but repeated contact with them takes its toll and eventually leads to your going up in a puff of smoke. They don't move terribly quickly so it's not too hard to get lined up and zap a magic missile at them, but the longer you hang around the more of them will appear. This does have drawbacks, because on some of the busier screens where there might be both monsters and moving blocks as well as the Sabreman himself, the movement of everything on screen does slow down a lot. It might have been a good idea to make sure that locations didn't get overcrowded, though this doesn't happen so often that it's a major flaw.
The runes are large stone tablets each with a distinctive mark carved on it, and of course they're all placed in the most inaccessible locations and surrounded by traps. The same applies to the wells tucked away in various corners of the forest.
There are a number of small stone pyramids in the forest and I think that they've got something to do with the Pentagram itself, though I haven't yet managed to work out exactly what. I've tried jumping on them, zapping them, pushing them over - all to no avail, so I suppose that I'm just going to have to make the ultimate sacrifice (no pun intended) and go back to playing the game until I've solved it all. It's not easy being a games reviewer...
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