Issue No. 2 MARCH 1984

FEATURES

BELOW US THE SHADOWS, ABOVE US THE STARS
Profile on Starzone, and on Steve Turner.

FLYING HIGH!
We look at computer retail outlets. In this, the first of an occasional series, the CRASH team checks out W.H.Smith.

ARTICLES

PARDON ME, I’LL SAY THAT AGAIN
Franco Frey interfaces with the Currah Microspeech unit.

LEARNING AT PLAY
We begin an occasional look at educational software and some reviews.

REGULARS

EDITORIAL — YOUR LETTERS
Plus Advertisers Index and Reviews.

NEWS INPUT
A brief roundup for the month.

RUN IT AGAIN
In our second comparison we ROLL OUT THE BARREL and take a look at KONG games.

THE TERMINAL MAN
Comic Strip excitement as shipwrecked Arcadians discover the true identity of Cross...

DIY

FANTASY/CRASH SUPER QUIZ

CRASH HOTLINE CHARTS
The phones have been buzzing! This month we publish Britain’s first ever top selling software chart compiled from votes.

CRASH QUIZ
Test your knowledge of Adventure games.

GUIDE

FROGGY
Pick of the month from among the established games that are available.

SPECTRUM SOFTWARE GUIDE
Pages and pages reviewing both old and new games.

REVIEWS

REVIEWS IN THIS ISSUE
INCLUDE GAMES FROM Ultimate, Silversoft, Mikrogen, Rabbit, Mikrogen, Rabbit, Microsphere, Software Projects, Micromega, C.D.S. and many, many others.

- ABC, Artic
- ALCHEMIST, Imagine
- ANDROID 2, Vortex*
- APPLE JAM, DK’Tronics
- ATIC ATAC, Ultimate*
- BATTLE 1917, C.C.S.
- BIRDS & THE BEES, Bug-Byte
- THE BIRDS, Rabbit
- BUBBLE TROUBLE, Arcade
- BULL TABLES, Lotus-Soft
- CASTLE BLACKSTAR, S.C.R.
- CHUCKIE EGG, A&F
- CRUISE ATTACK, Mikrogen
- DIMENSION DESTRUCTORS, Artic
- DODGE CITY, Phoenix
- DOOMSDAY CASTLE, Fantasy
- EARTH DEFENCE, Artic
- ENERGY 30,000, E.L.M.
- FIGHTER PILOT, Digital Integration
- FREEZ’BEES, Silversoft
- FRENCH IS FUN, C.D.S.
- GAMES DESIGNER, Quicksilva
- THE GUARDIAN, P.S.S.
- HOUSE OF THE LIVING DEAD, Phipps Assoc.
- HUMPTY DUMPTY MYSTERY, Widgit
- HUNCHBACK, Ocean
- I’M IN SHOCK, Artic
- KNOCKOUT, Mikrogen
- KRAKATOA, Abbex*
- LASERWARP, Mikrogen
- MAGIC MEANIES, C.D.S.
- MICROBOT, Softek
- MR. WIMPY, Ocean
- MOUNTAINS OF KET, Incentive
- 1984, Incentive
- OMEGA RUN, C.R.L.
- PAINTBOX, Print’n’Plotter
- PARATROOPERS, Rabbit
- PATHFINDER, Widgit
- PAT THE POSTMAN, Mikrogen
- PI-EYED, Automata
- POTTY PAINTER, Rabbit
- PUNCHY, Mr Micro
- THE PYRAMID, Fantasy
- ROBOT RIOT, Silversoft
- ROBOT RUNNER, Longman
- ROMMEL’S REVENGE, Crystal
- SCUBA DIVE, Durell*
- SPECIAL AGENT, Heinemann
- SPEED DUEL, DK’Tronics
- STARCLASH, Micromega
- STONKERS, Imagine
- SUPER SNAILS, Games Machine
- THRUSTA, Software Projects
- TRIAD, Amba
- WHEELIE, Microsphere*

* New Game of the Month

Editor

Roger Kean

Designer

Oliver Frey

Consultant editor

Franco Frey

Staff Writers

Lloyd Mangram, Rod Bellamy

Advertisement Manager

John Edwards

Production Designer

Michael Arienti

Cover illustration

Oliver Frey

Transcriptions

Matthew Wilson and Dave Foreman, http://www.crashonline.org.uk/

Additional review transcriptions

Chris Bourne, http://www.zxspectrumreviews.co.uk/

BELOW US THE SHADOWS, ABOVE US THE STARS

The Professional Programmer

Enter the professional programmer: Steve Turner and his assistant, Andrew Braybrook have recently entered the field of writing software for home computers on a full time basis. Their first program, 3D Space Wars has reached new heights of realism in its graphic design and ingenious construction. Andrew Hewson writes after his recent meeting with Steve and Andrew.

