Flight of the Amazon Queen

The Good
I was a lover of Apogee titles back in the day, and one of these was Alien Carnage, which was made by a small Australian company called Interactive Binary Illusions. They only released two titles in their lifetime, with the other one being Flight of the Amazon Queen, a graphic adventure for the Amiga and PC.

You play Joe King, “pilot for hire” who owns the rickety plane “The Amazon Queen”. He has the job of transporting the actress Faye Russel to somewhere in the Amazon jungle so that she can shoot her latest film. A rival pilot named Anderson takes it upon himself to lock King up inside a hotel so that he can get all the glory to himself. King manages to escape, however, and catches up with Anderson just before he jets off with Russel. En route, the plane crashes into the Amazon jungle due to a lightning strike. There, King finds out that an evil doctor is transforming Amazon women into dinosaurs and using them to take over the world.

The setup program for the game is graphical, not text-based. The backdrop for this program is a bird’s-eye view of the Amazon jungle itself, similar to the title screen of Amazon: Guardians of Eden. You can select what sound card you use for sound and music, and those available include Adlib, Sound Blaster, and the Roland MT-32. For the MT-32, you have to select which port you are using. If you want to custom port, you are then taken to a text-based prompt, and returned to the program after you’re done.

Anyone who has played adventure games from Sierra and LucasArts will feel right at home with FOTAQ, with eight huge icons and the inventory above the main area. The icons represent common commands such as give, move, pick up, talk to, and use. Above this is text telling you what action you are carrying out. The inventory has four slots visible at a time. Arrows allow you to cycle between objects and it wraps around; keep clicking the same arrow, and it eventually loops to the start. Although it is much easier to play FOTAQ with the mouse, it is good that IBI caters for people without mice as well. Keyboard users can move the mouse with the arrow keys, and use the [Ctrl] and [Alt] keys to select commands.

Pressing [F1] will bring up King’s notebook, where you can perform various actions such as save and load a game, adjust text speed, turn the voices on and off (CD-ROM version only), change volume, and quit. There are 100 save slots; you select dividers on the right of them to get access to the next ten. I like how you can start typing away as soon as you access the notebook, and the game assumes that you want to save.

Most of the characters you meet are friendly, and each have their own personalities. I love the way a few of them tests Joe’s laid-back attitude. An example being when Joe gets locked up and he gets fed up with someone insisting that he takes his puppet. When you talk to characters, you will often get up to four dialogue choices. You need to select a specific one to progress through the game, although it doesn’t hurt to experiment for some interesting conversations; King will automatically come to the right one anyway.

Some of the hand-drawn graphics look amazing. They are on par with LucasArts games, and they depict the Amazon quite nicely. I like the pinnacle where you select where in the Amazon you want to go. Although the game features some close-ups of the main characters, sometimes I thought that this is a Leisure Suit Larry game, judging by the close-ups of women showing their cleavages. I like how Dr. Ironstein looks much scarier than the German doctor he is loosely based on.

There are two features that I quite like. If you have the comic book in inventory, you can read the comic in its entirety. You get to hear characters voice their own dialogue, and listen to some dramatic music plying in the background. Also, if you leave the game idle for more than five minutes, the screensaver is activated, and you need to press a key to wake the game up. I believe that a similar feature already exists in Sam & Max Hit the Road. The eleven-page manual boasts nice illustrations on every page, and the headings are quite amusing. It does not cover installation, but it tells you many details about the interface and the journal.

The Bad
It would have been great if IBI added the ability to access a map because walking all the way to the pinnacle becomes tedious, especially when you are navigating the jungle.

The Bottom Line
In conclusion, Flight of the Amazon Queen is a very good adventure game on par with LucasArt games. The graphics and sound is great, and the game even has some nice features including a built-in screen saver and a comic book that you can actually read. It is too bad that we didn't get more adventures starring Joe King.