THE USURPER: THE MINES OF QYNTARR

 Remember the thrill you felt the first time you played ZORK I? Well, you won't
find that repeated here. At this point in the development of all-text
adventures, a game really has to offer something new in the way of setting,
puzzles, or concept -- and I'm afraid that Sir-Tech's THE USURPER: THE MINES OF
QYNTARR (MOQ) just isn't up to snuff. This review is based on the IBM version of
the game.

 Your mission is to descend into (yet another) improbably huge cavern, collect
items, fight beasts, risk certain death, and manage your inventory. Somewhere
below is the object that will enable you to defeat the tyrant.

 Sorry, but we've seen all this before. When you go into a hut and the first
things you find are a saber and a lantern, you just know you're treading on
familiar ground. You will locate many items and many rooms in what is a very
large, but not particularly interesting, dungeon.

 The adventure is generally easy. When you enter a room filled with poisonous
gas, and later you find a gas mask nearby, it doesn't take an Einstein to figur
out what to do. Yet there are other puzzles for which the solution seems totally
random. For example, there is a subway from one part of the game to another, but
it's a one-way trip. I searched everywhere, did everything, examined everything
(twice), and finally gave up and called the Sir-Tech Hint Hotline. What they
told me to do bore absolutely no logical relation to transportation,
teleportation, or (most important) cogitation. Let me give you an example,
without giving anything away: If a game took you into a deep well whose ladder
back up was out of your grasp, would it make sense that the only way to return
to the surface would be to wear a hat? The solution to the subway puzzle is at
that level.

 The dungeon is chock full of items, over half of which will gain you points but
play no part whatsoever in solving puzzles. This not only made inventory
management a nightmare, it also became tiresome after a while. ("Oh no! Not
another giant ruby!")

 MOQ's "bigger is better" philosophy does not work. Most rooms just serve as a
passage from one place to another. Most items serve as "treasures" without
purpose, and aren't hard to obtain. The game has little wit, a fairly stiff
parser, and compares unfavorably in terms of difficulty and originality with
several of the user-written text adventures available in CompuServe's Gamers'
Forum file library.

 MOQ (written by Scott Thoman) comes with both IBM and Apple // series disks in
one box, and can be installed on hard disk. No other versions for other
computers are planned. In spite of the fact that the game is billed as "Book One
of the Mines of Qyntarr," and there is a listing for "Future USURPER Releases"
in the manual's Table of Contents, no future installments in this series are
currently planned. Frankly, I'm not surprised.

 THE USURPER: THE MINES OF QYNTARR is published and distributed by Sir-Tech
Software.

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