Steve lives in Essex with his wife and little son, Mark (with another child expected soon). He was thirty this year, a fact that made Steve think carefully about his future and decide to take a radical and some would say risky step.

Steve began to learn programming when he was about 15 years old. His career in computers really started when he attended one of the early TOPS (Training Opportunities Scheme) courses six years ago. After this he entered the Civil Service as a Clerical Assistant. He quickly became a programmer despite not having the necessary two years experience. He became dissatisfied with his work however and left the Civil Service to join one of the world’s largest insurance brokers.

He worked for four or five years making financial developments on ICL and IBM mainframe computers. At first he enjoyed the atmosphere in a big insurance company who insure, through Lloyds, everything up to Concorde and the Space Shuttle. He became a specialist, converting systems from other machines to IBM etc. He was appointed a team leader working on his own systems.

Steve has always been interested in home computers, and owned a ZX80 for some years. He became more interested in the hardware — how the chips and circuits work and so learned about assemblers to help him understand more about it. He also tried writing games on the ZX80 but soon decided that that was a dead loss.

When the ZX81 was introduced into the market, Steve decided not to buy. However, when the Spectrum came out, he must have been one of the first people to buy the new model and despite working full time still, he laboured in earnest to get the most out of this new machine. He dreamed up some good ideas for games and soon found that to achieve the effects he wanted, he needed new techniques. The games on the market at that time were, in his opinion, rather amateurish in many cases. For months, he worked into the small hours of the night perfecting new techniques and eventually produced a game, unlike any that had been written at that time. He submitted it to four software houses and three wanted to market it for him.

At this point, Steve was beginning to feel disillusioned with working for someone else. He decided that after spending over half his life enjoying working on his home computers in his own time, he was ready to become self employed and use his talents for his own benefit. When Hewson Consultants offered him a contract he decided to start working full time on writing software for home computers.

The game he wrote, 3D Space Wars took about five months to develop. Most of the time was spent in detailed graphic design and of course in developing the new techniques needed for this powerful game. Since then, Steve has developed 3D Seiddab Attack. This took three months to produce, most of which was spent designing it. Using many of the techniques learned with 3D Space Wars the actual writing took less time than its predecessor.

Now Steve is concentrating on another new game, called Lunar Attack. So far it has taken three months development and involves a lot more than either of the two previous games, because Steve is using the full potential of the 48K Spectrum for the first time. Previously, the graphics had been compromised so that the games would run on a 16K Spectrum.

Steve has other ideas which at this stage he is not prepared to divulge. The market for home computer software, Steve feels, is going to change, and he would like to see the whole standard of software improve. He would like to see more arcade quality programs, professionally produced and less amateur-basic programming which makes up so many at present. The public has often in the past been disappointed by the programs which have not matched in performance the pretty pictures on the boxes.

In the future, Steve thinks that people will expect more and more from programs. He expects more powerful programs with more depth — more like novels than sketches. He sees the welding of the graphical and word type adventure game, so that players can continue for hours with the same program. At present adventure games rarely have any graphics — perhaps just stills. Steve sees no reason why far better graphics cannot be incorporated. In the long term future, Steve predicts a major revolution in the entertainment industry. This would involve interactive entertainment: instead of watching a film, you’ll be able to take part in the film and help set the course of it. The film and TV industries will have to work with the computer industry. Already in the US they are starting to use laser disc technology for the storage of pictures. This forms a background to the storyline which is handled by a computer.

As a force on the market, Steve soon realised that his impact would be greater if he could employ others of his own calibre. He also would find it beneficial to be able to bounce ideas off someone with the same technical expertise. So he invited 23 year old Andrew Braybrook to work with him.

Andrew worked at Marconi in Chelmsford, where he was a trainee programmer in the computer centre. Using CMS, CICS and Cobol, but few assemblers, he worked with a suite of IBMs. After four years he had become a trainee analyst and programmer. He had always written computer games in his spare time, using Cobol to throw up games rather than text on the firm’s computers.

