{UTHE PLANETS}U - preview

  Forget the arms race, environmental pollution, inner-city deprivation or
global war. Martech has dreamed up a real dilly of a future for the human race.
Life is coming to an end and it's only 2007. A new ice age dawns, and it makes
last month's freeze look like a holiday in Tenerife.  In the middle of all the
chaos an alien capsule arrives on Earth... With a map of the solar system and
the postion of eight other capsules, one for each planet. THE PLANETS is a
planetary quest to solve the riddle of the alien capsules before time runs out
on Earth - Maybe the secret will hold a last desperate hope for humanity. And,
as ever, a brave space pilot is needed to go out and look for the remaining
capsules. You, buster. You.

  You can select which planet you wish to visit and then warp there. On arrival,
another icon provides a gridded map of the planetary surface. Somewhere here is
the capsule, and you must land to discover it. That sequence is very much like
the old Lunar Lander games - you must use your fuel as much as economically as
possible to brake as you descend so as to reach the surface at an appropriately
low velocity. Planets with lower gravity will be easier to land on than giants
such as Jupiter, where you'll have only jus enough fuel to land and then get
back to the mothership. On returning there's going to be a docking sequence,
again requiring arcade skills.

  The capsules themselves provide cryptic information which, when pieced
together, provide the complete solution to the mystery. But in order to decode
them you will probably have to take incount all sorts of astronomical
information about the planets themsleves, as well the clues in the arcade game.

Michiel, FidoNet: 2:283/502