WEIRD DREAMS

 Herman Serrano, the graphic artist who designed this game, has one of the most
original imaginations I've seen in a while. He'd originally planned many of the
screens in WEIRD DREAMS as separate paintings, but subsequently decided to
integrate them into the game. Unfortunately, although the artwork is stunningly
attractive, the game itself is deficient in several aspects. (This review is
based on the Amiga version; Atari ST version notes follow.)

 The premise of WEIRD DREAMS is rather complicated; in fact, there's a 64-page
novella included in the package that serves not only as copy-protection, but as
background for the beginning of the game. It seems that there's a sort of fallen
archangel (posing as a woman named Emily at your workplace) who's given you some
pills for your headaches; the pills, however, are designed to manipulate your
mind to entertain "Emily," who's terribly bored with her millennial existence.

 After the opening credits, you find yourself on an operating table, about to
drop off into your dream world, staring up at a group of surgeons. You'll return
to the "operating table screen" time and again when you "die" in your dreams.
There's a heart monitor line and beep across the bottom of the screen that goes
flatline when you first awake from the dream; then it starts up again. After
you've died five times in dreamland, you'll die for real on the table (in other
words, you have to start the whole game over again).

 Dreamland consists of a series of utterly and delightfully bizarre visual
puzzles. The first one places you (wearing your polka-dot pajamas) inside a
giant cotton candy maker. You're supposed to wait until enough cotton candy has
stuck to your pajamas, and then grab the stick as it comes rotating slowly down
into the maker. Of course, if you don't time things right, you're knocked on the
head and the scene ends.

 If you succeed in the first sequence, you're passed on to the next one, which
involves coping with a giant bee at a circus; he's carrying some sort of ball,
and he seems interested in you for some reason....

 Once you've mastered the first two sequences, you end up in a room full of
mirrors that you can pass through to select the sequences you want to try next.
Heading straight into the screen (i.e., the mirror directly in front of you)
takes you back to the cotton candy machine. Heading left puts you in a desert
land, where peculiarly penile creatures come leaping at you as fish sail
leisurely across the sky. Heading right puts you in an English country garden,
where roses with powerful, dangerous jaws leap out at you as you approach them.

 And this is all just the beginning. The game is chock full of equally unusual
scenes, each one of which is essentially an arcade puzzle. Some include time
limits, others do not. The puzzles are not unlike those found in good, hard
adventure games, but in most cases, the challenge in WEIRD DREAMS involves quick
movements as well as imaginative thinking.

 That's the one factor in WEIRD DREAMS that's frustrating; the animation is
beautiful and complex, but the relation between what you do with the joystick
and what happens onscreen is often imprecise. At some points, it's virtually
impossible to time your actions so that they'll prove effective. The result is
that you either pick one type of move as your gateway to success, and merely
hold the joystick button combinations down to repeat that move until you've
finished a scene, or you attempt to time your moves and simply hope for the
best. In some ways, game control is like that of DRAGON'S LAIR or SPACE ACE;
you're not so much controlling the onscreen character directly as signalling him
to initiate a particular gesture. If you like that sort of design, you may be
able to tolerate the frustration.

 One of the things that makes WEIRD DREAMS more like an adventure than an arcade
game is that completion of one puzzle often leaves you with something useful for
solving the next one. In other words, you have two goals in each scene: One is
to survive whatever attack is likely to take place; the other is to take
something with you from one scene to the next (true only in certain sequences).
Also, there are essentially four different dreamscapes, each with four or five
scenes, so a sense of progress through the gameworld is tangible. And each of
the four dreamscapes contains visual echoes of elements found within the others.

 WEIRD DREAMS is certainly a showpiece in terms of graphics and sound; if there
were a cheat mode available, it'd be worth it to buy the game just to enjoy the
series of animated, soundtracked artworks. Not only are the scenes completely
original and vividly imagined, but they're linked to each other in a kind of
symbolic universe that clearly represents the artist's own understanding of
psychoanalytic dream interpretation. In other words, it's not hard to deal with
each scene as a graphical metamorphosis of a real-life problem into its
symbolic, psychosexual analog. Ultimately, WEIRD DREAMS is really more of a
visual poem than a series of puzzles.

 If you can't solve a puzzle on your own, a hint book is included with the game.
For each hint you read, you are "charged" a psychoanalyst's fee. The more hints
you need, the higher the fee, and your psychoanalytic "evaluation" at the end of
the game is based on the amount of "therapy" you've required. I'd recommend
avoiding the hint book wherever possible, although even with its use, there are
still lots of elements in each puzzle to figure out; the hints are no guarantee
of automatic completion of a scene, by any means.

 WEIRD DREAMS comes on one copy-protected disk, and requires 512K of RAM and a
joystick to play. It will run on A1000s, A500s, and A2000s. Along with the
on-disk copy-protection, you're presented with a document-based copy protection
scheme at game startup.

 My thoughts about this game are divided: Its difficulty (due mainly to the
imprecise joystick control) will frustrate many. Its graphics and soundtrack
will impress and delight anyone who appreciates computer artistry in and of
itself. Its theme and imagery are each one-of-a-kind, and worth experiencing for
that reason alone. Just hope your _own_ dreams don't turn a little weird as a
result of your exposure to this game!

 ATARI ST VERSION NOTES

 Microplay's WEIRD DREAMS for the Atari ST is more or less identical to the
Amiga version described above. As FT noted, there are inconsistencies between
joystick actions and onscreen results; I didn't find this any more frustrating
than usual, and I'm inclined to think the oddball timing was deliberate. After
all, the eighteen screens depict phantasms in a nightmare, so how well can we
expect a joystick to work?

 The WEIRD DREAMS package comes with two copy-protected disks, a short story
that sets the stage for your plunge into the mental abyss, ST technical
supplement, and the Player's Therapy Guide (a hint book, to you and me). The
game is controlled via either joystick or keyboard, and will run on any ST with
512K and a color monitor.

 WEIRD DREAMS is an excellent showpiece for the ST's graphic and animation
capabilities, which appear top-notch throughout. The only things missing are
Salvador Dali's gooey alarm clocks, and the lawnmower joke is at least equal to
the chain-link fence joke in SKATE OR DIE. Besides, not even TWIN PEAKS has a
belching soccer ball...not yet, anyway. I say go for it.

 WEIRD DREAMS is published by Microplay and distributed by MicroProse.

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