After two years at this job, his Dad bought Andrew a ZX81, and he began to dabble in Basic. Andrew bought himself a Dragon 32 which he found preferable with its better keyboard and colours to play with. He saw Steve Turner’s work and became interested in it. He began to try to collate his ideas on the Dragon to see what could be achieved.

Three months ago Steve offered Andrew the chance to join up with him in his business and Andrew took it up without a second thought. Now his computing skills are more obvious and appreciated than when he worked in a big company, which gives Andrew a lot of satisfaction.

Steve and Andrew find that in the first stages of designing a game, they work mostly individually, with a strong competitive spirit to produce the best idea. In the final stages of game design they work together with plenty of discussion as they fine-tune their games. Steve works for the most part on the Spectrum, whilst Andrew works on the Dragon. They are each experts on their own preferred machines, yet don’t really know each others machine. On the whole, Steve does most of the graphical design work and Andrew works more on the programming techniques. Andrew feels that the market for Dragon software is very undeveloped with plenty of room for his exciting programs.

Design is problematic. It is not easy to dream up a good idea. Steve doesn’t think it is the sort of thing you can teach anyone. He doesn’t think there are any rules. He wonders if in the long run it needs a different sort of person to come up with the ideas. He gets some of his ideas from the pub on a Sunday!

Steve is quite happy to leave the distribution and marketing to the experts at Hewson’s, so that he can concentrate on the artistic part of producing the games. He feels that the talent needed to come up with these brilliant games is perhaps not the same as that needed by a skilled artist, but that perhaps the home computer game is a difficult medium to use with just as many challenges as paint and canvas. Ultimately we like to see something nice on the screen. He wonders if one day his work will be displayed as 20th century art in art galleries? I wonder what games will emerge when Steve enters his abstract period??

Head for the Star zone

At the 9th. ZX Microfair in December, Starzone’s game Zaxxan caused quite a stir when it appeared on the Crash Micro Games Action stand. The game on which it is based is, of course, the famous arcade 3D scramble game Zaxxon. Since it showed up in British arcades (and rarely at that) Zaxxon has become a bit of a cult. Naturally Spectrum owners were eagerly awaiting the inevitable appearance of a version for their machine. Months went by — nothing. Was everyone frightened of doing what would be a very difficult program on the Spectrum? It seemed so. But then a brand new name, Starzone, appeared with a small black and white ad for their Zaxxan.

Starzone is not a big, financially well heeled company at all, in fact they are four young men with an average age of only 17.5, and Starzone, which has operated at a profit and continues to do so, was started with hardly any money at all. David Cowell (the oldest at 19) disarmingly told us that the basic idea had been to raise insurance money for cars, which could be done cheaper through a company! David refers to himself as Starzone’s Co-ordinator. Tim Lake (18) is the Advertising and Promotions manager, which leaves brothers Tim Mardon and Nial Mardon.

Tim, also 18, describes his function as a sort of accountant, whilst the youngest of the group, Nial (15) is the senior programmer. It was Nial who wrote Zaxxan.

The three older members are between school and university and intend continuing with their education despite the company, while Nial is still at Abingdon school. As they talked, it became apparent that the common link is Abingdon School (near Oxford), where the other three were also in attendance. One of their other games, Dalek Dan, has been written by another pupil at Abingdon, Malcolm Salmon. David added, rather apologetically, that the third game, River Raider, just happens to be by another Abingdonite. We began to suspect that Abingdon is trying to rival Liverpool as Silicon Chip Hill!

All four members of Starzone have computer programming experience but Nial is the most experienced in Z80 machine code. He used to own a TRS 80 and had developed a ‘Scramble’ type game for it, but when the Spectrum came out he bought one and the first program done for it was Zaxxan. As the TRS 80 and Spectrum both work on the Z80 processor, there was little problem for Nial in adapting to the needs of the Spectrum.

Zaxxan was in fact ready quite some time back, but the boys’ ‘A’ levels held up operations, so that the game was only ready to market in September. Test ads proved there was a market for it, and now they have commissioned full colour artwork for the inlay cards.

