textfiles/games/REVIEWS/immortal.rev

 THE IMMORTAL

 Touted by Electronic Arts as an "Arcade Adventure," THE IMMORTAL is one of a
number of recent games (BATTLEMASTER, CADAVER, TREASURE TRAP, and THE FINAL
BATTLE come to mind) that have revived the two-thirds overhead perspective as a
viable form of presentation. I think the genre designation is apt, though
long-time adventure fans may turn up their noses at the adventuring elements in
this style of game. (This review is based on the Amiga version.)

 There's plenty to do in the way of puzzle-solving, item accumulation and
manipulation, and exploration in THE IMMORTAL, and (unlike adventures with
arcade sequences tacked on as an afterthought) the arcade elements of the game
function integrally and consistently within the gameworld presented. Even
Cinemaware's best arcade adventures tend to introduce arcade aspects like songs
in the midst of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. THE IMMORTAL goes one step
beyond and really puts you right there with all the other creatures in the game,
without letup.

 After a longer-than-usual but easy-on-the-drive disk-load, the game opens with
a contemplative moment and a greeting from your old teacher, Mordamir. His
ghostly manifestation appears from the flames of the flickering candle resting
upon the round, stone table in the first room. It seems he's not dead after all,
merely trapped in an apparently bottomless cavern. Your task is to attempt a
rescue by making your way through eight levels of the labyrinth beneath the city
of Erinoch. At bottom is the dragon's lair, where you will join forces with
Mordamir against the dragon.

 Mordamir has left a trail of items and clues leading to his whereabouts, some
contained in "The Codex of the Serpent," which provides important information on
each level of the labyrinth. Others are discovered by conversations with the
denizens of the labyrinth, or by exploration. Previous attempts to free Mordamir
have led to the entrapment of some of his allies, whom you may encounter along
the way. There are also numerous dangerous creatures inhabiting each level,
goblins in the upper levels, trolls, flying lizards, and spiders below (for
starters). With the right spells and potions, some potentially threatening
creatures can be turned into allies; others must be exterminated in order to get
past them.

 The graphics in THE IMMORTAL are simply stunning. I'm not talking "numbers of
colors onscreen," or "speed," or any of the usual mumbo-jumbo incanted to
impress the unwary. I'm referring to the beautiful detailing and lifelike
animation of everything that moves (animate or inanimate) in each room. The
flames flicker, snap, and crackle realistically; the goblins _look_ like goblins
in fine detail, with faces straight out of French medieval mythology; the wizard
(your character) is drawn and animated in loving detail, and expires in true
wizardly fashion. All the creatures, in fact, are so well done that it takes
little stretch of the imagination to make them real. Doors, traps, rays of
light, etc., are likewise so carefully drawn and animated that they simply
_feel_ solid and tangible when your wizard comes into contact with them. I don't
know how it was done, but even the tiles on the floors of the rooms look as if
you could touch the screen and almost feel their texture and edges. This level
of detailing is maintained throughout the game, and is one of the most
outstanding design features in THE IMMORTAL.

 The sound is also nicely done, though not as impressive as the graphics. One
tune plays continuously while you're on a level, and though it's accompanied
during battles by the realistic sounds of weapons clanking together, it becomes
grating after a while. (All the tunes do seem appropriate to the sections of the
game in which they're played, however.) I'd have appreciated more in the way of
sound effects, and more variety in the background music. At least you can turn
the sound off, but the ability to retain sound effects while eliminating music
would've been nice.

 The game control and interface are simplicity and ingenuity incarnate. Almost
everything is done via joystick (this game has obviously been designed from the
ground up for eventual console conversion), and the handling of item and
inventory screens is glitch-free. A spacebar accesses the inventory area, and
the joystick then moves from item to item; pressing fire will access and use an
item in the appropriate way.

 When decisions or searches have to be made, a screen comes up asking for a
yes/no response to a situation presented. When exploration leads to an area
where an item is located, the same type of screen appears, asking whether you
want to conduct a search.

 There's little in the way of excess inventory in THE IMMORTAL: If an item is
available (and doesn't cause harm upon accessing it), it's likely to be useful
further on in the quest. Just the right number of objects is present in each
level, so that the player's wizard is neither running around empty-handed, nor
burdened with an unrealistically high number of items.

