[{"TitleName":"Scott Adams Scoops","Publisher":"U.S. Gold Ltd","Author":"","YearOfRelease":"1987","ZxDbId":"0011347","Reviews":[{"Issue":{"Name":"Sinclair User Issue 62, May 1987","Price":"£1","ReleaseDate":"1987-04-18","Editor":"David Kelly","TotalPages":116,"HasCoverTape":false,"FlannelPanel":"Editor: David Kelly\r\nDeputy Editor: Graham Taylor\r\nStaff Writer: Jim Douglas\r\nArt Editor: Gareth Jones\r\nAdventure Help: Gordo Greatbelly\r\nZapchat: Jon Riglar\r\nHelpline: Andrew Hewson\r\nContributors: Richard Price, Andy Moss, Gary Rook\r\nHardware Correspondent: Rupert Goodwins\r\nAdvertisement Manager: Louise Fanthorpe\r\nDeputy Advertisement Manager: Mike Corr\r\nProduction Assistant: Alison Morton\r\nAdvertisement Secretary: Linda Everest\r\nSubscriptions Manager: Carl Dunne\r\nPublisher: Terry Pratt\r\n\r\nTelephone [redacted]\r\n\r\nSinclair User is published monthly by EMAP Business & Computer Publications\r\n\r\nCover Illustration: John Higgins\r\n\r\nTypeset by PRS Ltd, [redacted]\r\nPrinted by Nene River Press, [redacted]\r\nDistributed by EMAP Publications Ltd.\r\n\r\n©Copyright 1987 Sinclair User ISSN No 0262-5458\r\n\r\nABC 90,215 July-Dec 1985"},"MainText":"Label: US Gold\r\nPrice: £9.95\r\nMemory: 48K/128K\r\nReviewer: Gary Rook\r\n\r\nScott Adams was a legend in his own Californian jacuzzi. He was one of the first programmers in the '70s to transport text-only adventures from massive, powerful, mainframe computers on to paltry 16K micros such as the Commodore Vic-20.\r\n\r\nI say was because, although many followers began to regard him as a demi-god and follow in his footsteps, he never progressed very far from his simple text style and verb/noun player input.\r\n\r\nNow US Gold has packaged up four of his adventures on one tape, Scott Adams Scoops.\r\n\r\nThree of the games on the compilation - Pirate Adventure, Voodoo Castle and Strange Oddyssey - originally appeared on the early Commodore machine, the fourth, Buckaroo Banzai, is a recent film tie-in.\r\n\r\nPirate Adventure was the first adventure he wrote. You kick off in your classy London pad where you collect everything you'll need to survive on Treasure Island. But where is the island and how do you get to it?\r\n\r\nVoodoo Castle, the next in line, is a spooky little number set in a Transylvanian penthouse where Drac's cousin's had a curse put on him by his enemies. He's trapped in his coffin and you have to crawl around the castle, again using verb/noun input. The game's described as moderately difficult which means that you spend hours tramping around the first five locations.\r\n\r\nIn Strange Odyssey Adams turns his attention to the mysteries of space. Your ship's crash-landed on a strange planetoid. It's easily the weakest of the compilation Remember to put on your space suit before you press the red button to leave the spaceship... yawn.\r\n\r\nAnd finally, there's Buckaroo Banzai, a moderately difficult game taken from a very bad movie. It's set in a futuristic city with laser beams and ultra- weird pop groups. Adams seems to have jettisoned a great deal of film plot and gone for his usual mixture of problems.\r\n\r\nWhat's the verdict? There's no question that adventure game programming has moved on. leaving Scott behind.\r\n\r\nFor all that, we're talking real history of adventure gaming here, and Scott Adams Scoops is a great value package.\r\n\r\nNone of the text-only programs, though, match the style and technical panache of the Delta 4s or Magnetic Scrolls of this sophisticated software world.","ReviewerComments":[],"OverallSummary":"Simple text-only adventures from the pen of a master. It's a slice of history in a good value-for-money collection.","Page":"87","Denied":false,"Award":"Not Awarded","Reviewers":[{"Name":"Gary Rook","Score":"3","ScoreSuffix":"/5"}],"ScreenshotText":[],"BlurbText":[],"TranscriptBy":"Chris Bourne","ReviewScores":[{"Header":"Overall","Score":"3/5","Text":""}],"CompilationReviewScores":[]},{"Issue":{"Name":"C&VG (Computer & Video Games) Issue 67, May 1987","Price":"£1","ReleaseDate":"1987-04-16","Editor":"Tim Metcalfe","TotalPages":116,"HasCoverTape":false,"FlannelPanel":"Editor: Tim Metcalfe\r\nDeputy Editor: Paul Boughton\r\nEditorial Assistant: Lesly Walker\r\nSub-Editor: Seamus St. John\r\nDesign: Craig Kennedy\r\nAdventure Writers: Keith Campbell, Steve