![]() Even now, I can get lost in some of these screens for ages and just gawp at them. The pastiche fantasy world that teenage Simon is warped into from the real world is packed with interesting locations that are all beautifully drawn with some of the most eye catching sprite art of the era. A great adventure game will boast a great world where every screen is interesting, and when you crack a puzzle and move the story along, you’re rewarded with another compelling screen to absorb. I’ve said it before on this blog but one of the great appeals of the adventure game genre for me is exploration. What they created somehow felt as slick and polished as the big American games but retained the little charms of a quaint indie production too. Adventure Soft was effectively a cottage industry developer, with only 12 employees, led by father and son team Mike and Simon Woodroffe. Simon The Sorcerer, with its excellent puzzle design, beautiful background illustrations and memorable characters, compared favourably to these other classics of the genre, despite coming from a much smaller developer. ![]() I’d adored both the Monkey Island games and Beneath A Steel Sky on Amiga, and was hungry for more. I was already a big adventure game fan by this point. That novelty really hooked me in to Simon The Sorcerer but it was the quality of the game itself that kept me playing. I’m not sure it would have done, but I think that only goes to show how much of a leap forward CD-ROM seemed after a few years of me loading primitive games from cassette tape on Commodore 64. I even remember playing the game in the living room one day, when my mum asked me to turn the game off before her friend came round… “It’ll only confuse her,” she explained. In our house, the idea of a fully voiced videogame was such a novelty (this was a few years before I got a PlayStation) that it seemed like magic. This was undoubtedly a case of the voices elevating and improving on the basic text version. There’s tons of character to the performances, and the cast, particularly Barrie, nail the comedic tone of the script. Sure, the recording quality could be a little inconsistent, and you can hear a few actors reused here and there, but the overall standard was really high. Even now, nearly 30 years later, I think it holds up really well and is on a par with the work Lucasarts were producing at the time with their higher budgets and access to Hollywood talent. I had nothing else to judge it against, but the voice acting felt of a very high standard to me. As such, when I put that CD in the console and started to play, it felt revolutionary… But, I’m certain this was the first fully voiced adventure game I’d played, as my family wouldn’t get a CD-ROM PC until a few years later. CD32’s Liberation included a bit of speech here and there, including the immortal line, “You wanna buy an animal, a real stuffed animal?” And, of course, Ghostbusters on C64 featured some iconic speech, though that was obviously synthesized. I don’t think this was the time I’d played a game with voice acting in it. It was as though this game was made specifically to cater to my tastes! It was my favourite TV show at the time, and if I’m honest with myself, it still is today. It was none other than Chris Barrie, most famous for playing Arnold Rimmer in the BBC’s incredibly popular sci-fi sit-com, Red Dwarf. What the box didn’t tell me is who provided the voice of Simon The Sorcerer. I knew I had to leave the shop with that disc in my hands. Furthermore, the back of the box revealed this was a graphic adventure game, very much in the style of Secret Of Monkey Island – one of two games to sell me on Amiga in the first place. Finally, here was an Amiga CD32 game that actually promised to make use of the CD medium and offer something that wasn’t possible on floppy disk full voice acting. As you can see, Adventure Soft were so proud of their Full “Talkie” Soundtrack that they made sure you couldn’t possibly miss it.
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