SEARCH FOR THE KING

 The registration card for Accolade's graphic adventure, SEARCH FOR THE KING,
asks you to give the game a grade. I was able to assign it a "B+" without
hesitation. Had there been space on the card, I would have taken out my red pen
and added these comments: "Very good first effort, but concentrate on improving
your logic, and try to avoid imitating others. Keep up the good work!" (This
review is based on the IBM-PC version.)

 In SEARCH FOR THE KING, you play the part of Les Manley, a minor employee at TV
station WILL. Les is the low man on the totem pole -- he spends his time
rewinding videotapes by hand to save electricity. In a bid for higher ratings,
the management of WILL decides to pay a million dollars to anyone with evidence
that the King of Rock 'n' Roll is still alive. The management is positive that
the King is dead, so they figure they'll never have to pay. Les, frustrated by
his own lack of success, is determined to prove them wrong.

 Les sets out to find the King, armed only with his bag lunch. His amusing and
improbable quest takes him to a circus, a luxury hotel in Las Vegas, and finally
to the Kingdom, the King's southern home. Unlike most computer games that
attempt to be humorous, SEARCH is actually funny the whole way through. The game
features lots of wisecracks, a fan who believes that the King's sweat has
healing powers, the world's worst trapeze artist, an unusual form of space
travel, and a cameo appearance by Alfred Hitchcock. What more could you ask for?

 SEARCH FOR THE KING is Accolade's first animated graphics adventure. It was
designed by Steve Cartwright, author of HACKER and HACKER II. A pleasant change
from some recent adventures, even veteran gamers will find the puzzles in SEARCH
challenging. Most of the puzzles are tough but fair, although there are a few
that will try your patience. One of the puzzles involving Helmut, the World's
Smallest Man, has such a bizarre solution that you'll laugh out loud when you
discover it. It's not likely that you'll be able to solve the solution on your
own, though. (I confess that I had to get the solution from a friend, who in
turn got it from Accolade.) Other puzzles in the game, such as one involving a
fan of the King, are just badly implemented. Only a handful of the puzzles in
the game fall into the "very difficult" category, but those that do are very
difficult indeed.

 SEARCH FOR THE KING is much like a Sierra graphics adventure in look and play.
There's even a Sierra-like menu bar at the top of the screen. In fact, sometimes
the program is _too_ much like a Sierra game. SEARCH FOR THE KING tries very
hard to look like the LEISURE SUIT LARRY series. For example, there is a bunch
of close-up shots of curvaceous women, for no other reason than there are
similar shots in the LARRY games. The nerd-as-hero idea is also taken from the
LARRY games (although Les is quiet and timid, where Larry is loud and sleazy).
This attempt to mimic the competition just serves to divert the player's
attention from SEARCH FOR THE KING's own virtues. It's also a little misleading:
Although the back of the box hints at it, there's almost no sex in SEARCH FOR
THE KING.

 SEARCH FOR THE KING establishes Accolade technically as a major new player in
the graphic adventure field. Overall, Accolade has done a good job of creating a
Sierra-like adventure game engine. The promotional material for the game touts
the superiority of Accolade's new parser, but I found the parser in SEARCH to be
just marginally better than Sierra's. The Accolade parser is more
discriminating; for example, ASK FOR is interpreted differently from ASK ABOUT.
Yet there were still plenty of times when the parser just didn't understand what
I wanted to do; e.g., the parser refused to recognize LET GO OF XXXX, but
accepted RELEASE XXXX.

 SEARCH has some nice little features not found in other graphics adventures.
One is a command buffer that allows you to recall any of the last four lines
you've typed. Another is the ability to drop things. In Sierra games, once you
pick up an object, you're stuck with it. There's no real need to drop things in
SEARCH, but the ability to do so if you want to is nice.

 The only bugs I found in SEARCH were isolated cases of Les vanishing, freezing,
or "walking on air." In all cases, I was able to avoid the bug by restoring the
game.

 The graphics in this game are as good as those in Sierra's recent 16-color
games. The animation, however, is not as smooth as that found in Sierra or
Lucasfilm efforts. The game supports CGA, EGA, MCGA/VGA, and Tandy graphics. For
most users, the 16-color EGA mode will work best with their system. The game
also supports an "enhanced 16-color mode" for those with MCGA or VGA. In this
mode, 16 colors are still the maximum number used, but the colors are drawn from
the larger VGA palette. This allows more subtle color combinations to appear.
The only trouble with the enhanced 16-color mode is that it takes up an
additional 32K of RAM. This means you may have to remove TSRs (along with mouse
drivers and disk caches) to get the game to run properly in enhanced mode.

 The copy protection in SEARCH FOR THE KING is off-disk: At the beginning of
each game, the player must enter a price from a list of VCR components provided
with the documentation. The game supports the AdLib, CMS, Roland, and other
sound cards. It requires 640K of RAM, and is distributed on five 5-1/4" and
three 3-1/2" diskettes; both formats are included in the package. The mouse is
supported, but a joystick is not.

 SEARCH FOR THE KING comes close to earning an "A," but I'm compelled to bring
it down to a "B+," due to a couple of unreasonably tough puzzles, some very
minor technical glitches, and its slavish emulation of the competition. However,
it's still a very good game, and I recommend it to all adventurers looking for a
challenge. If other Accolade adventures live up to the standards of SEARCH, then
Accolade can look forward to scoring straight "A's" in the future at the School
of Adventure Design!

 SEARCH FOR THE KING is published and distributed by Accolade.

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