Adult adventures in cyberspace and NOT SUITABLE FOR UNDER 18s. That's woken you up, eh? BloodNet first arrived back in the chilly month of February and our correspondent from north of the border found it a: "compulsive and compelling journey to the outer reaches of cyberspace," scoring it a most impressive 82 per cent (AF69).

In brief BloodNet is set in New York 99 years from now. Vampires, the information Superhighway, neural implants and mega corporations play a prominent role in this evil world and for a change, the plot is both relevant and bloody marvellous.

And, fanfare, it's a serious, non-linear adventure which is worth playing because it has, pause, depth. Why are there so few of these games around? Because it takes intelligent people to write them?

So here you go. While in cyberspace you meet a data angel whose body was murdered while he was decked in, leaving him trapped in the matrix. His Soul Box is decaying. He pleads for your assistance.

You have to transfer his consciousness into a Dragon Soul Box so that his data structure remains intact while you try to help him. Then copy your level three and four cloaks into his data structure so that he can avoid TransTech security until you can help him.

You also have the chance to pay a virtual scenario producer to patch this cyberlost data angel into a virtual reality construct of Manhattan, thus providing him with familiar perceptual input. Phew. And that's just the character generator. It's hi-tech, hi-spec but by crivvens it keeps you playing.

The control is maybe a tad finickety, don't even think about buying it unless you've got a hard drive, and there's no speech, but it's still the best point 'n' click adventure we've seen for an age or so. And we're still awaiting the staff of Future Publishing Internet magazine, .net to storm into the AF office and demand a game.

Die Zukunft sieht allerdings noch so düster aus wie am 1200er: Anno 2094 machen Cyberpunks, Vampire und Gangs die New Yorker Strassen unsicher, während der Megakonzern Trans-Tech das Land mit eiserner Faust regiert. Um den Alptraum komplett zu machen, ist der Held Ransom Stark nicht nur arbeitslos, sondern wurde soeben von einem Blutsauger angeknabbert - es bleiben ihm nur wenige Echtzeit-Tage, um die Gehirnspezialistin Deidre Tackett ausfindig zu machen, welche als einzige die stetig voranschreitende Mutation zum Vollzeit-vampir aufhalten kann.

Nach der umfangreichen Charaktergenerierung wird Ransom mittels der am oberen Bildrand einblendbaren Iconleiste im Point & Click-Verfahren durch bildweise umschaltende Örtlichkeiten gelotst; zu all den verfallenen Kirchen, dubiosen Bars und liederlichen Gossen gelangt man via simplen Mausklick auf einer Übersichtskarte.

Die Locations werden von zwielichtigen Gestalten wie Dealern, Söldnern, Hackern, Crackern oder Virenzüchtern bevölkert, mit denen teils etwas langatmige Anklick-Gespräche zu führen sind. Ehe das dabei in Porträtbildern eingeblendete Gesocks jedoch mit den unentbehrlichen Infos rüberkommt, muss man zumeist eine Gegenleistung (Geld, Waffen, Drogen oder Computerhardware sind zu beschaffen) erbringen.
Und trifft man mal einen Freund, kann er für die maximal sechsköpfige Party unterschiedlicher Talente rekrutiert werden.

Nun dürstet es unsere Hauptdarsteller aber zunehmend nach dem guten Roten, weshalb Ransom abhängig von einer Energieleiste öfter einen Passantenhals anzapfen muss - freilich ohne dabei versehentlich eine für ihn wichtige Person leerzusaugen.

Kämpfe mit Opfern, Vampir-Kollegen und Gangstern werden in Rundenform und unter Zuhilfenahme eines stattlichen Arsenals aufgefundener oder gekaufter Waffen wie Granaten, Kruzifixe und Flammenwerfer ausgetragen; entweder persönlich oder komplett vom Rechner.

Zudem kann Ransom dank seines Laptops in den Cyberspace abtauchen, wo er auf der Suche nach Zugangscodes inmitten von gefährlichen Wächterprogrammen, Viren und Bytes umherschwebt.

Verglichen mit der AGA-Version kommen hier nur Bilder in blutarmen 32 Farben und mit eher mässigen Animationen zur Aufführung, auf Intro und Soundbegleitung wurde gleich völlig verzichtet.

