Simon the Sorcerer

STORY / GAMEPLAY
Simon, an apprentice sorcerer, receives a letter from his friend Calypso, the Grand High Wizard of Fleur Deli. Calypso chooses Simon among hundreds of others to rescue him from the hands of an evil wizard called Sordid! The gameplay on this adventure game is quite simplistic and follows the classic recipe of most adventures games of its time. The screen is split into the main story (visuals) window at the top and a commands list at the bottom. All you have to do is to just point and click your mouse on the top window to move Simon towards any possible direction and you can click on any of the available commands (presented as icons) of the list below to activate and / or interact with objects and other characters. One of the special features in Simon The Sorcerer is the self-mapping so as not to waste valuable time, which is done with pencil lead and elbow grease to draw in rough paper! It may sound a quite strange addition but, back in the early 90s, not all adventure games included mapping. This way you can easily access certain locations you already visited! You will have to solve several puzzles and deal with trolls and dragons! Your quest is challenging but you must stick to your goal in becoming a great sorcerer and finally saving the master! The only negative thing I found is that the game has too much, time consuming, disk swapping and loading as it comes in 9 disks(!) in all 16bit home versions! But if you own an Amiga, an Archimedes or a DOS PC with a HDD, the game could be easily installed on the hard disk.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
The Amiga AGA has superb visuals that are similar to the DOS and Acorn counterparts.. The locations are some of the most visually attractive we've ever seen on the home computers. All screens are stylish in such a way that they give the feel of a fairy-tale book! Comparably, the AGA version has 256 colors on-screen (much like the Acorn Archimedes and DOS) while the OCS version has 32 colors only. The sound on the AGA version is exactly the same as the OCS with a nice (but recurrent) tune throughout the game and several small tunes depending on what you encounter at any moment. Note that the Amiga CD32 (console) version supports sampled speech (via its CD-Audio capabilities), so it has an option to switch between text and speech. If you happen to own an Amiga 1200 with an external CD ROM, you may also enjoy this unique sound feature!