COUNTDOWN

 The screen shows two men sitting around a desk, talking and looking at some
paper. Suddenly one man looks up with a surprised expression on his face. The
scene changes to display a darkened figure standing at the door, holding a
pistol. Three distinct shots: "pop pop pop!" The scene switches back to the
surprised man. He grimaces, hands clutching at his chest where three fresh
bullet wounds are clearly visible. He falls back in his chair. Now a closeup
shows his face, and he is yelling out his last words: "Get Scorpio!" A scene
from a mystery movie? No! This is one of several digitized and animated
"flashback" sequences with Realsound speech that you'll see and hear on your
computer screen when you play COUNTDOWN, the new adventure game from Access
Software. (This review is based on the IBM-PC version.)

 Fresh from the success of MEAN STREETS, Access Software continues to employ its
technology of integrating digitized, animated photographic images, and hi-res
computer graphics in the production of COUNTDOWN, a spy adventure game. While
the implementation of this technology is indeed dazzling, the adventure gamer
who's looking for a meaty adventure with juicy puzzles may well be disappointed.

 In this game, you are CIA agent Mason Powers. Your section chief, Frank McBain,
was murdered and you are the prime suspect, as you were the last person to see
him alive. When the game begins, you find yourself locked up in a prison
hospital, suffering from amnesia. Your first goal is to gather enough
information and items to escape from the hospital. As you play, your memory
gradually returns in the form of flashback sequences like the one described
above. As you gather more clues and information, you will soon discover a
terrorist group that is planning a major strike against the United States. As
heroes usually find themselves in such situations, it is up to you to unearth
the plans, foil the strike and get the girl at the end. Well, perhaps two out of
three....

 The story is one of the highlights in COUNTDOWN. There are enough twists and
turns to keep players intrigued: You'll want to keep playing just to see more of
the story unfold. The surprise ending, which also includes the longest flashback
sequence in the game, provides a strong and satisfying finish to an otherwise
rather easy and short game.

 COUNTDOWN employs a parserless interface, which seems to be gaining a lot of
popularity these days. Anyone who has played FUTURE WARS or the MANHUNTER series
should feel right at home here. Nine verbs control all the actions available,
and one of them is not needed to solve the game. A unique feature is the way the
game handles interaction with non-playing characters (NPCs). When you TALK to
them, you decide what approach to take. You can be HELPful or PLEASANT, or you
can try to BLUFF or HASSLE, or any combination of the above. You can also OFFER
them bribes, or ASK ABOUT things from a list of possibilities. The dialogs are
predetermined and based solely on the approach combinations you select. Some of
the NPCs require you to happen upon a particular approach sequence before
they'll reveal anything useful.

 Except for the first part of the game, in which you try to escape from the
prison hospital (known as the Sanctuary), the game is very linear. The puzzles
primarily involve searching various locations and finding useful items, or
talking to NPCs to elicit information. By and large, the puzzles are obvious and
simple to solve. The difficulty lies in seeing the objects for what they are.
Keys and other small objects either show up as tiny pixels, or they are drawn
with such dark shades of colors that discerning them sometimes becomes a bigger
challenge than actually solving the puzzles. It is really ironic that this
should be a problem with this game, considering the great job the programmers
did with the digitized photo images. There is no arcade action type of puzzle,
and mapping is generally not necessary. There is a small catacomb maze in which
mapping can help locate the exit a bit more easily. While the game may present a
challenge to a beginning player for a few days, the seasoned adventurer should
be able to breeze through it in a couple of evenings.

 Beware that this game supports _only_ VGA/MCGA 256-color graphics; there is no
support for EGA or CGA. Aside from the flashbacks described earlier, digitized
and animated photo portraits of various characters can be seen when they are
TALKed to. The graphics for the various rooms and locations are drawn pictures
that try to reflect some degree of realism. They are not the cartoonish
illustrations found in games by Sierra, Accolade, and Lucasfilm. Whether they
are superior is strictly a matter of taste. Personally, with a 256-color
palette, I think the artists could have done better. While the digitized speech
is amazingly clear and understandable and does not require additional hardware,
it is mainly used during the flashbacks. There is a brief musical theme in the
opening screen, and a few other sound effects are scattered around the game, but
nothing spectacular. Soundblaster is supported, and if your machine is faster
than 6MHz, you can also use AdLib and Covox Sound Master. The instructions
specify that the Realsound digitized speech will only play on machines faster
than 6MHz.

 The game comes in eight 5-1/4" low-density floppies. There is a coupon that
lets you send for the 3-1/2" format for $7.50. There is no copy protection. In
order to fully experience the audio and visual breakthroughs in this game, you
should have an IBM-PC compatible or a Tandy running at 8MHz or better, a VGA
card (obviously), and a hard disk. Anything less will be too slow. The game also
requires quite a bit of free RAM. When I ran the game with 548K of free memory
(using both my mouse and an AdLib card), it crashed during one of the flashback
sequences. I finally had to boot from a "clean" floppy to play the game. The
game supports a mouse or a joystick; I found that using the mouse was much more
comfortable than either the joystick or the keyboard.

 COUNTDOWN is a rather short game with easy puzzles. The story and the special
effects are clearly the main attractions, and they're both very well done. Even
though, as an adventure, it was too simple for my taste, I did enjoy the game.
If Access Software continues to improve on its game design and puzzle
construction, as well as its proven digitizing wizardry, its next game may very
well turn out to be a major blockbuster.

 COUNTDOWN is published and distributed by Access Software.

*****DOWNLOADED FROM P-80 SYSTEMS (304) 744-2253