Die Maussteuerung selbst klappt nach wie vor gut, allerdings ist mit Nachladezeiten zu rechnen, die ohne Festplatte fast schon unerträgliche Ausmasse annehmen.

Und da die umfangreichen englischen Textpassagen zudem fundierte Fremdsprachenkenntnisse voraussetzen, wird das Blutnetz nicht jedermann einwickeln können - auch wenn Freunde düsterer SF-Szenarien à la William Gibson darin nicht schlecht aufgehoben sind.

There was this episode of Tiny Toons recently, called Sepulvedra Boulevard. It was a parody of Sunset Boulevard, and it was spot on. The thing is, Sunset Boulevard is a strange, grim and scary film, with faded film stars, sinister butlers and a no-goodnik journalist who narrates the picture from the swimming pool in which he's been drowned.

To see it in cartoon form (despite some of the worst animation yet this series) is even odder, and substantial more scary. Almost as much of a shock, in fact, as the unheralded arrival of Bloodnet A500+.

When the original was reviewed in issue 47, I passed on Gametek's comment that the conversion was "many months away". They had lied to me, as have so many others.

PLAISANCE
Bloodnet, the everyday story of a vampiric 'cyberpunk', is a terrific point-and-click adventure. There are gangs and guns and murders in 'cyberspace' and monsters in it, and the world's best conspiracy, and interesting characters that are not, for example, orcs, and everything.

The A1200 version overcame its gigantically unpleasant controls and annoyingly fiddly room exits to charm me with its tremendous plot, non-linearity and magnificently amoral stance. This A500+ game is exactly the same except in two vital respects: there is no sound (which is good - the music spilled from the synthesiser of Satan), and there is no 'dialogue replay' (which is alarming - the trick to Bloodnet is that it's a well-written story, with reams of clue packed dialogue).

(The 'dialogue replay' was a godsend, allowing you to recall any conversation with the aid of the 'neural implant' that was fighting to prevent you fully turning into a vamp. It was slightly poorly done - the list was arranged by time of conversation with the most recent first, and as you'd likely talk to people more than once you ended up with, say, six conversations with Walter and had to check through each one to find the tittle-tattle you wanted - but vitally important. Missing it out is a disappointment, as you have to go back to scribbling notes on pieces of paper to remind you who's up to what).

The other thing about Bloodnet A500+ is that, like the A1200 original, it's impossible to play from floppy. Although there are only eight disks this time round instead of twelve, doing the slightest thing requires at least three swaps under the sinister gaze of a hideous control routine that insists you insert a disk, wait for the Amiga to recognise what you've done and THEN PREss A MOUSE BUTTON TO COAX THE GAME INTO READING IT.

The disks themselves appear badly arranged as well - there's far too much half-second accessing of lots of disks, rather than lengthy accessing of one or two. If you want to play the game without having its persuasively saturnine atmosphere shattered like an ill egg hit with a big building, BUY A HARD DRIVE.

The slightly fiddly install procedure (involving making special save and 'boot' disks) is a necessary evil, and pales beside the floppy version's 13 disk swaps just to start the game. Or so I'd imagine, for as I set out t check the hard drive version worked properly, it turned out SOMEONE WHOSE NAME WE KNOW had stolen our A600 hard drive along with most of our good games such as CD32 Roadkill, which is we weren't able to put the intro animation on last month's cover CD. It's great being us.

Cybernetic surgery, smart drugs, neural implants, hacking, phreaking, cyberspace, net-surfing, vampiric bloodsucking, illicit street trading, shizophrenia, street-tech weaponry, designer violence, bio-weapons, religious insanity, and more, more, more constitutes the newspeak plot of this surprisingly absorbing adventure from Gametek.

But first, the bad news. If you don't have a hard drive, forget it. There are 12 disks in all and access times between locations and courses of action are debilitating, easily adding an hour or so more on to a typical session's play.

Hard drive owners, however, are in for a treat, albeit a mechanically flawed one. Bloodnet plays like the interactive William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, RU Sirius novel that you always intended writing but never quite got round to.

The plot is everything. New York City of 2094 is caught in the icy harsh grip of bloodsucking vampires and tyrannical mega-corporations. You play the role of Ransom Stark, an ex-Trans Technicals employee who spent too much time in cyberspace and eventually lost his grip on reality.

