A Great Game, Badly Explained

DoMark’s “Virtual Reality Studio” ranks among the very best computer entertainment programs around. But with an $89.95 retail price, you’d think the game distributors might have had enough dough to spring for a decent set of instructions.

They tried, of course, even including a 75% superfluous videocassette to supplement the grossly dense prose and sleepy design of the printed manual.

But what we have here is a gross failure to communicate. And it turns your crucial first hours in “VR Studio” into frustrating drudgery. Too bad, for if you stick it out and hit-and-miss your way for a while, “VR Studio” gets much, much better.

Not a game per se, but a kind of electronic Erector set, “VR Studio” lets you build and roam through a boundless, three-dimensional landscape. You can look up, down or all around within each landscape. You can build an entire city--inside individual buildings as well as out on the streets. You can animate parts of the picture and even construct your own action game.

The landscapes are not like photographs. They are built through the manipulation and coloring of various two- and three-dimensional geometric forms. A tree, for example, might be constructed from a pyramid and an elongated cube; a city street from a long rectangle with a series of shorter narrower rectangles making up the yellow line down the middle; a house from a cube, a flat-top pyramid for a roof and rectangles for windows and doors. There is a 256-color palette, including an “invisible” color that creates transparent objects.

Within the stylistic confines imposed by the geometrics, there is nothing that can be conceived that cannot be created in “VR Studio.” If the makers knew how to tell people about it, they’d have a virtually perfect program.

Virtual Reality

Rating: ****

IBM & compatibles, Tandy, Amiga; 640K; mouse or joystick recommended. List: $89.95.

Computer games are rated on a five-star system, from one star for poor to five for excellent.