WHAT'S HOT

SETUP

    A good game-demo is something like a good review: it tells you just enough about the game to let you know whether or not you really want it, without giving away so much that you feel like you don't need to get it. The Mazera demo, as in many Pocket PC games and programs, is simply the unregistered version of the program, and Mazera's demo is a good one: a bit short, perhaps, but it lets you play just enough levels to get a feel for the game, introduces you to the game's basic storyline, and incorporates the need for registration right into the game itself. After getting past the first few puzzles and learning what the game is about, you run into a locked door which you need a key - and a registration key! - to get past... But I'm getting ahead of myself here...

PROGRAM FEATURES

The opening splash screen

    The game's graphics are QVGA (so a bit blocky on the larger VGA screens due to pixel-doubling), which is fair enough, in my opinion, given the newness of VGA technology. (Screenshots have all been taken from my Dell x50v and then resized to QVGA.) The music, while a little repetitive, is actually quite catchy, and, once in the game itself, changes to match the mood/style of the location you find yourself in. I enjoyed it enough that I never bothered to turn it off.

Tapping the splash-screen image or the single word, Menu, at the bottom brings up the game's main menu.

The main menu

The Play submenu lets you choose from a maximum of four savegames - or start a new one in any empty slot

Given that there is a maximum of four savegames, the second main menu item, Erase Savegame, also becomes necessary.

    Preferences allows you to turn the music and sound effects up, down, or off (nice that you can control each one separately), select whether you want a scrolling or an immediate transition from one screen to the next, change the buttons that you use to control your character, and turn on/off the ability to control your character by tapping on the screen.

The Preferences submenu

    Note that Stylus Input is initially set to Off. I immediately turned it on, as I've always loved being able to control things by simply tapping on my screen. You can also change the buttons you use to control your character, but, given that your character can only move in four directions and open/select options from a menu, I didn't see much point in changing them - until I thought of my new Bluetooth keyboard! As soon as I thought of this, I immediately turned on Bluetooth, remapped the buttons to the arrow keys, and tried playing with them - and discovered that it worked quite well, except for the slight delay before key-repeat set in. In the end, I found it most comfortable just to use my x50v's directional keypad - but I appreciated the ability to choose from a variety of input options.

But enough about menus and options... Let's start a New Game!

Let's start!

As we start the game, we are introduced to our cute litle caped character, standing trapped and bored in a garden-like enclosure that we learn is essentially an alien zoo...

 
Introductory text sets up the storyline for us, page by page...

    When the game or the characters have something to tell you, your standard RPG dialog boxes pop up, and tapping on the screen or pressing the menu button moves on to the next "page" of text or dismisses the box if the text is finished. Pretty standard and convenient. After being introduced to our character, Ix, and his plight, we learn that, one day, something happens...

One day, something happens...

    ...and our story begins. What happens, when you start looking around your little cage, is, of course, that you discover a way out, and your grand escape begins. Once out of your cage, the beginning portion of the game is set up to introduce you to the basic tools, obstacles, and gameplay concepts that you will encounter and need to use/overcome as you make your escape.

Hey, blocks! They could come in useful...

    Here we are introduced to the Sokoban concept: pushing blocks around is a big part of the puzzle-solving in this game. One nice touch is that you can "flip" the blocks by pushing them against the wall...

 
A nice touch: the blocks are "flippable"

    ...which essentially means that you can swap places with them (I'm not sure whether this means you flip them over yourself or you flip over them): a nice touch because this greatly reduces the possibility that you will get yourself into a situation that you can't get out of. (A particularly nice touch, in my books, because getting stuck and having to restart the level was one of the things I hate about Sokoban!)

    The puzzles in these first few screens are also nicely structured: they are challenging, but not too difficult, and effectively introduce you to the blocks, buttons, force-fields...

Push the red button, and the force-field disappears!

...stationary laser turrets (which are easily blocked with blocks)...

 
Blocking the lasers with blocks...

...and other mobile nasties that you will need to manouever around...

