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Amazon

King, Tolkien, Bradbury, Clavell. The implicit promise was always the same: this story wasn't thrown together as an afterthought by some caffeinated assembly wiz, but rather bears the mark of top-shelf authorial talent. Of course, in practice the games were mostly ghostwritten, with the marquee name at most being an equal partner with the programmer.

Amazon was an exception. Telarium bragged that Crichton had not only designed the game before they approached him, but wrote "every word" that appears in the finished product.

...which makes it baffling that Amazon's writing is so desultory and slipshod: as if the Crichton bestseller from which it's adapted, Congo, has been adapted to second-grade reading level by someone with no talent for children's literature.

Where the novel's MacGuffin sets up a chilling rationalization of the Skynet scenario, the game settles for a roomful of shiny treasures. Where the novel builds on actual primate sign language research, the game has a wacky parrot who flat-out formulates entire paragraphs. And where the book aspires to minor lyricism — "In the distance they saw great billowing clouds of smoke and licking flames; there were the muffled explosions of air-to-ground rockets, and the helicopters wheeling like mechanical vultures over a kill" — the game drops clunkers like this:

You break through the jungle abruptly and come upon government soldiers, most of them drunk or on drugs. It's a dangerous situation.

Blocky graphics — dumped straight in from one of the 8-bit versions — do nothing to redeem the title. Oh, if only they'd kept Crichton's puzzles, and had a programmer script-doctor the prose...

Important: This game is not compatible with the Mini vMac emulator (last tested with v3.1.3.) It requires a physical compact Macintosh such as a 128K, 512K, or Plus.

Compatibility
Architecture: 68k

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