c9c-eh@dorothy.Berkeley.EDU (Warner Young (WHY)) (10/09/87)
I think I should apologize beforehand for the slightly(!) unorganized manner of this review. I have never done this before. REVIEW: MIDIMAZE by Xanth FX (distributed by Hybrid Arts) Premise: MidiMaze is a game where a bunch of "Have a nice day" type Smileys run around in a maze and shoot each other. This past weekend I bought a copy of MidiMaze. As we have three ST's at home, we had an excellent opportunity to test it. After connecting all the computers up with MIDI cables, we began to play. The program runs in either high or low resolution. It can run on two different connected machines running two different resolutions, too. The game can be played solo, on one machine, where the computer can provide up to fifteen "drones" for you to fight. The drones come in three different varities: Very Dumb (Target), Plain Dumb (Standard), and Not So Dumb (Ninja). The Very Dumb ones are pretty dumb; they run around in circles and wait for you to pick them off. The Standard drones are slightly smarter; they shoot back if provoked, although they can't always be provoked. The Ninjas are deadly; they are probably sneakier than any human likely to play the game. All the options are chosen from a standard GEM menu bar, which Xanth FX has jazzed up (in low res), with some colors; all this is set against a nicely generic background telling you who wrote the game, so on, and etc. All in all, though, playing solo is not that great. Okay, playing with other human opponents. Well, it's much better that way. One ST is the "master" computer, called that by virtue of being the last to be booted. The master computer controls such things as how many drones to put in, loading the maze, and any other options. A "slave" computer has a few options also: it can remove itself, and play Solo; it can become a MidiCam, where you can't play, but you can use it to watch from any other player's (or drone's) view, or get an overhead map showing where everybody is; and there is a choice of mouse or joystick control (anybody who has ever played Way-Out on the 8-bits may miss having a keyboard control; I know I do). There are probably two or three dozen mazes on the disk they supply, and more can be created using any ol' text editor. The mazes must be square, and can not be any arbitrary size. Also, there seems to be a limit on how big you can make a maze, although the documentation does not mention this (the doc does not mention much at all, except how to create a maze). The 3-D view when you play is in a small rectangle on the left side of the screen; the refresh rate on it is pretty good, unless it's a big maze, and somebody else just turned on their overhead map (I'm not sure why it would slow down, though). Response time is also good. There are a few flaws with the program. If one of the computers in the MIDI ring is removed, or turned Solo, it is not always possible to recover it into the ring again. If the maze is small, and you place too many drones in it, the game crashes. When loading a maze, if there is something wrong with it, it tells you "Maze file format boo-boo" but does not give any indication of where the error is. Also, it's sometimes very hard to distinguish between players in monochrome, because it uses different fill patterns, as opposed to colors. All in all, however, I like it. Playing it, I wish the mazes could be larger (except that it takes forever to find the others in a big maze), that there could be multi-level mazes, and that we had a few more ST's hooked up, for even more fun. If you can easily get more than two ST's together, I would recommend getting it. One final note: MidiMaze is copy-protected, for those of you who need