Meanwhile Nial is working flat out on a new game with the working title of Supercharger. It’s a ‘Pole Position’ type game. At the ZX Microfair they had a good chance to look at all the various competitors in the field and decided that no one has yet come up with the definitive Spectrum version. Nial is ‘sub- contracting’ the title screen and sound effects, which are intended to be spectacular, and he is aiming for a highly playable game incorporating features like humpback bridges, tunnels with only headlamps seen, a suspension bridge, hills, bends, an ambulance to watch out for, and the best 3D perspective view yet seen. There will be a hi and lo gear change with ice on the road as an extra hazard to the other cars. He’s also looking into the possibility of rain (giveaway mackintoshes with every cassette perhaps?)

Meanwhile the Starzone team — a very calm bunch too — sit (metaphorically) and wait for the reaction to Zaxxan. They got a mixed reception at the ZX Microfair with people either loving it or complaining it wasn’t enough like the original. ‘People are very unrealistic in their expectations of the Spectrum,’ said David Cowell philosophically. But their Zaxxan remains the only version, and it’s a very good one. Let’s hope University doesn’t entirely swamp their programming energies. We mustn’t be complacent, we need new writing talent all the time.

Much of the phenomenal interest in home computers has to do with their exposure in the high streets of Britain, and few chain stores have done as much to promote that interest as W.H. Smith and J. Menzies. This month our roving reporter took a whirlwind trip a round sum of W.H. Smith’s bigger computer shops.

John Rowland the Buying Manager for W.H. Smith, who heads a dynamic young team, says that the home computer has transformed the present-buying market this year. A nice story involves an eight year old computer customer who, annoyed by the proximity of the toy department, asked for it to be moved away so he could concentrate on more serious keyboard matters. The home computer also seems to have broken down what are thought of as traditional socio-economic pigeon holes, which is to say, the North is poor and unemployed and so can’t afford such luxuries.

“Our strongest selling computer shops are in the principal provincial towns,” says John Rowland. “Newcastle, in fact, is the biggest selling shop, but Birmingham, Edinburgh, Manchester and Sheffield are also very big.” It underlines two points, firstly that there is more unemployment in the North, and games players there have more time on their hands, but secondly, that people in the North have as much interest in computers as anywhere else — perhaps even more. Manchester and Liverpool, for instance, are very important centres of software development, and in each of those cities W H. Smith have busy and well laid out areas devoted especially to computers and software. The Spectrum is the biggest selling item — hardware and software accounting for approximately 45% of the market.

The new W.H. Smith Computer Shop, at London’s Heathrow airport — serving travel-weary computer freaks.

In London the W.H. Smith in Hammersmith (situated in the new shopping precinct) has a large computer shop. Like banks, shops are very much an extension of the manager. At Hammersmith the manager is Jack Cox. Hammersmith was one of the first stores in Britain where W.H. Smith thought of trying out ‘electronic leisure’. Thanks largely to Jack’s efforts it proved to be a rip-roaring success. But Jack isn’t what you would immediately think of as a computer entrepreneur. He happens to be a grandfather, not in the age group normally associated with computer freakism. His grand-daughter is though, and some of her interest has rubbed off so that now Jack Cox is fully fascinated by the subject. The computer shop at Hammersmith is more fully staffed than any other individual department in the shop. He reckons that the thing which outshines their competitors is that they put a strong emphasis on training staff to be helpful. Jack is aware that the most with-it people are the kids. Among his Saturday staff is a youngster who proved to be so knowledgeable that the boy is now training the older staff — including Jack Cox himself.

A wholly new and rather surprising venture is W.H. Smith computer shops in the departure lounges of airports. To date they have units at Terminals 1 and 2 at Heathrow. These have been built with the absolute co-operation of the British Airports Authority and have been going now for three months. Once the go-ahead was given W.H. Smith’s own fitting department moved in and built the purpose-designed units in only eight weeks. They have special glass shutters so that when they are closed at night travellers can still see as much as they can during the day.

The units have proved very successful and receipts are described as “really very good”. There have even been several incidents when an individual has spent over £1000 at a go! The man who has set up and organised these airport concessions is Bill Rowe, but he is now moving on and from March Roy Hawker takes over responsibility. Other airports are under consideration, both W.H. Smith and the BAA convinced that they will do as well in other locations.

It might seem surprising that computer shops at airports should prove so popular, but perhaps a bigger surprise is that a customer profile indicates that a large percentage of customers are businessmen (after all, this is the home computer market). W.H. Smith suspect that there is a large element of ‘daddy’s lies’ behind the claims that purchasers are only getting a machine or software for their sons!