Donoghue, Matthew Woodley\r\nAmerican Correspondent: Marshall M. Rosenthal\r\nArcades: Clare Edgeley\r\nSoftware Consultant: Tony Takoushi\r\nPublicity: Clive Pembridge\r\nAdvertisement Manager: Garry Williams\r\nAdvertisement Executive: Katherine Lee\r\nAd Production: Debbie Pearson\r\nPublisher: Rita Lewis\r\nCover: Craig Kennedy\r\n\r\nEditorial and Advertisement Offices: [redacted]\r\n\r\nJuly-December 106,571"},"MainText":"SUPPLIER: US Gold\r\nMACHINE: Spectrum; Amstrad; C-64; C-16; BBC/Electron; Atari (8-bit)\r\nPRICE: £9.99\r\n\r\nPIRATE ADVENTURE\r\n\r\nWritten jointly by Scott and his wife Alexis. this game starts off in your London flat, from where you have to travel to Pirate's Island. Here you have build a boat, but in order to sail to the nearby Treasure Island to collect your treasures, you first have to find and win over the Pirate! One of the easier of Scott's adventures.\r\n\r\nVOODOO CASTLE\r\n\r\nThis game was written solely by Alexis. Count Cristo is lying dead in his coffin, and only by performing a strange ritual around it can you restore him to life. First you must discover the ritual and then find the ingredients necessary, before the final climax around the coffin.\r\n\r\nSTRANGE ODYSSEY\r\n\r\nThis is a science fiction adventure. Your space craft is crippled, and investigation of its surroundings leads you to the discovery of a strange alien teleport device. Discovering how it works is part of the fun - you never quite know at what strange place you might be deposited next, from an alien zoo to a methane snowstorm.\r\n\r\nCollecting alien treasures, and repairing your ship are the main aims of this game. Oh, by the way - beware the Rigellian Dia-ice hound!\r\n\r\nBUCKAROO BANZAI\r\n\r\nThis was not one of the original 14 adventures; it was a one-off, co-written with Phillip Case, and was based on the film of the same name, which was shown in the USA in 184, but never saw the screen in the UK. This is the first UK release of the game on any format.\r\n\r\nBuckaroo Banzai has a vehicle which will travel through solid matter - just as well for it will sure come in useful in finding the nuclear device invading aliens planted.\r\n\r\nMy least favourite of all Scott's games.","ReviewerComments":[],"OverallSummary":"","Page":"67","Denied":false,"Award":"Not Awarded","Reviewers":[],"ScreenshotText":[],"BlurbText":[],"TranscriptBy":"Chris Bourne","ReviewScores":null,"CompilationReviewScores":[{"Header":"Vocabulary (Pirate Adventure)","Score":"6/10","Text":"Pirate Adventure"},{"Header":"Atmosphere (Pirate Adventure)","Score":"8/10","Text":"Pirate Adventure"},{"Header":"Personal (Pirate Adventure)","Score":"8/10","Text":"Pirate Adventure"},{"Header":"Value (Pirate Adventure)","Score":"10/10","Text":"Pirate Adventure"},{"Header":"Vocabulary (Voodoo Castle)","Score":"6/10","Text":"Voodoo Castle"},{"Header":"Atmosphere (Voodoo Castle)","Score":"6/10","Text":"Voodoo Castle"},{"Header":"Personal (Voodoo Castle)","Score":"4/10","Text":"Voodoo Castle"},{"Header":"Value (Voodoo Castle)","Score":"10/10","Text":"Voodoo Castle"},{"Header":"Vocabulary (Strange Odyssey)","Score":"7/10","Text":"Strange Odyssey"},{"Header":"Atmosphere (Strange Odyssey)","Score":"7/10","Text":"Strange Odyssey"},{"Header":"Personal (Strange Odyssey)","Score":"6/10","Text":"Strange Odyssey"},{"Header":"Value (Strange Odyssey)","Score":"10/10","Text":"Strange Odyssey"},{"Header":"Vocabulary (Buckaroo Banzai)","Score":"6/10","Text":"Buckaroo Banzai"},{"Header":"Atmosphere (Buckaroo Banzai)","Score":"4/10","Text":"Buckaroo Banzai"},{"Header":"Personal (Buckaroo Banzai)","Score":"3/10","Text":"Buckaroo Banzai"},{"Header":"Value (Buckaroo Banzai)","Score":"10/10","Text":"Buckaroo Banzai"}]},{"Issue":{"Name":"ZX Computing Issue 38, Jun 1987","Price":"£1.5","ReleaseDate":"1987-05-21","Editor":"Bryan Ralph","TotalPages":84,"HasCoverTape":false,"FlannelPanel":""},"MainText":"Master Games\r\n£9.99\r\n\r\nFunnily enough, only one of the games on this compilation is written solely by Scott Adams. One is written with a chap called Phillip Case, another is co-written with his wife Alexis, while the fourth is written entirely by her. Still, \"Scott-And-Alexis-Adams-with-Phillip-Case Scoops\" is a somewhat less engaging title, I guess. The important thing is, all the games here are in that distinctive Scott Adams style we're come to know and hate.