Subject: REVIEW: The Labyrinth of Time
From: [email-masked] (Jonas Petersson)
Date: 21 Feb 1994 01:04:21 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

PRODUCT NAME

	The Labyrinth of Time

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

	A raytraced CD-ROM adventure game where you are selected to save
the world from the legendary King Minos.

AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION

	Name:		Electronic Arts
	Address:	P.O. Box 7578
			San Mateo, CA 94403-7578, USA

	Telephone:	(415) 572-2787

	Created by:	Bradley W. Schenck & Michal Todorovic
			Terra Nova Development
			Ventura, California

LIST PRICE

	I live in Sweden and I paid approximately $50 (US).  I do not know
the list price of the product.

SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

	HARDWARE

		CD32, CDTV, or an Amiga with a CD-ROM drive. 

		1.5 MB RAM (including 1 MB Chip RAM) required for an
		Amiga with a CD-ROM drive.

		(The documentation claims 512K of Fast RAM is required, but
		the CD32 has none that I know of, so I think that is slightly
		misleading.)

		PC version available and Mac version in testing.

	SOFTWARE

		For the CDTV or CD32:  none.

		For an Amiga with CD-ROM drive:  a CD-ROM filesystem.

COPY PROTECTION

	None.  (Unless you count the "thin, circular, plastic dongle" on
which the program is stored... but you'd need at least 512 floppies to make
a copy so...! ;-))

	Hard drive installation might be possible, but is certainly not
needed, nor recommended. ;-)

	Saved games can be stored in non volatile RAM ("Bookmark"), to
a personal RAM-card, or to disk. (See below.)

MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

	Amiga CD32. 
	Spare A3000 "pregnant" mouse.

INSTALLATION

	CD32 and CDTV:
	Put the disc in the CD-ROM drive, and the game starts loading.

	Amiga with CD-ROM drive:
        Open the disk icon labeled "lab" and then double click the
	"THE_LABYRINTH" icon.

INTRODUCTION

	I read about someone's being very excited about a prerelease of
Labyrinth being shown at WOC Toronto (I think), so I ordered it at the same
time as my CD32.  I was told it would hardly show up before Christmas.  But
it did, and soon I realised that I wouldn't be bored for a long time....

SUMMARY OF THE GAME

	You are kidnapped in the subway on your way to work.  The
constructor of the original labyrinth (from Greek mythology) tells you that
he has been revived by King Minos and forced to create a new labyrinth.
This one extends through time and space and will let King Minos conquer the
world.  He now asks you to try to find the thing that holds this new
labyrinth together and destroy it.  He is not able to tell you any more....

GAME CONTROLS

	It is very much possible to play the game using the CD32 joypad,
using what I call a "cheat button" which moves the pointer between existing
"hot spots" on screen.  But to me, this feels a bit odd, so a mouse is
strongly recommended.  I had a spare mouse (since I bought GfxBase's Amiga X
and got the Boing! mouse for free), so I've used it all the time.  According
to the documentation, there are also keyboard shortcuts for everything (and
more), but I have not tried this.

	The screen is normally split in two parts.  The top 80% shows a
(beautifully raytraced) picture of your location, and the lower part is
a row of nine icons.  The three to the right let you turn left and right
and walk forward.  There is an icon which lets you examine (zoom) objects
that you select from the picture (sometimes recursively), and four more for
moving, opening, closing, and picking up selected objects.  The last icon
lets you operate your currently selected inventory item (see below).

	Clicking your right mouse button swaps the icon row for another that
affects your inventory.  This is also where you save/load games.  You can
examine one object at a time visually or directly operate it on your
surroundings.  The object you see when you exit will be accessible from the
normal menu.

GAMEPLAY

	Walking around the first time is amazing:  the first hour or so, I
just kept zooming on everything that I could find!  Every single frame of
animations, such as opening a door, seems to be individually raytraced.  Even
the shadows change continually during motion.  Thanks to the CD-ROM drive,
the feedback after actions is good too.

DOCUMENTATION

	Two documents came with the system - both grayscale.  One of them is
a 16-page, A5 size, generic instruction book.  It was obviously produced for
the PC version, as the screen shots are a bit wrong, including path names
like "C:\".  The cover is the same as on the packaging:  a variation of an
Escher print -- an appropriate choice.

	The instruction book begins by telling you that exploring the game
without reading the objective could make it more fun.  This is also what I
did, and I think it's possible to manage completely without the
documentation.  All pictures in it have excellent quality (there is also a
picture of the two creators - a nice touch in my opinion) and the
instructions are very clear.  I can't verify whether quitting the game
actually works, but I see no reason to do that on the CD32 anyway.  There is
also a HINT service in case you get stuck.  It's touch tone operated and
available only in the US.

	The second document is a 6-page, A5 size paper labeled "The
Labyrinth of Time reference card for Amiga CD32."  It gives instructions that
are specific to the Amiga version; for example, the loading instructions that
I described above.  It also states that the flash RAM on CD32 and CDTV will
fit up to 7 games at a time - I've used only three so far and have never lost
anything (like a Pinball Fantasies high score, for example).  There are also
options to save to a personal RAM-card or to disk which I presume would be
enabled if they were physically available on my Amiga.  There are also
instructions on how to get Technical Support with phone numbers and addresses
in England, US and Australia.