The decision to try out computer shops actually inside the terminal lounges was not taken as a complete gamble. Three years ago W.H. Smith had a small shelf devoted to home computers at Heathrow Terminal 2 and the turn over was phenomenal, so they thought it would be a good idea to expand. It certainly seems to have been!

Nevertheless, there is an awareness at W.H. Smith that the market can be fickle in such areas. Says John Rowland, “If the computer becomes a useful tool then it has a long future. If it’s only used as a toy it’s not so good. The toy market is renowned for its fads.”

Perhaps the growth of educational software will help ensure the future of the home computer. If John Rowland’s experience is anything to go by, the growth of the educational market this coming year is going to be very big. “We are being bombarded by it,” he says. “Software publishers of any size seem determined to bring out educational programs.”

There are, of course, fads in anything and computers may prove to be no different, but we at CRASH believe that the games market is here to stay for a long time, because all sorts of developments are taking place all the while, which will completely revolutionise the games you can buy and the machines you will be able to play them on. Meanwhile, it’s down to the retail outlets to provide the opportunities for you to find what you want — even in those boring minutes before take off at Heathrow! W.H. Smith seem very pleased with their new venture and it’s certainly flying high!

A typically busy day at one of the Computer Shops in a larger WH Smith high street store.

‘PARDON ME,
I’LL SAY THAT
AGAIN!’
FRANCO FREY takes a NOI$$$Y listen to the

Ever had your mother constantly nagging at you while playing something interesting? Well, now you can improve the situation by having the Spectrum do the same. Impossible? Not any more with the Microspeech unit. The only difference is that the voice will sound like a Dalek rather than a Siren (your mother) and that you can switch it off whenever you feel like it (Try that with your mother)!

Considering the power of voice, the unit is very compact and installing it is kid’s stuff. You also gain a beep amplifier, because the sound is directed through your TV speaker. The detailed Programming Manual and Demonstration Tape display the whole ‘voice’ Spectrum at your disposal and if you can’t get to grips with it, try listening to your mother now and again.

Technically the unit is an allophone system, which means that like you and I it doesn’t care about the writing or spelling of the words, but simply speaks by concatenating speech sounds (allophones). To this purpose the string variable s$ has been reserved, which can be assigned by a LET statement:

LET s$ = "ssaavEE": PAUSE 1

and on pressing ENTER the unit will detect with the PAUSE period the s$ and the inbuilt allophone interpreter will convert the allophone symbols within the string into speech code and place this into a FIFO (first in first out) buffer. The code in the buffer will automatically be output to the speech chip, while the BASIC program continues.

The FIFO buffer resides near the top of memory between RAMTOP and UDG area and depending on the length of the buffer RAMTOP will have to be lowered with a CLEAR statement. The speech unit initialises RAMTOP on start-up to allow for a 256 byte buffer (RAMTOP = 65111 on a 48K machine) but this can be increased to the detriment of the BASIC memory area. There are 64 allophone codes and therefore 64 allophone symbols to choose from.

A one step intonation facility is provided (Daleks also get excited and raise their voices!) by using upper case letters (adds decimal 64 to the allophone code). You can create a word or phrase library by assigning string variables consecutively to the reserved s$ string (always with PAUSE 1 in between), or you can concatenate individual string variables to form s$. A more compact solution is to use a string array and concatenate and even slice the individual array elements.

If you don’t mind operating with allophone codes directly, you can bypass the interpreter and operate directly on the FIFO buffer by POKEing the codes directly into the buffer memory area. Once loaded you set the stack pointer to one below the last item in the buffer to be voiced by POKEing the stack pointer and — bedlam! Your Spectrum becomes an instant party killer! Loading the buffer can be executed with a small BASIC loader program either via INPUT command or via DATA statements:

10  LET a = 65361
20  READ b: LET x = b
30  FOR n = 1 TO (x - 1): READ b
40  POKE a,b
50  LET a = a - 1
60  NEXT n
70  POKE 65365, 255
80  POKE 65364, (65361 - a)
100 DATA 21,41,39,24,24,24,37,1,16,70,
41,39,53,3,19,55,3,34,14,20,13,55

