It #8217;s the most advanced computer role-playing game ever: When you play you #8217;re really there #8212;in a dark dream teeming with evil creatures, danger-filled fortresses, and malevolent sorceries. The game plugs directly into your brain--no keyboard, no modem, no monitor. And for game hacker Arvin Rizalli and his friends, no cash up front, no questions asked . . . and no hope of rescue when the game goes horribly, deathly wrong. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Arvin Rizalli, his mother and six of his friends pirate a computer-generated, interactive role-playing game. No dull video game, the program plugs right into the players' brains, putting them in the middle of a daring quest to rescue a kidnapped princess. The quest moves at a breakneck pace, careening from forests to caves to deserts to enchanted cities. Along the way, Arvin and his company fight a dizzying array of orcs, wolves and other evildoers, but their biggest challenges come from Arvin's mother's mysterious, life-threatening illness and a bewildering assortment of dangerous glitches in the computer program. Readers who are fond of either sword and sorcery fantasy or role-playing games will not be able to put this swashbuckler down. Ages 12-up. Copyright 1991 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Gr 6-10-- As this fantasy adventure begins, eighth-grader Arvin Rizalli has just become Harek Longbow, warrior elf, in the first stage of a fantasy role-playing game that simulates reality. He is on a five day quest, goal to be discovered, with six other teenagers in various roles, and his mother, impelled by curiosity to play the game for the first time. As the quest progresses, Arvin realizes first that the program has some glitches complicating their activities, and later that his mother seems to have some other, unrelated problem that interferes with her ability to play but adds to the urgency with which they must finish the game and return to reality. Just as the game is missing certain levels and controls, this novel is lacking in some basic levels of character development, motivation, and relation to a real world. In their fantasy roles, the seven players encounter giant rats, trolls, werewolves, and more, with each meeting an excuse for swordplay and general mayhem, usually accompanied by death and destruction. Arvin describes his fellow players and speculates on which roles they have assumed--this is the extent of the characterization. The mechanism or procedure by which the program simulates reality is also not explained. Velde begins this game on page one and finishes it only four pages before the end of the book, leaving little room for further developments. Fantasy game players will enjoy this story as another level of the game, but readers looking for more may be as anxious as Arvin/Harek for the game and the novel to be over. --Susan L. Rogers, Chestnut Hill Academy, PACopyright 1991 Cahners Business Information, Inc. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Gr. 7-10. He knew he was really eighth-grader Arvin Rizalli, but he "felt like Harek Longbow of the Silver Mountains Clan, an elf warrior of the fourth level" with all the knowledge that Harek would have as well as the appearance of an elf. Arvin (the youngest of six teens) and, to his dismay, his mother (a decidedly amateur gamer) are hooked up to a pirated computer game, in which cerebral stimulation, instead of a dungeon master, sets the parameters--planting memories and providing an image of a place that feels, looks, sounds, smells, and tastes real. The group's quest: a five-day journey to rescue the kidnapped 10-year-old daughter of King Ulric the Fair. Violence becomes the norm as the gamers meet the usual fantasy creatures--wolves, trolls, goblins, giant rats, unfriendly humans--and acquire the expected magical amulets, but the questers are also threatened by voids in the program, made possible because no one is monitoring the game, and they also are confronted by an alarming illness suffered by Arvin's mother almost from the beginning, an illness unlike anything usually found in gaming. Although the presence of Arvin's mother, who doesn't quite fit in, and her illness, which turns out to be a real-life near-fatal aneurysm, are minor irritants, the story as a whole can be praised for the characterizations, an intriguing and believable mix of real-persona and assumed game identities, the well-realized setting, and the quest's surprise ending. (Reviewed Dec. 1, 1991)0152009604Sally Estes From: Syndetics Solutions, Inc. Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.