Luckily he was saved by a woman called Deirdre Tackett. She surgically inserted a neural implant into Stark's skull which, as you find out in the intro to the adventure, saves his life more than once.

Coffin fit
Van Helsing is searching for Tackett. He needs to acquire a program designed by her. He dupes Stark with a bogus job and eventually manages to turn him into a vampire. Only the neural implant saves Stark from the horror of becoming a fully-fledged vampire under the will of Van Helsing. And that's when the adventure starts for real.

It plays and feels like the sort of RPG you would play round the table with friends. At the beginning you can generate the statistics for Star by answering a series of 12 questions, the answers to which affect the final scoring. Fine tuning is allowed on five separate categories.

Once done, the serious business of recruiting fellow mercenaries, exploring futuristic New York and jacking into cyberspace can be investigated. And this is where the game really bites.

Exploring New York is easy. It's just a matter of clicking on the little red triangles on the map. This lets you get on with the serious business of finding out more about what's happening in the underground and in cyberspace.

Cyberspace travel is fraught with danger. A deck and an interface is required and safe locations have to be sussed out or Stark could find himself assassinated while still surfing the information Superhighway.

Nevertheless, this activity has to be delved into if vital information is to be acquired. And gaining certain types of info requires certain types of gear and equipment, all of which have to be searched out in the real world.

So, despite some tedious game mechanics, such as the inventories and the characters and the combat system, this adventure is powerfully overwhelming in its narrative and pace. It feels as if you're taking part in a book. Adventure fans, Internet fans, hackers crackers and phreakers are all going to love it. It bites.

There used to be a computer magazine called Ace. As every computer magazine has to have a gimmick - AMIGA POWER's, for example, being that we always tell the truth about games - Ace had a farcical scoring system. Each game reviewed by Ace received not only a mark out of a thousand, but also a gently or steeply curving line predicting how your interest in the game would be retained over time.
Nonsense of course, as the reviewers clearly hadn't been playing the game for three months (or whatever).

Anyway, the point is while playing Bloodnet I've been mentally plotting my own 'lasting interest' curve and it looks like a row of spikes ona tachycardiac sugar-fiend's electrocardiograph machine. Not since Elite has there been such a nettling mixture of the buzzingly terrif and crashingly poor.

No sooner would an intriguing plot twist pop into view than a grueseome mechanical fault would lurch from the wings to cancel it out. Tragedy loomed with some doom in a room as a week or so of sternly attentive play left me wallowing miserably in that flat, indecisive state. But then, a religious experience.

CUSHION
Bloodnet (the everyday tale of a vampiric 'cyberpunk') is a phenomenally complex point-and-click adventure. Far phenomanallier than is needed, in fact, with a CONTROL METHOD OF ASMODEUS that uses both mouse buttons in an unhelpful manner and a doorstop manual of essential reading.
You can 'recruit' characters to your 'party' and 'jack' into 'the matrix'. Statistics make a fulsome appearance, as do 'character generation' and (eek) 'hit points'.

The game has a terrible, terrible beginning as you struggle with the controls. Picking up an object is a three-stage affair: first, you double-click on it with the right button to bring up a description of the object; then you single-click on it with the right button to put it in your hand; then you turn your character to face out of the screen and single-click on him with the left button to make him put it in his inventory.

The idea is that, with the object in your hand, you can switch to another sheet, and, say, put it in your computer unit, give it to another person in your group or 'use' it with something. But you can do all this much more easily from the all-in-one inventory screen. Worse, because you have to double-click to examine an object, it's all too easy to get it accidentally - a fatal error if you're in a room with someone on guard.

Practice helps, of course, but you'll still fume over having to pick everything up one object at a time and then switch to the inventory screen, scrolling through lists of unlabeled icons in order to pass the objects to the appropriate character because the members of your party can't get things directly. You should at least be able to specify into whose inventory objects are put by default.

And, heck, while we're on the subject of clumsiness, although you don't have to walk around the location to pick up objects or talk to people - the game takes the sensible view that you can reach everything and you can switch directly to the city map in order to travel around - you do have to manoeuvre your character through doors if there's an adjacent room and this is appallingly and unnecessarily fiddly.

