CHRONO QUEST II

 A sequel to Psygnosis's CHRONO QUEST, CHRONO QUEST II picks up the story where
the original left off. A major disturbance in the temporal engines of Explora
has caused them to overheat, catapulting you back to the beginnings of time. You
must engage in a search for metals to fuel your time-traveling vehicle just
enough to get back home.

 The premise is interesting, and there have been some significant updates to the
quality of both graphics and sound in this sequel; also, much has been done to
overcome the problems with disk swapping, copy protection, and game control that
hampered enjoyment of CHRONO QUEST. On top of all this, some interesting new
design experiments have been incorporated. Nevertheless, CHRONO QUEST II proves
to have its own set of problems and frustrations. (This review is based on the
Amiga version).

 You begin the game onboard an 18th-century-style ship, with Explora located on
the deck near the main mast. There are 13 different time locations you can
access throughout the game, and within each of these locations lie different
challenges, opportunities for exploration, and encounters. Whenever you enter a
new Era, you begin at the same location on your ship; where possible, you can
move off the ship into the world of that Era, and search for metal and other
useful items to help your progress.

 While movement through time is anything but linear, the game design is, I
think, overly so. As in most adventure games, you have to complete certain
puzzles at certain points in order to progress to new areas, or in order to
succeed with the assigned tasks as you move from area to area within an Era. In
such circumstances, a good adventure game will usually provide you with a number
of options and clues. But in CHRONO QUEST II, you'll find that you have little
in the way of either choices, or clues, to help you out. You just point and
click, and point and click, until you happen upon the right combination. Cycling
almost randomly through a series of combinations without any clear sense of
which one might work just isn't my idea of fun. There _are_ a few ah-hah!
experiences when you finally get things right, but on the whole, the puzzles
seem excessively random.

 Perhaps to compensate for this linearity, game control is radically simplified.
You are presented with about six icons at a time to click on, and your choices
are usually limited to Use, Examine, Take, Drop, Advance, and Retreat (i.e.,
move right or left into the next or previous screen). Most of the gameplay in
CHRONO QUEST II involves heavy use of the Examine icon. Clicking on Examine
presents you with a magnifying glass, which is used to click on small areas of
the visual window. You can do a virtual pixel-by-pixel examination of each
screen with the magnifier, and often must do so in order to find items. Once
found, an item is easily taken. Once it's taken, you're left with the
opportunity to engage in long hours of trying to figure out how to use an item,
with the technique mentioned above. Object use is thus often unnecessarily
challenging, even though game control is not.

 The one thing you know for sure is that any metal object will be effective as
fuel for your time-traveling vehicle, and this becomes the main ongoing puzzle
in the game: Your success and failure with CHRONO QUEST II is largely dependent
on figuring out which metal objects to use when, in order to navigate properly
through the sequence of 13 time periods. In other words, you may have to jump
ahead to Era X in order to find a metal object that will have negative time
effect and get you back to Era II, since nothing in Era I will have small enough
effect to allow you to jump to Era II. This is again a _very_ hit-or-miss
proposition, and becomes quite tedious until you've figured out the proper
sequences (good to take notes here). At least you can use Examine when near
Explora to determine how much time-travel a particular object will net you when
placed in the fuel tank.

 The most potentially interesting new thing in CHRONO QUEST II involves the
one-on-one encounters with significant figures in certain Eras. When you figure
out the puzzle that lets you into the presence of, say, Aeolus or Circe (there
is a background thread of pseudo-Greek mythology behind the earlier parts of the
game), your icon panel switches to enable Talk, Listen, Give, Examine, and Use.
You have to decide whether to talk first, listen first, or offer a gift before
doing either; in some instances you have to offer a gift at an appropriate
moment during the conversation.

 The little surprise is that conversation actually takes place! In other words,
when you choose to talk from a scrollable menu of text messages, the onscreen
character will respond not only in text but in digitized voice. Each character
has a different voice, meant to be appropriate for the character.

 Here's where a potentially great idea falls flat on its face, due to lack of
care with a few simple things. To begin with, CHRONO QUEST II is originally a
French design, translated into English. I suspect much of the text response was
translated in France, as it often doesn't qualify as English. When you try to
Use an object inappropriately, for instance, you get an inexplicable text
message saying, "But what did he says?" There's even some French left in the
program; for instance, your pointer asks "Quoi?" and "Ou?" rather than "Which?"
and "Where?" when you're trying to Use an object with it.

 Most importantly, though, the English digitized voices thrown into the
translation of the game really seem an afterthought. When I ran into the
digitized picture of beautiful Circe, the graphic led me to expect the voice of
an at least relatively mature woman. What I heard instead was the voice of a
cute, Cockney 14-year-old. And she wasn't even saying what the text message
said. For instance, in digitized voice, one response was, "Swine! You deserve no
more than the steak of a pig!" In text, it was, "Swine! You deserve no more than
the _state_ of a pig!" (The latter is correct, as Circe turns you into a pig if
you do wrong.) A bit disconcerting, to say the least!

 Problems like these wouldn't have been hard to rectify, yet for some reason
weren't. This makes the overall design seem glitchier than it should, and
destroys what little credibility the gameworld manages to provide. I almost want
to play the French original, since I suspect these are problems that were
introduced in the translation from French to English.

 CHRONO QUEST II comes on four full 880K disks, and features many beautifully
drawn screens, as well as appropriate sound samples for different moments in the
game. It contains neither disk- nor manual-based copy protection, and is easy to
install on a hard disk. (I believe that, with a little effort and knowledge, you
might even be able to substitute your own sound samples for those included, as
all data files are easily accessible.) It is designed carefully to be playable
with one floppy drive, but will make use of more if available.

 The game is controlled entirely with the mouse, and will run in any Amiga with
512K (as usual, have at least 1MB of RAM or more if using a hard disk).
Gamesaves are possible, though you have to exit the game and rename the save
file if you want to keep more than one at a time.

 I've heard of problems in translating games from one computer version to
another, but this is the first time I've ever run into problems with translation
from one _language_ to another! CHRONO QUEST II is a potentially interesting
design that, for some reason, didn't get Psygnosis's usual close care and
attention. It's definitely a challenging adventure, but there are many minor
annoyances you'll have to become accustomed to before you can begin enjoying the
game.

 CHRONO QUEST II is published and distributed by Psygnosis, Ltd.

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