Eureka!

This game is a text-based adventure with some simple graphics and a few simple (annoying) action games.

Eureka! was an 80's experiment: it was released on several platforms and languages with a big monetary prize to the person who would solve a puzzle.

Unfortunately it was a serious disappointment as the game had bugs (typos for instance) and was seriously HARD.

In the end, a guy won the prize, but to this day I still think it was impossible to win for most because of the bugs and the pb with the translations.

The game is divided in several sub-games that occur in different time periods: prehistory, Rome, king Arthur, world war 2 and modern times (reacheable only after finishing the others). Amusingly, a bug in the Spectrum version allowed me to play the last game before fininshing the others.

The parser is pretty basic, the actions often not obvious and you die VERY easily. Some actions are timed, for instance: pursued by a tyranosaur, if you are too slow to type an action, you get a nice visit of its jaws and a gameover...

Among the annoyances are the fights: some parts of the game involve fights and when you are hit you lose hit-points. The problem is that in order to get more hit-points (and make the game bearable) you had to spend time playing an annoying arcade game that takes place at the beginning of each game, and it is REALLY an annoying game!

Since the game was multi-platform, they kinda took the lowest common denominator, and it shows... Especially the images are not that good, even for the time.

On the other hand, I must say that some of the scenes are quite good. Especially in Rome, where characters talk to you in Latin... The game was written by Ian Livingstone, one of the guys who wrote the CYOA (choose yout own adventure)/Fighting fantasy in the 80's and it shows.

Still, the difficulty, too many bugs and annoyances made it a serious disappointment.

Review By Larry