Rainbird Software
£15.99 cass, +3 only

Glug, glug! There I am swimming in my goldfish bowl when some stupid human plonks a great big, plastic castle in the water. After my initial confusion, I decide to investigate - something fishy going on here, I think to myself. So in I swim, only to be confronted by a familiar voice. Suddenly, everything comes back to me - I am actually a daring inter-dimensional espionage agent, currently taking a relaxing break in the guise of a fish!

The voice belongs to my boss, Panchax - trust him to interrupt my vacation. He tells me it's an emergency: the infamous Seven Deadly Fins have sabotaged a project to conserve water on the fish-inhabited planet of Hydropolis.. They have also dismantled a focus wheel which would enable me to warp to Hydropolis. Warping involves transferring an agent's mind into the body of another creature or person and is extremely painful. To find the three pieces of the focus wheel, I must first complete three separate sub-adventures.

On entering one of the three warps in the castle, I am immediately transferred into the back of a clapped-out van belonging to a hippy band (they're not around at the moment). I have also become human again - well, I would've floundered in my previous fishy form! Finding some clothes and a torch (it is nighttime), I wander outside. I plod across dark fields and soon find a ruined abbey. Inside are a group of drunken hippies - the band - sitting around a camp fire. It's hard to believe that a part of the focus wheel is in the vicinity.

On completing this section (no I won't tell you how!), I am returned to the castle where I can enter one of the other two warps. One of these sends me to a forest inhabited by a warp junkie and an exploding parrot! The other transfers me to a recording studio with a short-tempered, 'coffeeaholic' producer (reminds me of someone). When I recover all three parts of the focus wheel, I can use it to enter the body of Dr A Roach, a scientist on the waterworld of Hydropolis. This strange place is inhabited by weird fish-people with human torsos, but tails instead of legs.

Dr Roach's apartment is in Paddlington, but other areas of the city can be visited via the Underground. The many locations include a pub where, instead of drinking, customers sniff special gas in order to get finless. Other innovations include fishofaxes and Fisa cards! But it's not a good idea to dawdle: The Seven Deadly fins are out to get Roach. So to avoid getting pushed into the path of an oncoming train it's best to get a disguise.

As in previous Magnetic Scrolls disk-based adventures (Jinxter, Corruption etc), the flexible parser accepts most logical input and permits editing of the current and last command. It also allows up to about ten separate commands to be entered in one line of input. The frequent disk accessing fails to severely interrupt play, although the occasional need to enter anti-piracy passwords is slightly annoying. The lack of any graphics is irrelevant - they would have only required more time - consuming disk accessing and taken up screen space.

With the large vocabulary, problems require much lateral thinking instead of simple word finding. All objects can be examined, often producing a witty response - the fishofax is described as combining the features of a diary and a wallet for four or five times the price!

Although the three sub-adventures don't take too long to complete (Are you sure about this? - Nick), they do add variety - the game isn't wholly about fish. The main adventure requires more skill and exploration, containing many red herrings (groan). But if you get stuck, you can always type in special codes for very subtle hints. However, even failure isn't too frustrating when there is so much side-splitting humour to enjoy. Some adventures use humour to hide a shallow plot, but Fish! combines laughs with thoughtful, challenging problems. In fact, writing this review was made infinitely more difficult by the fact that Nick and Skippy were playing it 24 hours a day! (And they don't normally play adventures).

Title: Fish!
Publisher: Rainbird, Wellington House, Upper St. Martins Lane, London WC2H 9DL
Price: £15.99 (+3 only)
Reviewer: Mike Gerrard

I have to admit that Fish! (with its free exclamation mark) puts me in a tricky position, and I don't just mean at the start of the game when you're swimming upside down in a goldfish bowl. No, what I mean is that this latest Magnetic Scrolls title is co-written by our very own Phil South, so it's a bit difficult being objective when you've heard about the game from the start and seen the blood, sweat and beers that Snouty's put into the writing of it. Nevertheless, I shall try. I shall also try to avoid fishy puns, mainly because every one you could possibly think of (and some you wouldn't want to) have already been used in the game, or in the packaging.

Our old friend the blue box this time contains the inevitable disk - very sorry, tape-type persons, but this is about 170K of adventure - and a one-week travel card for the Hydropolis Underground Omnibus Company, which is not valid before 9.00am Mondays-Fridays, except Dogger Bank Holidays - gerroan! There's a Fish Identification Chart, a sheet headed "How to Look After Your Fish" and a document from the Mission HQ of the Department of Inter-Dimensional Espionage. At this point you might be forgiven for thinking. "Goldfish... espionage... swimming upside down in a bowl... what the fish is going on here?"

What you obviously don't know is that some fish are in fact really Inter-Dimensional Espionage Agents in disguise, and that means you. You thought you were on holiday in a bowl, but you are about to be recalled to duty by your boss, Sir Playfair Panchax, told to pull your fish finger out and get on the trail of the Seven Deadly fins, that dangerous group of inter-dimensional anarchists. To help you, your boss has conveniently sent you three time warps, and you can go through any of these at the start to revert to your normal state (whatever that is) and wind up in three different introductory adventures. It's through tune-warping that the Fins manage to commit many of their dastardly crimes.

