Beyond the Wall of Stars A review by Bruce L. Giles CompuServe 72307,261 Copyright RIPC (c) 1993 Resource International Publishing Company Route 1, Box 168 Milford, TX 76670 System Requirements: Apple Macintosh with System 6.0.7 or later, 3 MB RAM, 8-bit color and color monitor. Equipment used for review: Apple Macintosh IIsi, 17 MB RAM, 8bit color monitor with 640 x 480 resolution, NEC CDR-74 CD-ROM drive, System 7.1. This CD-ROM bills itself as the first multimedia adventure story from R. A. Montgomery, author of the "Choose Your Own Adventure Series." It is subtitled "Quest One of the Taran Trilogy." "Beyond the Wall of Stars" is a science-fiction adventure story in which the player takes the role of one of the characters. It features full-screen, full color graphics, including both 3-D artwork and digitized photos. There is limited animation in many scenes, but no QuickTime videos. Sound is used throughout, primarily as endlessly repeating background musical loops. The adventure begins with a fairly time-consuming title screen, however, clicking the mouse or typing a key bypasses the title screen to take you directly to the table of contents. From the contents screen, you have several options. You can start the adventure at the beginning, or at several intermediate points. First-time players are directed toward the introduction, which explains the basic premise of the adventure. You are a member of a probe team from the planet Celadon, journeying to another planet called Tara. After signing on as a member of the team, you are given the descriptions and strengths of the other team members, along with their photos. Your first task is to select the team commander from four potential candidates. Once the commander has been selected, the adventure begins. As the story progresses, you are presented with a number of screens that develop the story line. For most of these, you simply sit, watch the animation, and read the text, all the while listening to the background music. Occasionally, one of the characters has a decision to make, and this brings up an "Option Control" screen, presenting two or more options that the character can take. It's your job to choose one of them. The option you select determines the direction the story takes next. With some of the options, none are particularly right or wrong, just different. The story can take vastly different turns depending on which option you select. Sometimes you select a choice that quickly turns out to be seriously wrong, and the adventure ends prematurely because of it. Fortunately, there is a button at the bottom of each screen that will take you back to the previous Option Control screen so that you may choose again. Unfortunately, you may have traveled down a path of several wrong choices before you discovered your mistake, but you can not travel back past the most recent option control screen. So, unless you have saved your position (placed a bookmark) at one of those previous screens, you may not be able to recover from your mistake without starting over. In some instances you may be able to back up one screen at a time, though this option is not always enabled. You may place a bookmark at any screen, giving it a unique name, and you may return to any of these bookmarks at any time. It's often a good idea to place a bookmark at an Option Control screen so that you can return to explore all the possibilities. In the first major section of the adventure, you explore a planet called Morgan Kara, which is the first stop on the way to Tara. Depending on the various choices made, it is possible to bypass most of this section of the story, but doing so may keep you from succeeding in a later section. Initially, most of the Option Control screens contain choices to be made by the commander you selected earlier. With some of the options, however, the commander is soon left behind while the story line follows the development of other team members. Along the way, you may encounter a magic jewel, which may prove useful later. Eventually, providing you have made the proper choices, you find your way to the Galaxy Gate. Here you are given a magic word for future reference. You are also provided with your first real challenge: you must solve the puzzle of the runes to progress further. Even this challenge is not particularly difficult though, and in fact, it's fairly easy to solve by clicking the mouse almost at random, without ever truly understanding the puzzle. In the second major section of the adventure, you're back on board ship, but there is a new problem. The crew is getting mutinous, and the commander is showing signs of breaking under the strain. Eventually you must assume command and attempt to guide the ship toward Tara. On your way, you stop by the planet Kandar for more adventures. Depending on the choices you make here, you may need that jewel or magic word, or you may not. Eventually, you leave Kandar and again proceed toward Tara, which is hidden behind the Great Wall of Stars. Next, you and your crew members split into several groups in an attempt to locate Tara. One of the crew members is "kidnapped" by a hostile force, and suddenly the adventure ends on this cliffhanger. You are presented with a screen proclaiming "To Be Continued..." and informed that the story continues in volume two of the Taran Trilogy, "Trouble on Tara" (available in early 1993, according to the screen). "Beyond The Wall of Stars" is an intriguing concept with a lot of promise, but it fails to deliver any real substance. I have refrained from calling it a game, because it really is not a game. There are no points to be scored, few puzzles to be solved, and while the adventure can end prematurely if you choose the wrong options at certain points, you never really win or lose. The options themselves are generally not challenges, but simply choices. You pick one or the other essentially at random, because you have few clues to guide your choice. The user interface is fairly non-standard, though in a program like this one, that's not necessarily a drawback. Very little typing is required. Most of your progress through the adventure is made by simply clicking the dog-ear at the bottom right corner of the current screen, which takes you to the next