Graphics.............9/10
Audio ................ 9/10
Playability.......... 9/10
Price................ 9/10
Overall.............. 9/10
A quality and totally bug free game that is worthy of a place in every Amiga owners collection.
Programmed by: © MantaSoft 2000. Price: £15.00 Available from: Forematt Home Computing. Supplied on: Amiga CD-ROM. Game type: Puzzle Game. Required hardware: Amiga with AGA or GFXboard, 1.5 MByte ChipRAM, 4
MByte FastRAM and 20MByte Hard Drive space. Sound
support via AHI is also provided. Game description: Pictris is a puzzle game in which you have to use
mathematical clues to work out which blocks in a
grid have to be highlighted in order to find a
hidden picture.
* 240 different puzzles across 3 difficulty levels. * Automatic saving of records. * Selectable multi-channel Octamed SoundStudio modules. * Randomly chosen backdrops from user creatable categories. * Multi-lingual requester support. * Inbuilt tutorial mode.
Whilst Pictris can be played direct from the CD, you will of course
need to install the game to your hard drive in order for your game
positions to be saved. All you need to do is to double click on the
Installer icon and everything is taken care of for you. You could of
course just drag the entire game drawer over to your hard drive as
there are no assigns needed to set up and play Pictris. You will
need about 20 MBytes of free space on your hard drive to install
Pictris.
Having installed Pictris to your hard drive you now need to set the
game up to suit your particular Amiga's specifications. Open up the
main drawer and first select the 'Set Language' option. Here you can
choose from no less than 12 different languages including even
Russian! Next you need to select a screenmode to play Pictris on. Select now
the 'Set Screenmode' option. AGA only users would be wise to use a
640x512 Hi-Res Interlace mode in no more than 16/32 colours in order
to leave enough ChipRAM for Pictris to run in. GFXcard users will
have no such restraints on screen size and colours, however Pictris
recommends a screenmode of around 640x480 and no more than 256
colours as it could slow down the game by excessive CPU usage. Having selected your chosen screenmode you will now be presented with
an Audio Selector requester. You can select from 15000 Hz, 22050 Hz,
27429 Hz and 44100 Hz modes. I had no problems playing the
background music at 27429 Hz via AHI and the sound was crisp and
clear without any clipping or noticeable slowing down. All the above
takes less than a minute to do and your Pictris preferences are saved
to ENV-Archive which you can change at any time.
Hardened Puzzlefreaks may like to jump in at the deep end and play
Pictris straight away. However I am a coward when it comes to
playing and reviewing a new game so I elected to try out the built in
tutorial first. The tutorial is good, no, it's very good. It
teaches you on a small and simple 5x5 grid how to work out
mathematically which boxes in the grid contain parts of the hidden
picture and by using the left and right mouse buttons how to reveal
those parts of the picture and how to 'mark' off the non picture
boxes. No, sorry I'm not going to explain how mathematically you can work
out the 'secrets' of the grids, it would spoil all the fun. You will
have to go and buy Pictris for yourself. Having played the tutorial for a while and learnt from it the
mathematical 'secrets' of the grids it was time to move on and play
Pictris for real.....
It's time now for you eager readers to view the Easy Levels screen
grab that I have prepared for you. You are presented not now by a
5x5 grid as in the tutorial but with a slightly harder 10x10 grid.
There are also a number of large buttons of the left hand side of the
Pictris playing area. Let's look at those buttons first. The first button 'Give Up' needs no explanation at all, it's for folk
with no backbone and stamina! The "Save Game" does exactly what it
says. Now because the picture backdrops are randomly generated, sometimes
two pictures of a similar colour palette are displayed and it's
difficult to see the images in the playing grid. The 'Change
Background' button takes care of that problem for you by selecting
two different picture images. A nice feature, well done MantaSoft.
The 'Change Music' button allows you to select from the 5 Octamed
modules supplied with Pictris or if you wish you can choose one of
your own Octamed modules to listen to from your hard drive. Again I
think that this is another nice feature.
As I said earlier the object of Pictris is to find the hidden picture
in the game grid. There are mathematical clues within each puzzle
that have to be solved to help you work out which boxes contain parts
of the hidden picture and which do not. So all you have to do is to
reveal the correct picture boxes within the grid within the generous
30 minute time limit and the puzzle is solved! If this were the case then there would be no point to playing
Pictris, however MantaSoft have thought of everything and you will
find that the 30 minute time limit per puzzle is not so generous as
it seems. Each time you make a mistake time is deducted from you.
The first mistake will cost you 1 minute of your time. The second
mistake will cost you 2 minutes. Make a third mistake and 4 minutes
will be deducted from your time. Not so easy now is it? Any further
mistakes from now on will result in a whopping 8 minutes being
deducted from your time. If you run out of time you will have to
start the puzzle again.
A look of the screen grab showing you the huge 15x15 puzzle grid will
give you a clue as to the depth and number of puzzles that there are
for you to try and solve. I just can't wait to work my way up to the
difficult levels.
The graphics are fabulous and are user definable too. You can add
your own pictures simply by added them to the Background_Sets drawer.
There is also a very comprehensive AmigaGuide included within the
package that will explain anything you should wish to know about
Pictris. Audio is excellent especially if you use AHI and have some 16bit
Octamed modules of your own to play. The game playing curve is also
just about right, very easy to start with but getting progressively
harder the further you get. If your a Puzzlefreak, Pictris is an absolute MUST. Even if you
don't normally play puzzle games Pictris is different enough to make
it a worthwhile purchase. Price wise at £15.00 Pictris is a steal.
Go and get it NOW.
Graphics.............9/10 Audio ................ 9/10 Playability.......... 9/10 Price................ 9/10 Overall.............. 9/10 A quality and totally bug free game that is worthy of a place in
every Amiga owners collection.