ULTIMA WORLDS OF ADVENTURE 2: MARTIAN DREAMS The Grand What If is alive and well and available for play at your local game store under the guise of MARTIAN DREAMS by Origin. Following the success of SAVAGE EMPIRE, the Avatar has been released once again from Britannia and is motoring around in the ULTIMA VI engine, tearing up the where and whens we thought we knew so well. (This review is based on the IBM-PC version.) This game is a trip! Quite a trip. In vivid and realistic detail -- yes, realistic -- the red sands of Mars, circa 1895, become the stomping grounds of the Avatar and a now bookishly reformed Dr. Spector. Other characters of the here and then are: Nikola Tesla, inventor of the AC induction motor; Sigmund Freud, dreamy father figure; Dr. Blood, pusher of oxygenized air; and dear little Nellie Bly, Pulitzer's prize feminist. After much reading and a hectic visit to Tesla's lab, you're whisked via timegate to the site of an 1893 World's Fair disaster, and the biggest hotshot you've ever seen, Lowell's Space Cannon. It is 1895 and you join a rescue party setting out to follow the first batch of Spam in a canister that boomed off to Mars in 1893. All of this action is preliminary to the game and occurs off-system in the booklets that come in the package, or appear in the opening (non-interactive) sequence. Once you've landed, you get to ransack the cargo hold and chat with your companions. When you have stocked your inventory and obtained some instructions, you're finally ready to step out onto the Martian surface to rescue the 1893 party. Before you can do that, you must pass a copy- protection exam, the only one in the game, by answering one question using one of the booklets as a reference. Painless and effective. Nearly everything you need during the game is found close to where it is used, but four items are critical and must be carried at all times: the sextant, the telescope, a tent, and a pocket watch. I mentioned realism. This game is realistic to the point of tedium in some instances. Until you manage to activate the power and then to melt the ice- cap that fills the canals, you spend much of the gametime walking...and Mars has a lot of ground to cover! Monsters are few and far between, and like any desert, the scenery gets monotonous. The object of the game is to rescue each member of the 1893 expedition, but to do this there are five major game segments to conquer. You must find the motherlode of oxium, get into Olympus Mons, turn on the power, melt the ice- cap, free the expedition members from the dreamworld, and conquer Rasputin. Yes, that is _the_ Rasputin, mad monk extraordinaire, a swift one with the firecracker. The group that you are about to rescue includes: Sarah Bernhardt, actress and makeup expert; Buffalo Bill Cody and Calamity Jane, rootin' tootin' shopkeepers; Andrew Carnegie, steel magnate and industrial genius; George Washington Carver, plantation expert; Marie Curie, hot stuff for a Victorian; Wyatt Earp, a rather horsey fellow, good with a gun; Thomas Edison, tinkerer and electronics wizard; Emma Goldman, devoted leftist, always willing to espouse revolution; William Randolph Hearst, yellow journalism's colorist, always willing to pay for a scoop; Nikolai Lenin, devoted distributer of the wealth of others; Percival Lowell, astronomer and cannon father; Georges Melies, sleight-handed photographer; Admiral Peary, explorer and iceman; Teddy Roosevelt, the man with the clues; Louis Comfort Tiffany, handy with lenses; Mark Twain, who can fathom the skills of a river pilot for you; and H.G. Wells, documentation specialist. There are others on Mars, but this is the crowd you must rescue. Each is critical to the ultimate solution, and conversations with them are frequent and informative. Unimpaired by the ULTIMA convention of honesty, you're free to rip off everyone in this game. No one even notices you prying open their luggage and taking their clothes, weapons, and supplies. This is the only unrealistic quirk in the game. Resting is cute. You must U)se the tent. This action results in the tent being unpacked and pitched. Then each character in your party scurries inside, and you get to select how long you want to rest. If any of your characters are due for a promotion, they dream it and the stats increase. Although there is no magic in MARTIAN DREAMS, the dream machines are pretty fantastic, and three of the five types of berries that grow have some wild psychedelic properties: Brown ones allow you to see your surroundings; purple ones allow you to control things from a distance; and green ones let you converse with apparently inanimate things. Blue berries are not good for you, but will help if you contract radiation sickness. Mapping is not required, but careful recording of coordinates is important. I also found it helpful to sketch out the cities and mark the locations of the characters, since each required several interactions during the game. The best weapons in the game are hidden in Argyre, which can not be entered until the game is almost complete, so the great weapons are nearly useless. Only the lead character should be allowed to have a shotgun, since all characters fire directly at a target, right through the party if necessary. Two pistols or a rifle seem to be the best armament for most of the game. The Elephant guns are potent, but the ammo is heavy. As in most of the recent releases from Origin, there are characteristic bugs present. Weird chunks of scenery keep popping up in the oddest places, supposedly due to the "tiled graphics" used. Certain perfectly logical actions can lead to needed items becoming unrecoverable. Don't lose or drop the plate from the camera, or it is gone for good. Don't take coal from the conveyor belt, or from the floor right next to the belt. Don't lose the tongs. Don't use the steel cannon balls on the large barge. Don't get too excited if your Avatar undergoes a sex-change; it's temporary. If you saw the movie "Robinson Crusoe on Mars," you've seen the world of MARTIAN DREAMS, right down to the chewable oxygen supply. If you played BAD BLOOD, you've seen the graphics of MARTIAN DREAMS. If you've seen the Voyager photographs, you will find the geography startlingly familiar. If you ever fell asleep in history class and conjured up an alternate reality for the dusty people and dates being discussed, you've dreamed a Martian Dream. One of the really neat aspects of this game is that you can go back and read the writings of the members of the 1893 expedition -- the real writings -- and you'll find all kinds of little things that will tickle you into thinking, "Oh sure...he heard that on Mars!" That is the magic of the Grand What If, and MARTIAN DREAMS captures that magic, completely. MARTIAN DREAMS is supplied on 5.25" disks with exchange forms for other formats. A full 640K RAM is required for gameplay and an additional 256K expanded memory is required for music. A hard disk is required. It supports 256-color VGA/MCGA, EGA; Roland, AdLib, and Sound Blaster soundboards. Because of the 640K requirements, I found it necessary to use a boot-disk floppy with just COMMAND.COM and a mouse driver. A mouse is recommended and the game will run on IBM PCs and 100% compatibles. 10 MHz or faster is recommended. ULTIMA WORLDS OF ADVENTURE 2: MARTIAN DREAMS is published and distributed by Origin.