Download Fish!

In 1983, in England, Anita Sinclair, Ken Gordon and Hugh Steers got together to form a company named "Magnetic Scrolls". Their propose was to create interactive text based adventure games. At the time there was a big growing in the search for such games for the existing 8 and 16 bits platforms and being an English company, it immediately get advantage in the British market. Well, everyone who wish to know more about "Magnetic Scrolls" won't have any difficulty in finding reference to it so, let's talk about the game we are presenting here.

Fish! was one of the last games labelled as "traditional" to be released by the company in 1988. By that time the first graphical "point-and-click" adventures were starting to show their faces and the classic text based adventure games were starting to lose their popularity. And this is a game with a "sort off" unrealistic plot, or was not the main character a... well, if you were thinking about a "fish", you got it. Yes, but let me remind you that this "fish" isn't just like any other fish, because he is special "Agent 10", one of the best agents in an ultra-secret governmental organization - so secret that nobody has ever heard about it. But, you ask me "how can a fish be a secret agent?". Well, you know, throw some recent and quite innovative technology, it is possible to do something called "warp". "And what the heck is a warp?", you ask again... No, it is not one of these space jumps made by some spaceships like the "Entreprise" and others... It isn't other than a special technique which allows our hero - that little fish inside that fish bowl - grab a "host". In the middle of that process there is some sort of "mind-melting" in which the strongest mind (that will be the fish mind, of course) will take control of the host's body.

But, what is the propose of such organization? Well, as everything in the know - and probably in the unknown too - universe, from real life to pure fantasy, there are always two sides: the side of the "good" ones and the side of the "bad". And these bastard "bad" guys always find a way to make some bad things. And the bad guys of this story are called the "Seven Deadly Fins" and they are plotting to exterminate all marine life - something that the good guys can not let happen. As reward to stop their evil plans, our little hero wants nothing more than some deserved holidays inside his little fish bowl, being well feed and having nothing else to do.

This game is, as I previously mentioned, text based adventure. It has however a few graphics to set you up in the mood, but they do not change much. In fact, these graphics have plenty of colours, as they use 16 colours (in a time most developers still used the 4 basic colours of CGA). About sound, all I can say is that I didn't heard anything. The command text interpreter is quite good as it can recognize sentences with several words. This can be either a strong or a weak point, as although the game can recognize some complex sentences, I didn't found its dictionary very complete - for example, at the beginning of the game our small fish is swimming "upside down" and to turn it and make him swim like he is supposed to, you have to enter the right command (just to point out, that will be "turn over" and not "turn upside up" or something like that). For those who can find themselves stuck at some part of the game, we include a "walkthrough". But try not to use it to play and finish the game without having to think for yourself as you will loose all the fun this game can be if you do that.

All in all, this is one of these games which the adventure fans will want to try out. Players who prefer "point-and-click" games or that simply are "too lazy" to type in the commands, are advised to stay away of this game. To all the other, I recommend you to try it out!

Technical Notes:
This game was originally made for Amiga, Atari, Commodore64, Zx Spectrum, and other like. So, to run it in DOS, it needs a emulator. This emulator is included in the game archive and it is the executable file "magnetic.exe". To run the game, after mounting the folder were the game is located in DOSBox, just type the command "magnetic fish.mag", or type the command in the "Execute..." from the windows start menu.