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 Acorn Archimedes version has great graphics with some of the most visually attractive locations we've ever seen on a home computer. All screens are so stylish that provide the feel of a real fairy-tale story! Comparably, the Archimedes visuals have 256 colors on-screen (much like the Amiga AGA and DOS VGA versions) while the Amiga OCS version uses 32 colors only (but still looks impressive). The sprites are nicely animated and beautifully designed as well. The sound on the Acorn's 16bit systems is great too, with a nice (but recurrent) tune throughout the game and several small tunes depending on what you encounter at any moment. There are no sound effects though but that's perfectly OK and cannot ruin this fantastic game's experience.