IFReviewed by
Tom Zuchowski on 2006-05-06 11:55
MAIN PGM Version: 5.0
Extra Commands: OPEN, EXAMINE (used for READ)
Deleted Commands: conventional EXAMINE, no SAVE
Special Features: None Playing Time: 2 hours and up
Reviewer Rating: 3.0
Average Rating: 4.5/2
Description: "Hearing tales of great adventure in a place called Eamon Bluff you set off to find this ancient place.
"You come upon two paths thick in fog. One leads past an old cemetery and past a well. The other path goes deeper into the fog, and a deathly silence overtakes you."
Comment: This Eamon has much of the vivid imagery that Tim does so well. He's quite good at generating atmosphere. But, unfortunately, this Eamon was released before it was completed. I recently talked with Tim, and he said that it was never finished because he had lost access to an Apple computer at the time.
But even apart from that, this is an uncommonly difficult Eamon. There are several death traps, some without warning. There is a nasty gimmick that turns all of your companions against you without warning. The bad guys are absurdly strong; many had hardiness ratings in the 200-300 range. One had a hardiness of 910!
The map is a bit of a mess, with several mismarked exits, and I wound up trying every direction in every room to ensure that I didn't miss anything because of incorrect exit descriptions.
This is an older Eamon, and it requires the typing of full commands with no abbreviations. This isn't normally all that bad, but there are several name misspellings that drove me nuts because I kept typing them correctly.
In the end, I had to throw in the towel. By the time I had exhausted my leads and my ideas I had still not seen 19 of the 100 rooms and could not get past several "force walls". And it didn't help any that the program crashed 5 or 6 times with OUT OF MEMORY stack overflows during play (but the simple POKE51,0:GOTO100 restart command got me going again every time). I was left with the strong impression that this Eamon does deserve its (10) difficulty rating.
Here are a few hints that I gathered:
Take the cemetery route. Don't go down the well until you can find nothing else to do. You'll take a life-threatening hit every time you enter the anteroom off the front door.
It's too bad that this Eamon wasn't finished. It's got a lot of Good Stuff in it. But it's just too hard.
Used with Matthew Clark's kind permition.
Original review available at Eamon Adventurer's Guild Online website.
