Amazon: Guardians of Eden

When the people at Access aren't out surveying golf courses for LINKS 386 Pro, they spend their time pushing the limits of computer hardware in the adventure-game arena. Amazon: Guardians of Eden is the latest game from Access, and it takes full advantage of the best computer graphics and sound hardware available today.

Amazon is a cinematic adventure set during 1957 in the deepest jungles of the Amazonian rain forest. The game features giant ants, rope bridges, insane scientists, lost villages and, of course, scantily clad Amazon women—all the makings of a classic American "B" movie, or something we'd see on the USA cable network after midnight on a Friday night.

In addition to the outstanding graphics, Amazon features full-motion video screens accompanied by digitized speech. These little movies pop up within the adventure as the player runs into the game's puzzles.

Great graphics demand great sound, and Amazon doesn't disappoint there either. Access developed Real Sound, a patented sound system that offers decent sound from any standard internal PC speaker, and major sound cards are also supported. With a Sound Blaster or compatible board, the game offers a MIDI soundtrack in addition to digital sound effects and human speech. The bare minimum requirement for the game is a 286 IBM PC running at 12 MHz with 540K RAM, but a 386 IBM PC running at 33 MHz with an SVGA graphics card is recommended. Amazon comes on seven high-density 3.5" floppy disks, and the game requires over eight megs of free hard drive space. Also included is an excellent manual that hand-holds a new gamer through game configuration, even explaining boot disk creation, should the game require more memory than is currently available on the player's computer.

Amazon features all the standard adventure game controls: walk, look, take, speak, etc. Some of the game's puzzles are time dependent and many are quite challenging, so be prepared to die quite often. (Death is usually pretty gory and shown in full-motion video, accompanied by an appropriate sound.)

What if you get stuck? There's no need to order a hint book, since the game comes with an extensive and very welcome on-screen help menu! The player starts the game with 170 "help points." Each time help is consulted, points are deducted and the player's score drops. The hints can be purposely vague or they can all but give away the solution. The better the hint, the more you pay. Amazon is lots of fun and quite comical; it borrows heavily from 1950s sci-fi and jungle movies. More than once I found myself laughing when my character slipped up and died a gruesome death—that's all part of the game's atmosphere.

Amazon is a clear winner. The puzzles are involved and do require some patience, but the on-screen help ensures that the game won't be too easy or too hard, regardless of the player's experience.