Label: Alligata
Price: £8.95
Joystick: various
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Tamara Howard
June 12th, sometime in the Nineteenth Century. The search for Dr Livingstone has gone on for many months now, and I'm beginning to feel the effects somewhat. I became separated from the rest of my party, and am suffering as a consequence. Believe I am experiencing hallucinations of some sort.
I am feeling rather strange at the moment. I appear to have turned completely blue. All around me are strange animals and vicious natives, I am constantly bombarded with coconuts and other missiles. Am forced to shoot at anything in sight to stay alive. Every now and then I find myself stopping and going back to the beginning of my adventures. Strange forces are evidently at work here...
Alligata has bought the licence to Supongo Livingstone! from the Spanish and given us Livingstone, I Presume!
You are the pith-helmeted (that's pith), back-packed, be-shorted Stanley, and it's up to you to wander around the island, avoiding the psychotic animals and natives who are out to kill you, collect the jewels and brave the underground caverns to find the good Doctor.
To make life a little easier, you are equipped with explorer-type things. A boomerang, a knife, a grenade (rather revolutionary for this period in time, but there you are and, most useful of all, a pole-vaulting pole. So you can walk, jump, pole-vault and kill and maim things a bit.
One might think, mightn't one, that turning the epic adventure of Stanley's search for Livingstone into a 'puter game would be a dead loss. Well, it's not.
Supongo Livingstone! did great business over in its native Spain, where it was described as, 'Fantastico, sensationale!' And there's no arguing with that.
Because actually it is a nice game. It's not terribly fast, there aren't an awful lot of things to kill on the way, but there's a lot of tricky thinking to be done.
In fact, Alligata thinks that you'll find Livingstone, I Presume! so difficult that it's included a Poke in the instructions. So if you want to practise a bit, or if you're just a bit of a cheat on the quiet, you can just tap in that Poke, and get away with infinite lives.
Apart from the odd attribute problem, the slight unpleasantness involved in your feet turning green as you walk halfway into a bush, the graphics are nice, large and cartoony. My particular favourite is the man-eating plant, and it's probably worth wasting the odd life just to watch yourself being swallowed by the critter.
Livingstone, I Presume! could prove very popular. An original twist to the seek and find game, it's been put together with a lot of thought, and it's going to take you some time to complete all seven levels.
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