by Ed Carmien Spiderweb Software, $30. Requirements: 68040/PowerPC, 3MB RAM, System 7. Contact Spiderweb Software at http://www.spidweb.com. Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip... Ah, for the seafairing life of the early 18th century. Nothing but the wind at your back, the ocean on all sides, and the deck beneath your feat. Unfortunately, engineering being what it was at the time, even a minor ocean upset could send a vessel lock, stock, and barrel to the bottom of the watery blue. While setting out on a mission of exploration to chart a group of small islands, you and your crew find yourselves in exactly that prediciment. After a massive storm that rages on for days, you beach your boat on a deserted, uncharted island and hope that the scraps of wood it provides, and whatever resources you can scrounge for, will be enough to allow you and your crew to survive long enough to build a new boat and escape to...the next island, where your boat unfortunately needs to be replaced again. Such is the seafaring life. Ocean Bound is a new entry into the category of real-time strategy. Unlike Total Anihalation, Command & Conquer, Warcraft, or any similar titles, the mission in Ocean Bound is not one of conquest, but of exploration. Many of the elements of real-time strategy abound; resource management, personal allocation, building contstruction; but the emphasis in Ocean remains on puzzle solving, not slaughter. Play is deceptively simple: click a structure and then click the map to build it, or click a command and then click the map to execute it. There is no combat or unit management here; every command you issue impacts the land, not some other force. While this allows for a focus of purpose not commonly found in realtime strategy titles, it comes at the expense of excitement; once you have dedicated enough wood to completing your vessel (the overriding objective of each level) and farmed enough food to survive, it’s simply a matter of wating for the level to run its course so you can advance to the next island. The mechanics of Ocean are as straightforward as its system requirements. Even a modest 68040 should be able to handle this game elegently; both the 604e/200 and a 603/120 used for testing handled it with ease. Like the genre-defining Warcraft, a series of shortcut keys make issuing the various commands easier; absent is Warcraft’s contextual command-click to ease the issuing of orders. It is really only in the placement and type of terrain that Ocean sees much variety, but to be fair this is where it excels. The levels range from simple layouts to familiar shapes (since when is Australia an uncharted landmass?) to fiendish collections of tiny islands that demand the careful construction and management of bridged roadways to collect resources. If anything the difficulty in terrain advances too quickly; by level 5 you already find yourself in a situation where, if you don’t place your initial building on exactly the right map tile, the level is unwinnable. Fortunately there is no penalty for losing; you can restart a level at any time and can replay any level you’ve conquered. The interface does, unfortunately, have a few quirks. Perhaps the most irksome is the lack of an "Are You Sure?" dialog when you issue a Restart Level command. Often I’ve wished there was a way to override such commands in puzzle games; after having played Ocean, however, I wish they’d thought to include it. I accidentally restarted half a dozen levels, invariably at the point where I was close to completing it. To be fair, however, those who play without multitasking (which, to the game’s credit, didn’t affect performance in the slightest) may not find this as much of an issue. The game also demands that your monitor be set to 256 color mode, even tho 16 bit graphics does not demonstrably affect play; and, annoyingly, the game does not return your monitor to its default state when you’re done playing. Scrolling is handled by simply dragging the mouse , but gamers with the shareware control panel GoMac! installed should be aware that scrolling south will cause strange redraw problems (see screenshots). Luckily, these problems will clear up as soon as you stop scrolling. But with 60 levels to explore, Ocean deserves credit for taking the realtime strategy genre in a new direction. With plain and informative graphics and a uniquely nonviolent structure, Ocean Bound is at once accessible to those who think with their heads instead of their hands, and to those who lack the mind- blowing concentration and reflexes necessary to dominate a multi-screen battle in Warcraft and its ilk. Fans of nonstop action need not apply, but Ocean’s Beyond is at once engaging and captivating, making it a perfect entry for younger gamers or fans of puzzle games. In an industry that has become famous as a giant game of follow-the-leader, it is refreshing to see a game that thinks for itself.