ADVENTURES IN TIME

Main review

The unnamed, rotund protagonist of Adventures in Time has been having a really bad day – things started to go seriously wrong when during his morning constitutional through a local forest he wandered well off the beaten track and got himself royally lost and the situation has only got worse since he stumbled into some ancient ruins to discover a strange apparatus, seemingly abandoned but fully operational, in the undergrowth.

Anyway, since he’s one of those dangerously inquisitive beings who, despite finding themselves lost amongst the ruins of a hitherto undiscovered ancient civilisation and confronted by an incongruous machine that arcs mysterious purple energy, will still have to press some of the buttons just to see what happens, our poor hero is simultaneously catapulted off into the temporal vortex and flung quite a physical distance from the machine itself. So now he’s going to have to make his way through the suddenly rather hostile landscape in the hope that whatever the button prodding has done can be easily reversed in order to get home.

AND THIS ONE MAKES EVERYTHING GO ABSOLUTELY TONTO

The sprites in Adventures in Time block out their immediate background and movement has deliberately been made coarse to avoid issues with colour clashing that could otherwise have happened – whilst this does make the action a little harsh on the eyes to begin with (and looks just a tiny bit untidy) it doesn’t take long to become acclimatised and the decision is a good one overall since the usually rather criminally underused large palette of the Plus/4 can be firmly pushed into the spotlight through both the background and foreground graphics.

And along with the work that has obviously been put into those colourful and indeed well-defined graphics, a great amount of attention has been paid to the sound, with the game offering the option of a couple of extremely well-produced tunes and some more than reasonable sound effects, all of which are generated by the Plus/4’s own sound hardware rather than relying on a SID card – the limitations of the TED and only having a couple of channels and waveforms for sound have been ignored and the results are pretty spectacular.

Overall, Adventures in Time is a well designed and constructed flip screen platform game with some excellent presentation paired with some impressive graphics and music. If there’s anything to complain about here it would have to be the length, there may be over forty screens to play through with some variety in the landscapes themselves and nice touches in the background, but once players have got their eye in with the jump mechanic it’s quite an easy game to actually complete – but hopefully the wide open ending is there to make way for a sequel, so fingers crossed there’ll be more Adventures in Time to be enjoyed soon.