 Fortunately, bodily necessities aren't much of an issue during play, either,
though certain drinkable or edible items affect your strength, and sleep is
always an opportunity for renewal. Although desperate searches for food and
water may be realistic in some ways, they can prove unentertainingly boring and
repetitious in others. In THE IMMORTAL, only enough of this sort of thing is
present to maintain the believability of the gameworld.

 The game's own management of the characters it runs in the labyrinths is
something else worth commenting on. As I write, I've left my wizard standing
over a goblin he just killed. I know there's another one around the corner, busy
hacking away at an ally. Whoops! He's done. I see him rush over to the wall. He
carefully inches up on me from behind the wall, and when in full view, rushes
toward me in battle! Oh, no! I forgot to prepare a fireball! Oh well....

 This happens regularly in the game. While there are some instances in which
creatures seem to stand or sit obliviously until you get near them, others seem
fully intent on their own animated purposes. Again, this independence of
directed action provides you with a feeling that the world you've entered has a
life of its own. In the above example, if I'd gone over to save my ally from the
goblin, I'd have found him bloodied but amenable to a little conversation; or,
alternatively, if I'd attacked the goblin with a fireball and missed, there's a
chance I might've hit and killed my own ally. I don't know how much programming
work this degree of character AI requires (particularly when it's all animated
in real time), but I'll bet it's quite a lot.

 I like this game! Any negatives? Unfortunately, yes. In lieu of a save-game
file, the program gives you a special 13-digit code to write down when you've
successfully finished a level. Entering this code after startup lets you begin
at the next level of the game. All well and good; this technique has worked
before on cartridge games. However, the glitch here is that, for some reason,
the number parser doesn't always take in every digit or letter typed. This makes
accessing a "saved position" needlessly difficult, since sometimes you have to
go through the whole ritual a couple of times before it takes. (Or, alternately,
you have to type slowly and carefully, checking each digit as it's typed.)
Because, especially when starting a level, your wizard will go poof! more often
than not, this becomes a really intrusive problem until you've begun to master a
level.

 Then, too, given the two-thirds overhead view, movement is a little complex. To
make your wizard walk straight across a room, you have to keep the joystick on a
diagonal. (Make sure you have a joystick that handles diagonals easily.) This
can be especially frustrating when trying to move along a wall next to a door
you've just walked through: More often than not, you'll find yourself
unintentionally exiting the room you've just entered.

 In combat scenes, fortunately, your own attacks and defenses all require only
forward-and-back or side-to-side joystick movements, translated into the
diagonals onscreen. However, it's sometimes difficult to determine whether your
opponent is slashing you from the right or left, thus making it harder for you
to figure out the right defensive move to make. I guess these are just some of
the tradeoffs of this style of game presentation -- consider it a challenge to
your abilities to spatialize in the abstract.

 Finally, the text portions of the game are unavoidable, even though clicks on
the fire-button pushes them past more quickly than their default scroll rate.
This can become slightly annoying when playing the same level a number of times,
as once you've read a message, you don't necessarily want to have to read it
again the next time around.

 THE IMMORTAL comes on two copyable disks; it needs a minimum of 1Mb of RAM to
run. It is _not_ hard-drive installable, and only runs off of DF0: However, once
loaded, it is almost fully RAM-resident, with further disk accesses occurring
only to load new levels. The manual states that there is no support for
accelerated Amigas, which I take to mean the A3000 as well as the A2500. The
game runs on stock A1000s, A500s, and A2000s, however. It's controlled almost
entirely with a joystick, though the keyboard is used for inventory and
copy-protection purposes. Copy-protection consists of two consecutive manual
look-up routines, initiated after entering the code to begin at any level other
than the first (and/or after completing the first level). A picture has to be
found, after which a letter from a particular line has to be typed in: a minor
intrusion, and certainly more harmless than some copy-protection schemes we've
seen.

 Despite its shortcomings, THE IMMORTAL is sufficiently beautiful and original
to earn a high recommendation. It helps point the way for a new kind of arcade
adventure that brings a fundamentally different style of play to the classic
dungeon crawl.

 THE IMMORTAL is published and distributed by Electronic Arts.

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