The Magnetic Scrolls Collection

If you thought adventure games had gone out with the advent of the bitter, think again. What's more remarkable about this package than any of the games it contains is the window and menu system it uses. The functions embedded in the system are normally the domain of expensive desktop software suites. Assuming you have one meg, then, you can now spend more time playing the same move in a myriad of possible ways than the weeks it would previously have taken to finish Fish, Corruption and Guild of Thieves.

These games first appeared in traditional graphic adventure format, with key illustrations displayed above a test display and > interpreter that threatened to reply "You cannot see the south here" every time you typed in a command. Using the windows system the company developed for the overblown Wonderland (as in the one Alice trashed), you can make moves by moving icons, clicking a pointer menus of key commands or typing them in. ("You cannot see the south here.") It is a revolution. Magnetic Scrolls, who first found fame with The Pawn and its Infocom-beating parser implementation, now give us a whole bunch of reasons to spontaneously combust in awe of their cleverness.

Corruption can be found in the most unlikely of places. The sink, however, isn't usually one of them.	It takes more than a thieving mind to join the Guild of Thieves. Only the lowdown and sneaky need apply.

Guild of Thieves was their second release and it's good to see it again, dressed up or otherwise. It's the only game that has ever really managed to get the concept (apologies to Pseuds' Corner for using the word) of thieving into a game and make it fun. As you try to prove yourself to a town's most discreet brotherhood, you're drawn into a veritable den of iniquity, whatever one of those is. And the ensuing plot unravels faster than knuckles crack when they're caught in a till. There's a high humour quotient and some of the punchlines are good enough to steal for yourself. This is stuff well above second rate.

Fish boasts another first. If you've never played an adventure set entirely in one of those plastic castles that look so natural in the bottom of a goldfish bowl, you've never played Fish. Yes, only you, a humble goldfish, can rescue your underwater world from a gang of extraordinary aquatic adversaries known as The Seven Deadly Fins. Extremely silly adventure games have been tried before but most of them have been trying. The problem with Fish is that some of it is just so totally hatstand - quite often the stumpers seem either pointless or wasted, occasionally unfair. Still, in my book it's a damn site funnier and more playable than James Pond. You'll have a good laugh at the puns, too. I'd make one here but it ain't my place.

Weakest of the tree games is Corruption. Your character is a budding yuppie and the plot seems to involve little more than a succession of lessons in humourless disillusionment. I'm afraid I found it less than captivating and certainly isn't the kind of thing you should think about getting into if you get easily paranoid.

Still, anyone who's ever enjoyed an adventure game will lap up Fish and Guild of Thieves at least. Even if adventure games usually turn you catatonic from four hundred yards, they've rarely been more playable than the examples here, and the new display system makes them more accessible too, They're all notoriously difficult to complete too. Neat.