screen. There is also a button to take you back to the previous screen. This one does not always appear, however, so sometimes you can't backtrack. Additional buttons allow you to play a screen over, return to the contents page, and place a bookmark or return to another bookmark. Occasionally, you have to click the mouse on some object on the screen. There are occasional uses of a crude form of hypertext. If a word on the screen has a different colored background from the rest of the text, you can click on it. Doing so brings up an additional window with further explanation. Most of the ones I tried didn't seem to be particularly helpful or useful. The program sometimes has a problem recognizing your mouse clicks. Sometimes, but not always, this seemed to be caused by the animation that was occurring at the time. Occasionally I had to click repeatedly on a dog-ear before I could proceed to the next screen, even when there was no animation apparent. Another problem is knowing exactly when to click. Sometimes the text appears first, sometimes the animation appears first, and if you click too soon, you may proceed to the next screen before the current screen has finished, thereby missing out on part of the story. It's not always clear when the animation has ended either, so sometimes you're staring at a static screen for several extra seconds, waiting to see if something else is going to happen. Initially, the graphics and the music are impressive, but these soon grow tiring. I found myself frustrated at times when I had to wait for the crude animation to complete before the text appeared. The CD-ROM disc is frequently accessed, and this also causes a number of pauses in the action. There is a fairly large selection of apparently original music, but much of it is in the form of phrases only a few bars long which repeat over and over through a series of several screens. Quitting the adventure can uncover a nasty surprise. You can quit either by pressing the Quit button on the contents page, or by typing command-Q (although the latter is not documented). Either way, the adventure quits immediately, without first asking you if you want to save your position. On the positive side, I experienced no crashes at all during my testing, and found no incompatibilities with any of my numerous system extensions. The documentation claims that the program works best with System 6.0.7, but I found no problems using System 7.1. The story line was confusing in a number of places. Most of the characteristics of the various crew members that were given at the start appear to be useless information that has little bearing on how the adventure is played. The various sub-plots don't always fit well with the basic story or even with each other, and too often, you find yourself wondering what various events and people have to do with the rest of the story. There were times when characters simply appeared without any introduction or explanation. I eventually figured out that they were introduced in other "paths" of the story, but if your particular adventure didn't proceed along that particular path, you might never realize what's happening. Some of the plot lines appear to go nowhere, though they too may be further developed along other paths through the adventure. For example, there were several references to the mysterious death of the initial commander, and it was implied that this would be investigated further, though I never found a path through the adventure where that happened. Other plot lines seem destined for further development in one of the other two volumes in this trilogy. Sometimes there seemed to be wild jumps, as if major portions of the story were just left out. In one screen, I was on Kandar, waiting for repairs to be made on my ship. Suddenly, in the next screen, the ship was back in space again, with no explanation of how it happened. My overall impression of the story is that it was really intended for a teenage audience. The prose tends toward a comic-book style of writing at times, with pseudo-scientific details thrown in, not because they belonged there, but because they made the story sound more "high-tech." One screen discusses wormholes in space, while in another, a constellation of a dragon magically turns into a small "real" dragon a few inches high. In photos of the antagonists on Morgan Kara, they appear to be carrying Super Soaker water guns or something similar, although we are supposed to believe these are futuristic weapons. Most of the characters appear to be in their late teens or early twenties. The cover text for the disc states that it will "engage and entertain children aged 10 to adults." Lack of attention to detail is evident in a number of areas. I started my adventure by choosing a female commander. At first she was referred to by name, and her picture appeared frequently. After I progressed through the Galaxy Gate, however, the commander suddenly became male, and was no longer pictured or referred to by name. Shortly thereafter, "he" was killed off. Shortly after that, my female commander was pictured in another screen, though there was no reference to her in the text. The digitized photographs were frequently cropped closely around the characters, using something like the lasso tool available in many graphics programs, and then placed on a drawn and shaded background. Usually, however, a different colored background "fringe" a pixel or two wide was included around the edge of the photos, which detracted from the overall effect. There were a few spelling problems as well. The planet "Celadon" is sometimes spelled "Celedon". One of the characters, "Karmah", is sometimes spelled "Karma." These are minor quibbles perhaps, but they indicate the overall problems with detail. Although "Beyond the Wall of Stars" is initially both visually and aurally stimulating, the glitter quickly fades. Not a true game, it seems to be aimed primarily at a teenage audience, and there is probably not enough substance or challenge to satisfy an adult adventure game fan. --------------------------------------------------- Published by Creative Multimedia Corporation, 514 NW 11th Avenue, Suite 203, Portland, OR 97209. Telephone: (503) 241-4351. Fax: (503) 241-4370 Retail price: $49.99