\r\n\r\nSome of you may never have played a Scott Adams game, in which case consider yourself lucky. Way back in the mists of computing time (i.e. during the late seventies) he was one of the first people to release an adventure for a home computer (a TRS80, or something similar). For this computer's extremely limited capabilities, what he produced was remarkably good, so it sold well. Time moved on, better computers with greater memory arrived, the market changed - but Adams did not. He kept on churning out games which fitted into 8K, converting them for the new computers as they arrived. His name being a venerable one, people bought his adventures, even though he was a dinosaur who should have evolved or become extinct. Critics gave him good reviews out of respect for what he once was, though. If written by anyone else the games would have been ignored. Their only redeeming factor was the quality of his puzzles - fiendish and ingenious. Unfortunately, the parser was always very limited, the text brief to the point of ridicule, the responses few and sloppy.\r\n\r\nHe would probably never have succeeded in the Spectrum market, except that his first games released on the Speccy were enticing licensed names - The Hulk and Spiderman - and that they were accompanied by some stunning graphics, at the time the best the Spectrum had witnessed.\r\n\r\nBut this US Gold compilation does not consist of those more attractive Adams productions. It contains four TEXT-ONLY adventures, previously unreleased on the spectrum (as far as I know). Three of these were originally written over five years ago; the fourth is based on a film no-one in this country has heard of. Hardly a tantalizing package, is it?\r\n\r\nThe games are Pirate Adventure, a beginner's game with self explanatory theme; Voodoo Castle, a supernatural quest to save a Count's life; Strange Odyssey, a space adventure which is now unplayably cliched, though it would have been quite good when written; and Buckaroo Banzai. The last really is an oddity. The film is a very weird, apparently incomprehensible science fiction fantasy which completely flopped on its initial American release (around two or three years ago) and has never been seen here, though it has since developed a cult following in the States. Even stranger is the game, which is in the typical curt Adams' style, and is completely meaningless and pointless if you haven't seen the film. Which, of course, you cannot have done. I managed to find out a little about Buckaroo from a cinema magazine I read, but US Gold's utterly worthless instructions tell you just this \"Only by unravelling the many puzzles set by Scott Adams do you stand any chance of completing this futuristic adventure.\" (What John Cleese would call a bleedingly obvious statement. How else do you complete an adventure? By spreading a cheese sandwich over the keyboard?) \"Set in the world of pop groups and science fiction.\" Very informative.\r\n\r\nOn the Spectrum, Scott Adams without graphics is like a radio version of a Charlie Chaplin silent film. The text is no compensation. Here is an example of Voodoo Castle at its most descriptive: \"I am in a room in the castle. Visible items: A big kettle.\"\r\n\r\nThe vocabulary does not even include WEAR or I (though the imbecillcally inept instructions claim that it does).\r\n\r\nHaving read all this, you may be wondering why the game is not getting the lowest possible ZX rating (a 'Groan'). Well, considering there are four games on a £10 tape, they work out as budget titles - £2.50 each. As such they are not entirely bad. The puzzles are fun to crack, and the lack of distracting features (like text, graphics, a decent parser or a noticeable number of locations) tends to concentrate the mind. So for some good problem solving - I realize there are people who like Scott Adams style of games even if don't understand why - this might be worth buying. But anyone else - steer clear. This is adventuring at its worst.","ReviewerComments":[],"OverallSummary":"","Page":"63,64","Denied":false,"Award":"Glob Minor","Reviewers":[{"Name":"Peter Sweasy","Score":"","ScoreSuffix":"Grim"}],"ScreenshotText":[],"BlurbText":[],"TranscriptBy":"Chris Bourne","ReviewScores":[{"Header":"Overall","Score":"Grim","Text":""}],"CompilationReviewScores":[]}]}]