On the other side of one warp is a recording studio - the music business features very heavily in Fish! You might even find a cassette made by the Fins, and the machinery with which to play it - that's provided you're quick about it as the producer keeps asking you to make him a cup of coffee and if you don't oblige he throws you out on the streets, where you automatically warp back to your goldfish bowl - and warping hurts!

Another warp leads to you waking up in the back of a grotty van, and you now seem to be the roadie to a group of some kind, who've all gone and left you to wander round in the ruin of an abbey, trying to avoid the attentions of a group of hippies. This isn't easy, especially as you end up wandering past their camp-fire carrying a church pew. This does rather tend to draw their attention to you. By now you will have gathered that Fish! is one weird game, probably a love-it or hate-it job depending on the wavelength of your sense of humour. Anyone weird enough to read YS in the first place is probably going to love it.

I did have some trouble in the third warp, however, which leads to a forest clearing where another espionage agent, Micky Blowtorch (author of Warping Along With Blowtorch), is lurking. Not that he's very co-operative. In order to have a good look round the location where he was stubbornly staying, I asked him to go south east. The response was "Micky Blowtorch says, "What would anyone want to go Please insert the game disk and press any key" Now I know the games weird, but not that weird. The game disk was already in the machine. I pressed a key. Same message. I turned the disk over, even though I knew the 'B' side was blank. Same message. I turned it back again, Same message. I switched off and reloaded and made a note not to try that again! There were niggling parser problems elsewhere, too, partly due to the tricky things you had to try to do in the game. I thought the problems had just a bit too much emphasis on timing - doing things in the right numbers of moves, which means that you have to repeat actions quite a lot so as to work out the best order, that type of thing.

But one thing you cannot say is that Fish! is just another mundane adventure. It's one I've kept loading up, returning to each of the warps in turn and trying to make a bit more progress in the hope of getting through to the following major part of the adventure which takes place in Hydropolis. It's tough going! It's also full of funny finny jokes, leaving no fish unpunned, and no barrel unscraped in the quest for aquatic cracks. Spectrum adventurers seem to like that kind of thing - and they should definitely like Fish! (Can I have that fiver now, Snouty?)

Label: Rainbird
Author: Magnetic Scrolls
Price: £15.99
Memory: 128K disk only
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

Honest to Cod, this plaice is getting on top of me. I've absolutely haddock with this adventuring - I think I'll skate off and show you all a clean pair of eels. After all, the world's my oyster and I could have a whale of a time.

Right! That's it! No more fish puns AT ALL. Not even a tiddler. Oops! we'll try to get this review out of the way without descending to Magnetic Scrolls' level of humour, which is painful at best, as you'll know if you've guffawed through previous epics such as The Pawn, Guild of Thieves or Corruption.

This latest adventure, like the previous efforts, is text only on the Spectrum - a pity, because, though the Scrollies try valiantly to deny it, graphics (particularly of the quality seen in the 16-bit versions of their games) do add a great deal to the atmosphere. The parser, though, is the main attraction of MS games; it's so intelligent that you'll get a sensible reply to almost anything you type in, not the usual "I can't do that".

Your main aim in life is to defeat a bunch of renegade fish known as the Seven Deadly Fins (arf), who pop up in various guises in their bid to take over the universe, or something tacky like that. They've stolen a time-warp gizmo doofy and split it into three sections, you have to get it back. All dull enough so far. The gimmick is that there are three completely separate scenarios to complete, in each of which you occupy a different body.

Swimming through the first time-space warp thingy transports you into a recording studio, where your first challenge is to make some coffee before you get the sack. The kitchen's locked, of course, so things aren't straightforward. I can't help feeling that some of this section might be based on the experiences of Fish author John Molloy, who's best-known as half of the computer-rock band Mainframe (RIP).

Assuming that you don't make the mistake of entering the studio in the middle of a recording session (instant dissolution), you proceed to the next adventure, which is set in the steaming Amazonian jungles, and the third which sees you in the back of a van in the middle of a disastrous rock group tour.

Like previous MS adventures, the screen layout of Fish is dead straightforward; at the top of the screen is shown the current location, score and number of moves made; the rest of the screen is full of text. Your text input can be edited in various clever ways (delete letter, word, or line, return to previous line and so on) and you can even change the text colours.

The gimmicks included with the package aren't quite up to the usual standards; a Hydropolis Underground Omnibus Travelcard, a Fish Recognition poster, and a manual/novella/hints book. As usual the hints are in coded form; type in the codes to get help on specific points.

If you like the cringemaking MS sense of humour, you'll probably enjoy Fish; but it seems to me that the plot doesn't hang together as well as previous offerings. Worth £16? You'd be shark raving made. (Fyak!)