At the beginning of April 2016 Peter Verdi's Magnetic Scrolls Chronicles website went offline. So far all my attempts to contact Peter failed. His site carried some invaluable interviews with former Magnetic Scrolls people. To preserve the work I temporarily uploaded a dump of his site taken in summer of 2015. All you can see below is 100% Peter's work! Hopefully his site will reappear soon! Peter, if you read this, can you contact me?


Remember how it's like to ride on a cloud? How it feels to be squashed by a bus, or how to get that damned gold disc from Micky? Well, here's your chance to relive all these situations.

Have a chat with the devil in THE PAWN, ransack an entire island in THE GUILD OF THIEVES, restore luck itself to a whole country in JINXTER, uncover a conspiracy in CORRUPTION, become an inter-dimensional secret agent in FISH!, an ancient god in MYTH, walk in the footsteps of Alice in WONDERLAND and inherit a haunted mansion in THE LEGACY.
Become a part of the fantasy of Magnetic Scrolls - you certainly won't regret it . . .

 
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This is the "Text" section of "The Pawn". Here you will find articles and reviews of "The Pawn" I gathered over time.

Review (Atari ST) taken from "Happy Computer" magazine
written by Heinrich Lenhardt, translated by Peter Verdi

Welcome to Kerovnia - the fantasy land where drunken dwarves dwell in a witty adventure game with superb graphics.

Kerovnia seems at first glance like your average fantasy world: there are the dark, gloomy forests, the usual wizards, dragons and brave heroes. But the current situation in Kerovnia tells us that this world doesn't take itself too seriously.

King Erik is slowly but surely losing his power and influence over the country - just now that elections are at stake. The people responsible for this whole situation are the dwarves who have been banned from Kerovnia a long time ago and are still not allowed to return to the country. Problem is that the dwarven folk brew the most delicious and strongest whisky there is and the citizens of Kerovnia wouldn't mind enjoying this particular drink. But King Erik can't be convinced to let the dwarven peoples back into the country.

At this particular point you enter the game, being mysteriously thrown from the "normal world" into the land of Kerovnia. What distinguishes "The Pawn" from other adventure games is the fact that you don't have to achieve a certain goal in the game - it is at first unknown to you. You basically have to find out by yourself what your goal in the game will be, but mostly you are interested in getting back to the normal world. The game itself features some very comfortable special commands. You can, for example, change the foreground and background-colour of the text screen and you can also change the textsize. Changing the textsize is particularily important when you are running your Atari ST on a colour-tv. All ten function-keys of the Atari ST can be customized. You can type in often used commands and assign them to a function-key, which means that you won't have to retype all the standard phrases over and over again.

Included in the packaging is a very good novella, which comes on 44 pages and introduces the player to the plot of the game. Those among you who don't bother with literature can of course skip the novel, read through the manual and start playing right away. Adventurers who get stuck at a certain puzzle will find encoded hints included at the end of the novella, the box also contains a poster. The only problem for us german gamers - without decent knowledge of the english language you won't be able to play "The Pawn". Trying to make the parser familiar with german grammar didn't lead us anywhere.

Heinrich Lenhardt's opinion on "The Pawn":
For me "The Pawn" will always be a classic. This was the very first game that really made use of the Atari ST's graphic power. All of the roughly 30 different pictures in "The Pawn" are still the best graphics to date on the ST. Most of the conversions won't of course feature pictures of this quality - the QL and Joyce versions don't have any graphics at all.

The adventure itself is a very good self-persiflage. This game is making fun of each and every fantasy-cliché there is - but in a very elegant and ironic way. Combine that with the superb parser and you get an absolutely stunning gaming-experience. You can even type in whole sentences and "talk" to other people in the game. The game isn't exactly cheap, but it's right at the top of adventure gaming. The documentation and the user interface are absolutely brilliant.

I can recommend "The Pawn" to beginners and experienced gamers alike. Anyone who has decent knowledge of the english language and is looking for a graphic adventure with decent text simply has to buy this game.

 

Gregor Neumann's opinion on "The Pawn":
Trying to categorize "The Pawn" is absolutely impossible. The people who created this game have done everything to make it different to any other game in the genre. The result ranges from wildly romantic to chaotic. You are never quite sure who the game is making fun of with it's subtle humour: adventure games? The player? Or even the game itself? This aspect makes for an absolutely refreshing gaming experience, because every time you expect something to happen, you can be sure that something completely different happens in the end.

The text is really decently written. It is full of new ideas and irony (or have you ever heard about an adventure game which announces on a sign that you have reached the southernmost border of the game?). I wasn't convinced by the parser though - allthough everybody thinks it's one of the best parsers around at the moment. Why? Because at the end of the day - when you try some unusual way to solve a problem - it just doesn't understand you. But nevertheless I think that "The Pawn" is one of the best adventures of 1986.

Graphics: 87 out of 100
Total: 89 out of 100