"Straightforward but too heavily weighted to combat maneuvering"

SSI was a wonderfully prolific company in the eighties. I still can recall receiving their catalogs and wanting to get every game in there but being restricted by a lack of funds. But the variety of games was offset by many of the games being choppy themselves. That is how Shard of Spring feels. It's a pretty straightforward story; Siriadne, a demon(female, no less) has seized the shard and demands tribute from the Island of Ymros--if the shard vanishes, there will be no more peace. So you need to assemble a group of adventurers as they go through awkwardly-proportioned dungeons(one for each land type,) a huge gate to a lost continent named (yawn) Islanda that's shaped like a maze(water replaces walls,) and a strange sort of maze of islands before the final assault on her tower. Although the game is frequently exasperating and the puzzles are a bit easy, there's a nice story-line, which makes the game playable enough.

SSI games always seem to try to buck trends deliberately, especially with the controls, and there were some odd experiments here. Some work well; you have two chances at re-rolling attributes, which is nice if you want to build a character of a certain class. It's much better than paging through random dice rolls and more exciting than a flat X attribute points to distribute, which generally get lumped according to class. Others, such as the right arrow/left arrow/forward keys(the game is strictly overhead view,) don't work out so well, and toggling Gothic font seems singularly useless. Of course there are middling ones; although there seem to be too many towns, each one has a different list of weapons to buy and skills to accrue--with each level your players improve they can gain different skills depending on whether they are wizards or warriors. This points out another SSI trait--generic names for concepts, but clever ideas and twists hidden beneath them. For instance, you can only use the most valuable attributes such as item identification once a day.

Combat is probably too prominent in Shard of Spring, so a few notes on that. New SSI games seem to overlook something and here it's the ability to flee quickly--all running must be done manually and is almost as demanding as staying and fighting. It's interesting that your movement ability is based on dexterity, but after several times of using commands that almost feel like marching orders(''Troops! LEFT! FORWARD! RIGHT!!'') you'll be fearing the prospect of combat with the unoriginally-named monsters. Level 4 mages? Snakes? Level 10 fighters? Bleah. And overall, you are punished harshly for stupid mistakes(should turning really cost movement points?) As in regular travel you must turn and walk forward--no directions. You'll make frequent typos in the process as the computer always takes too long or too little. Combat far overshadows any events in a dungeon as well.

The best part of the graphics is how the designers created several forest icons so that certain areas look like they have tall trees. Next best are the dungeon-specific items such as statues. The monsters, barring the coiled snakes, are some of the duller pixelations, and the weird dots on the edge of a combat field make it look like a roller rink or a museum and offsets the interesting combat field specific to the surrounding terrain. You also have huge gates or pools of fire guarding critical places, which is nice, but the one place where a lack of graphics is annoying is in a town. It's just a text list.

Maddeningly, the dungeons, although each is a different sort of maze(and some just have a bunch of keys you need to find to unlock doors until you cover the place) don't line up. Trying to map them on a straight grid will fail; a disk load will tell you when you've moved down a level(and on an original Apple you'll know when it happens from the wait, believe me,) and you need to keep separate maps for each one. The final one combines frequent stairs with branching paths, but it is not really as impressive as the secret door one or the maze of teleportals to send you to islands you can only see on the mainland(sea travel isn't safe yet--Siriadne's Minions helped save the programmers some time there.)

Shard of Spring shows a promise that never fully matured in the sequel, Demon's Winter, and an ease of play and clear purpose absent in DW. The puzzles are mostly rat-mazes or involve visiting all the towns and following the advice in the pub(''Geesh! You'd think these people would get themselves in shape, quit drinking, and DO something with their lives!'') and it's a bit scant on detail, but what you can see is organized pretty well. The combat may also be a bit tedious even though character-building is slightly easy. But with quicker processors and so forth these days, combat is less of a pain, so this is not a bad game for a quick emulation experience, even if it winds up being more fights than story.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 09/14/00, Updated 01/13/02