Again, if someone attacks you (sometimes if you just talk to them, or walk into the same room as them), you're only given the option to run away after you've meticulously placed your companions in fighting positions. And, cheaply, in fights everyone's represented by the same sprite so you can't easily see who's shooting whom.

And even if you've already talked to them, you don't get any indication of who the characters are on the screen until you commit talking to them - an agonising fault when their talky close-up looks absolutely nothing like their full-figure pictures. (At a transient camp, for example, an obviously age-bent white woman turns out in close-up to be a 12 year-old black arms dealer. Cheers, Mr Artist.)

And playing from floppy is impossible - everything you do causes lengthy disk accessing and from being killed to being asked to insert a save game disk takes 17 swaps.

And you don't get to talk to people, you just get fed lines and occasionally answer yes or no to a question. And there are minor bugs, like people chatting about people you haven't met yet as if you have, or tatting about people you've just shot in front of them without apparently having noticed you've just shot them. In front of. Them. Brrrr.

PRIZE
Such are the faults of Bloodnet, skidding maliciously beneath the hammer of kindly indulgence like the hamster in the underfelt of life. It took me the week or so of attentive playing to realise I didn't care about them at all because I was having far too much fun.

Being a bit of a point-and-click player, I've come to loathe their addle-pated Saxinraxin-Raxinfraxin plots )off which hangs lots of obvious puzzles for no reason other than point-and-click games have to have lots of them and they have to be obvious), their plastic characters (often existing solely to blurt out a vital clue before dropping dead) and their crass storytelling (clearly planned without a writer in sight).

Bloodnet's story is a zinger. On the streets of 21st Century Manhattan vampires are quite at home, picking off the underclass and concealing themselves from the neuromediaeval knights of vengeance by setting up rich-boy clubs for bored necrophytes.

Meanwhile, revolutionary students are plotting to free the world's computers from the propriertary grasp of a sinister multi-national corporation, people are being bumped off in 'cyberspace' and in trying to find someone who can reverse the slow vamp conversion you're undergoing a plot of terrible proportions that only a cockroach embittered by a life of pitiable uselessness would reveal to you.

Isn't that fantastic? A tremendously involving, immaculately-scripted story that fizzes with ideas, populated with characters who never ring false, stocked with sly, satisfying puzzles that don't leave you trying combinations of everything you're carrying in befuddlement AND NARY AN ORC IN SIGHT.

Even more refreshingly it's all non-linear, letting you follow up leads and explore the city- and 'cyber'-scape in any old order. And leaving it to you to tie up your findings. (I myself continue to err on the side of caution, not yet taking up a number of hackers on their eager offers to rampage through 'cyberspace', but for the moment retaining my hard-bloke hit squad to make sure of any opposition).

And the game's cheerfully amoral. There's a bit, for instance, where you find out a gang is being hired by the villain to rub you out, but is willing instead to work for you if you come up with their fee first. Cunningly, however, it's just as easy to storm into their hideout and massacre them before they get a chance to be a nuisance because shooting someone's carries no penalty beyond perhaps slinging their friends into reprisals.

(A word here about the scraps themselves: although everything's governed by 'target acquirement, 'character statistics' and those (eek) 'hit points', you can thankfully turn them all off and tell everyone to act on their own initiative, sit back and watch the exchange of fire in hopeful terror.)

PIN
A major plot-point of the game concerns synthesizing dangerous high-tech drugs to help your party in fights of in 'cyberspace' (or to sell for a tidy profit) and, most entertainingly, as a half-vamp you're forced periodically to kill for blood, the nebulous 'innocence' of your victim determining how much you lose of your precious humanity.

Truly, Bloodnet is a game where you are in control. AS IT SHOULD BE. (It's also luxuriously large, after that week or so of attentive play, at a guess I'm a little over halfway through the game, still visiting new locations and still returning to old ones armed with extra information to make sense of the rum goings-on. Although, of course, the non-linearity makes it splendidly difficult to establish how far I am from success).

Point-and-click games are in the vast majority an insolently poor bunch. Bloodnet joins with ease the pantheon of greats, jostling Nippon Safes and Beneath a Steel Sky to appear in the class photo beside the Monkey Island. It's beautiful.