LIKES

	Just about everything!  This is the future of graphic adventures,
and I hope it shows other producers that you can use most of the CD space
for the game. 

	One very good thing is the map that is automatically updated while
you walk around.  It took me a while to realise that I could even zoom into
and out of mazes by clicking on them.  A flashing red arrow shows your
current location, and you can position a dot somewhere else to get a short
description of it.

	In game music is good - not too exciting, but good for background.
It's far better than "elevator type" music.  There are a number of musical
pieces, and some of them seem to match certain areas of the game.  It is not
played straight off the CD since the drive is usually busy loading data for
the game.

	There are often sound effects associated with certain actions, like
the "ploink" noise of an elevator arriving.  They hardly ever disturb the
music and are often very good at enhancing the graphic effect.

	You can certainly feel the air of the Amiga in the good ol' days.
Leo L. Schwab for instance shows up in a poster for "Schwab Robotics" and
his uni-cycle from "Red's Dream" is described in the future museum along
with articles belonging to the very famous people of Terra Nova Development
(now, where did I see that name before... ;-)).

	Another thing I like is the humour in the game.  You can do lots of
silly things with items you find, and often this has been foreseen, so you
get remarks like "You'll try anything, won't you?", "No!" and "Don't molest
the dead." rather than just "Nothing happens."  Even the standard ones are
varied with "Interesting, but useless" type comments.

	Just for fun, I mounted the CD on our player at work and then
NFS-mounted it on my A3000.  Peeking around didn't help much as the pictures
seem to be stored in a format that ADPro does not recognise.  I guess it's
raw to speed up loading.  Reading the startup-sequence was interesting,
though. It seems that the support for the joypad is simply a handler that
creates mouse events.  Alas, the only CD-ROM filesystem I could find
insisted on keeping the ";1" stuff tacked on the filenames so I couldn't run
the game.  One day I'll try to plug it straight into the A3000 - I guess
I'll have to play it all over again on the 1950 screen....

DISLIKES (not)

	There is nothing I dislike really.  There are a few things that
could be slightly enhanced for the sequel, though:

	Graphics could be HAM8 - but I must admit I thought it WAS HAM8 for
quite a while...  I've been told the reason for this though:  the game was
originally created with the CDTV in mind.  Production took about 2 years,
and about 1 year after it was finished and about to be released, the CD32
showed up.  So they made a few last-minute adjustments to support it.  EA
wanted to publish the MS-DOS version first.  All graphics were created on
the Amiga using "Imagine, VistaPro, ADPro, DPaint and, well, whatever else
was lying around."  Bradley W. Schenck was the only artist.  Using HAM8-only
wouldn't be nice to CDTV and A500+A570, but there is probably space for
duplicate pictures...

	I miss the option of dropping things, but I understand the problem:
You'd have to raytrace every room from every angle with every possible
combination of dropped objects.  Oh, well....

	Because of the above, the inventory list gets a bit long after a
while, so accessing an object could require 15 clicks or so.  The
possibility to call up a scrolled list of the objects to select from would
be nice.

	It would be nice if there was some "click-ahead."  During load
of a new picture, the icon row is disabled.  Walking around (using a
mouse) when you know your way through a maze, you often click just
before the icons are reenabled.  This is not a problem when using the
joypad.  I'm probably just a mouse power user....

COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS

	Graphics-wise, it's way better than anything I've seen.  Full stop.

	Gameplay is definitely better than other adventures I've seen for
the CD32.  The closest match I can think of is Flashback for the normal
Amiga, but I personally didn't need that action.

	Today, I got a demo of some kind of detective game for the CD-I.  It
had good animations (digitized from real people it seems) and sampled
conversation, but I got bored after only a few minutes.  They seem to be
moving in the right direction, though...

BUGS

	None found. It did reboot once, but when I repeated the sequence (I
had just restarted from a saved game) it worked fine.  I think it was all my
neighbour's fault as his mixer/whatever disturbed my screen (and probably
the CD-ROM reader) just before the reboot.

	This is possibly something I haven't figured out yet, but the
interior of the elevator is not the same when you go up as when you go down
- it seems to change while you walk out of it....  Perhaps it's on purpose,
just to confuse me.

VENDOR SUPPORT

	I've not officially contacted them as I'm a very happy customer, but
I've received a clue from the Bradley W. Schenck himself when I was stuck,
and also information about the Mac version and the creation history when I
asked for it.  He has been very helpful in what I assume is his spare time.
(I located his e-mail address on Internet, it was not in the documentation.)

WARRANTY

	90 days.  As I understand it, Electonic Arts will replace damaged
media after this time if you send it in along with a Eurocheque for 10 GB
pounds.

CONCLUSIONS

	If you are just getting one adventure for your CD32, Labyrinth
should be the one.  (But keep your eyes open for a sequel....)

	I see no other way to rate it but 5 beautiful mazes out of 5!

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

	Copyright 1994 Jonas Petersson.  All rights reserved.

	This review is freely distributable, but all additions and
corrections should be made through the author.

Jonas Petersson
[email-masked]

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