"Aslanine."

When I was young I really enjoyed the Chronicles of Narnia. However, I was a bit upset that C.S. Lewis managed to die eleven years before I was born and thus deprived me of the chance to tell him his books were good enough to inspire me to write something even better, and maybe if he lived to a hundred he could see it. After all, I didn't think the other books were quite as good as the first, and I was progressing quickly, having already created some promising flip-through action books which I'd saved in my little red plastic lunchbox.

Several years later my mother bought me a Narnia game for our Apple II+. I was in awe. Any fool could write a book but a COMPUTER GAME about Narnia? I, who could barely cope with the BASIC commands HLINE, VLINE and HPLOT, watched the splash screen and stumbled through the first game with confused awe. It was Narnia, so surely it would make profound sense. I just wasn't sophisticated enough yet. Besides the game came with some neat dice(a trip to an oddities shop had made me a novice dice collector, although I didn't get my first pair of rear-view mirror fuzzy dice--neon blue lulus--until I was out of college) and cards and so forth, and it even included a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which was very handy as mine was almost worn out. Never before had a game been so lavish with peripherals, and I wasn't counting those educational games which threw in textbooks. And it had to be good, because a game programmer who learned about Narnia would surely feel compelled to make the right sort of game for it.

As it turns out the game is of the sort Uncle Andrew might have whipped up('my fairy godmother gave me this 6502 programming book. Digory, my boy, do you like shiny computer games?') or that King Miraz might have forced on his nephew Caspian if Narnia had been as up-to-date as Eustace Scrubb had wanted it to be('Hey, boy! A game. What d'you think of that? No fire button, but you don't need the violent stuff 'til you've been knighted.') The peripherals form a key part of the game which the computer doesn't bother to execute itself, and even the free book didn't have the cool cover I liked from my original box set. And when I saw the game as just one of multiple games on an Asimov ROM image, my suspicions had been confirmed. The writers didn't even bother to use the whole disk. It might have been a decent series of games if they had, but as it was the $40 plunked down on this game was partial divine retribution for the disks of pirated games some acquaintances dropped on us before they returned to Europe.

The game in fact falls short of an overly didactic Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style book I found on bibliofind.com. This book relied on rolling dice it did not even provide free, but more characters from the original book popped up, it didn't run in circles quite so much, and it took longer to complete.

You start out in a wardrobe on the right side of the wood, the border of which turns blue to show you it's cold, as the background is black, which doesn't show snow very well. Now beavers appear randomly from the top and bottom centers and wander, and each time you collect one you get a heart. Ten hearts, and you can get out of this mess. There are also flowers that don't wander and dwarves that go after you when they get close. Dwarves also destroy flowers or beavers. Some bushes may actually be dwarves in disguise as well. You can tell because they grow feet briefly, walk around, and sit back down. Now dwarves can't destroy you although they can challenge you to a dice roll. You must beat theirs, although the odds aren't necessarily against you as I've never seen a dwarf get a 12. If you get ten hearts, you advance to the maze level. There's also some purple X running across the screen. I think it's supposed to be Edmund; he exits the closet door and moves left to Jadis, but he may run into bushes as he tries to make it; it is impressive how fast he moves, for something that looks as if it's been pinned to a card. No points for rescues here, although if he makes it you are kicked to the maze level immediately.

The bad joke here is that when a dwarf challenges you to a dice roll, you're physically supposed to roll the dice. So that's why the computer was generous with the peripherals; it was lazy! I suppose this is intended to encourage honesty and also sharing the workload but after the first few games I typed whatever I pleased. This creates a new challenge: trying to pile up a new high score. You get points for defeating each dwarf or flower you grab, risking only a lost heart, which is useful if you are close to full and still want to pile points on before advancing. The game has a timer but I remember getting tired of the whole mess after a while and going to the next level, pretending that I wanted to make sure I had time to get through it. There is one trade-off for cheating; the annoying victory beeps last longer than the losing beeps.

The maze isn't much of a maze, as one screen encompasses it, and it never varies between games. You have ice crystals floating around(avoid them,) a few hearts to replenish you, more dwarves for challenges, and the occasional mystery chest. The mystery chest outdoes the dice, as it makes use of the stack of cards. Each card has a key letter you're asked to type into the computer. With all these graphics it was a bit insulting to see something I could have programmed left up to the reader. Although they were able to detect bad letters not on cards in the deck, the computer didn't seem to mind my typing in the letters for big points all the time. However, there wasn't much to do in the maze(the wood was more lucrative for points) so I usually wound up heading to Aslan at the other side of the maze to get the warm fuzzy final screen saying I won.

Ah yes. The warm fuzzy final screen--it is a good thing this game doesn't fake depths by repeating levels endlessly, but the screen's pretty much the same whether you win or lose(run out of time or, in the maze, hearts,) showing a generic kid with a grinning Aslan(who wuvs you even if a simple joystick is too much for you to control,) but there's a small text message difference. I suppose the game's attempted strength is the variety of splash screens it has(combat with dwarves, each card being different,) but the best part may be the wood border changing back green as you get more hearts. With so many other respectable Apple games getting away with chunky icons, this game should have ditched the less important big drawings(the dwarf isn't bad but could be smaller, natch) for maybe a few more levels. As things stood it took me about three games to beat the game without cheating. I suppose that's in tune with CS Lewis's books' general accessibility, but then Lewis's books had depth too.

I, ignorant of copyright law detail, feel on one hand it's too bad there haven't been stronger attempts to create a game based on Narnia, perhaps one revolving around the wood in The Magician's Nephew, but contrarily a bad effort would be worse than an eighth Chronicle bombing. As a youth I'd always hoped to find a small extension on Narnia, but it is safe to say that this has nothing on a small fragment I would read ten years later in a university library(for fellow Narnioholics, the book Past Watchful Dragons contains it, best found at your friendly distinguished university library.)

Still I guess the game teaches you that nature and books and people and stuff and finding challenging situations where you can't pretty much get whatever you want are still what's really important as opposed to some meaningless situation where you continually try to chalk up points or whatever for their own sake. Or something.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 07/06/02, Updated 07/06/02