Don't touch the force-fields! And watch out when you let out the crabs!

    ...which include fairly slow and stupid crabs, robotic, laser-toting Mazerans, mobile man-eating bushes (!), and probably a number other enemies I haven't run into yet. You will also meet a race of cute pink blobs who are being oppresed by the Mazerans and will help you out (mostly by opening doors) whenever you run into them - which is exactly what you need to do to talk to them. Here, the first nice pink blob, whom I have just rescued, is telling Ix that he will need to find four access spheres to convince the city's main computer to open the door and let him out:

The first pink blob, Fred, telling Ix he needs to obtain four access spheres

    Gameplay proceeds screen-by-screen, with puzzle-obstacles on about 50% of the screens, the puzzles gradually getting harder and harder. There is an arcade element to the game as well, which consists mostly of evading the nasty Mazerans and other aggressive creatures, oscillating force-fields, and other such obstacles. The screen-by-screen structure of the game is particularly well-suited to play on the Pocket PC, as it makes the game easy to pick up and put down again, at your convenience. Your game-state is automatically saved on exit, even if you soft-reset your Pocket PC. And if you die, nothing worse happens to you than re-starting the room you are working on, so the focus stays on the intellectual challenge of the puzzle, rather than on staying alive at all costs.

    And, as Astraware's advertising for Mazera implies, Mazera provides a spacious and varied world - perhaps not as spacious and varied as Ultima VII (the blocks get a little repetitive after a while), but I did find myself running into enough new creatures, features (the exploding block was a nasty surprise!), challenges, and settings to keep the explorer in me interested in what I might find around the next corner. Given the spaciousness of the world, it is nice that Mazera includes a View Map feature, available at all times, which helps to keep track of where you are and where you need to go next.

A typical map view, showing the location of the four access spheres in white, my location in red, and a map-piece I found of the central computer

    Occasionally you will find boxes that contain map pieces, which provides a little more detail about where you have been and where you might want to go. The first one was a bit hard to find - or, rather, hard to figure out how to get to, as it was there in plain view in my cage, but tucked away inside some bushes. You have to find the secret entrance to the tunnel that leads through the bushes to the map-box - something which took me rather a while. (OK, OK, so I'm pretty slow...)

I finally found a map piece!

    When I finally did find the map-piece, the discovery was a bit underwhelming. The overall map of your world shows the rooms where you have been in grey, with locations that you have not visited yet in dark-grey, and your character and other points of interest (like the access spheres) marked with flashing dots. Not much detail, but it works, letting you know where you have been, where you have yet to go, and where you are relative to everything else.

This is all the map shows you at the beginning...

    Discovery of the map-pieces fills in the parts of the world that you have visted (i.e., the light-grey areas) with a little more colour and detail. Nice touch, but, in practice, I didn't find the map-pieces all that helpful - or all that realistic, for that matter. Normally a map helps show you where you want to go and what you will encounter before you get there; the way Mazera handles the map-pieces, the bits of the map-piece that show the areas you have not yet visted (i.e., the dark-grey areas) remain greyed out until you have reached (and seen) that location! Not a big problem, but it does make the discovery of map-pieces pretty much useless, except to show in more detail the places you have been to and explored already...

HELP SUPPORT

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

    Mazera takes up about 1.5Mb of RAM when running and the program folder is about 3.4Mb in size, so you'll need a total of about 5Mb of storage space for the program - though you'll be able to get away with less RAM than that if you install the program files to a storage card.

BUGS AND WISHES

    The first quibble I have is really a more general rant against the whole "solve this puzzle, then this puzzle, then this puzzle..." sort of game that really is a standard feature of the whole puzzle/RPG genre that Mazera is a part of (so if you're a die-hard fan of this genre and/or this approach to gaming, you might want to skip this paragraph and go on to the next one). If you like the challenge posed by a puzzle you just can't get around, this is not a problem, but if you're like me, and like exploring worlds just as much, if not more than puzzling, and if you get frustated with a puzzle that's in-your-face until you solve it, Mazera might get a little frustrating at times.

I, for example, found myself spending way too much time staring at this:

This screen had me stumped for way too long...

    Of course, I was kicking myself when I finally did figure it out (hint: the solution had to do with similar patterns in neighbouring rooms), but Mazera's completely linear plot had me incredibly frustrated here for a while, which actually forced me to put the game aside for a while. Had I not enjoyed the game enough to pick it up again, keep at it, and finally figure it out, that might have been the end of Mazera on my device... And, admittedly, it felt really good when I finally did solve the puzzle, but that sort of enjoyment is, to me, a little like banging your head against a brick wall because it feels so good when you stop!

    My other quibble with the game is that it doesn't let you decide, "OK, I'd like to save the game here and keep this particular savegame so that I can come back to this point in case I do something majorly wrong in the next section." You can play whatever savegame you want, but whatever you do is automatically added to that savegame, so you can't go back unless you start a whole new game and play that one up to that point. This can get frustrating if you do what I did, and open the wrong door by mistake:

Do not open this left-hand door until you know you are ready to...

    Since there are no extra keys, and each key can only be used once in a lock and then cannot be retrieved, when I discovered (the hard way!) that the place to put the first access sphere is not through this door, I was forced to go back and re-play to this position from the beginning.

    There is a way around this, but it lies outside the program, and you need to know a little bit about where files are stored and how to rename them. If you go to the Mazera installation folder (the default is \Program Files\Astraware\Mazera), you can rename one of the savegame files to something like Mazera-savegame4 (which puts it in slot 4) or even Mazera-savegame5 (which takes it off the savegame screen entirely until you give it one of the four savegame slot names again), and thus save that position to return to and play again later.

Hack to copy a savegame position you want to be able to return to (like the two doors!): just rename the savegame file...

    But it seems to me that the ordinary Mazera gamer shouldn't have to figure out/resort to a hack like this: saving a position that you can return to and play from later should be a feature built into the game itself. Either that or don't make the game so unforgivingly linear that you have to return to the beginning if you do something wrong!

    The two bugs I encountered were both relatively minor... The Pocket PC's standard taskbar, as you will have noticed by now, is visible at all times, which is, in fact a useful design feature, if you want to know the time or change the volume, for example. On my x50v, however, the clock and volume icons were unexpectedly non-functional: while the clock worked to tell time, tapping on it did not reveal appointments or dates, nor did tapping on the volume icon bring up the volume control - the minimize X, however, worked fine. Not a big problem (after all, you can change the volume using the program's Preferencs screen) other than it being unexpected behaviour, and this particular bug did not show up on my son's old iPAQ.

The wrong-font bug in Mazera

    Fortunately, the fix is as easy as removing the offending font from your \Windows\Fonts folder - once you figure out which one it is! - although that can be a bit annoying if you actually want to use it! Just to prove that this is a Pocket PC OS problem, compare the two screenshots below: the first is taken without any fonts in the \Windows\Fonts folder, the second with Palatino Linotype Bold installed there. (Note the change in the font used in the Turn Off and Setting buttons.)

 
Left: No fonts in \Windows\Fonts - Right: Palatino Linotype Bold in \Windows\Fonts messing things up

    Given the antiquity of the bug (dating all the way back to Pocket PC 2000), I would expect a well-established company like Astraware to have figured out a way to steer clear of it by now!(Although, to be fair, it shows up rather rarely, since only a very few fonts seem to produce this bug.) Anyhow, once I removed the extra fonts from my \Windows\Fonts folder, the program worked just fine: seemed very stable in fact, which is impressive considering how astonishingly unstable my new Axim x50v has been! (But that's another story...)

PURCHASING

PROS

• Huge world to explore!

• Lots of puzzles to solve

• Screen-by-screen structure makes the game easy to pick up and play
• Nice background music

• Cute graphics and storyline

• Non-violent (mostly)

CONS

• Linear plot can make difficult puzzles very frustrating

• No opportunity to save a particular position to return to

• Price

OVERALL IMPRESSION