10  LET a = 65361
20  INPUT "INPUT "; (65362 - a);
". CODE = "; b: IF b - O THEN
GO TO 80
30  POKE a, b
40  LET a = a - 1
50  GO TO 20
100 FOR c = 65361 TO (a + 1) STEP -1
110 PRINT c, PEEK c
120 NEXT c
130 PRINT a, 65361 - a: PRINT:
PRINT "PRESS S TO RUN"
140 IF INKEY$ = "s" THEN GO TO 200
150 GO TO 140
200 POKE 65365,255
210 POKE 65364,(65361 - a)

Whatever way you choose, always make sure your stack area doesn’t drop below RAMTOP or your BASIC program will crash... In a similar way the machine code afficionado can (man) handle the FIFO and stack pointer directly from assembler or native code and so incorporate voice into his silent Dalek game. Mind you, in space nobody can hear even the Spectrum scream!

If all this is softwearing you down and you are ‘first and foremost’ a game player, have no fear: The Currah Microspeech is rapidly becoming an industry standard add-on and the list below gives a hint of the games which already include voice facility. But beware of using the speech unit in combination with non compatible programs: BASIC and m/c programs will undoubtedly crash or develop unwanted and potentially dangerous side effects due to the clashing of the FIFO buffer area with the program’s own stack or program area (Play DEATHCHASE or ATIC ATAC and you’ll know what I mean).

If you’re wondering where to plug in your joystick interface, be ready for a surprise: Neither Kempston nor Protek, or most of the other joystick interfaces make provision for an extension edge connector except AGF Cambridge and Sinclair (Interface II). It would appear that most of these companies rely on the fact that they are the last link in the add-on chain and can price their products more competitively due to the cost reduction. And since Currah would appear to have been thinking along the same lines, it will be up to you the games player to sort out the bottleneck: The only sensible solution is a 56 way flat cable loom which plugs via a 28 position doublesided 0.1" IDC edge connector socket to the Spectrum with two or three IDC edge connector plugs along the length of the loom, so that the various add-ons may be connected up together (A motherboard with several edge connectors ports will also do). Certainly not a cheap solution. Considering the fact that a games player will almost certainly require a joystick and the speech unit, this is definitely a huge drawback.

Throughout the usage of the Currah Microspeech you will become increasingly neurotic and paranoid, believing to hear each and every word or thought repeated by an inhuman voice. Before consulting your psychiatrist, try entering LET keys = 0 and you will find immediate remedy and absolute tranquility while you key in your latest software creation: This command will disable the voicing of all the BASIC keywords and printable characters and you will instantly be able to hear yourself think again...

CRITICISM

Simple and small unit. Also acts as only a sound amplifier by diverting BEEP sound to TV loudspeaker. Easy programming from BASIC and m/c as the unit is totally independent. It only requires feeding of a stack and setting of a stack pointer. But, as stack pointer and flagbytes reside in top of Spectrum memory: A) in BASIC, RAMTOP has to be moved down to protect this area; B) in m/c games, this area may already be used and system will crash or go funny. Fortunately more and more software houses take this into account. Allophone set is limited, but works well (for English language). Intonation limited to one step only. Various buffers may be used, switching between them by changing the stack pointers.

Price: High for a Spectrum add-on, but considering the complexity of the unit (speech chip controlled by allophone symbol interpreter/microprocessor) a small miracle. The unit comes packaged in an attractive card box with transparent window, complete with demonstration cassette, programming manual and all necessary connections. May be used with either 16K or 48K Spectrum. Price £29.90.

LUNAR JETMAN

Ultimate

BLASTERMIND

Martech

BIRDS & BEES

Bug-Byte

COLOURCLASH

Romik

SHARK ATTACK

Romik

3D MONSTER CHASE

Romik

VOICE CHESS

Artic

THE GOLDEN BATON

Digital Fantasia

THE TIME MACHINE

Digital Fantasia

ARROW OF DEATH I

Digital Fantasia

ARROW OF DEATH II

Digital Fantasia

FIREBIRDS

Lyversoft

LUNAR RESCUE

Lyversoft

MINED-OUT

Quicksilva

GRAND PRIX DRIVER

Britannia

GOLF

Mr. Micro

BACK AGAIN

First of all may I take this opportunity to thank everyone of you who has written to CRASH to say how much you liked the launch issue of the magazine. A magazine like CRASH relies so heavily on the goodwill of its readers and the support of the software houses. I can already see that we are going to get a lot of feedback from you, and you can be sure that we shall do our level best to incorporate any ideas you may have. But I should also like to thank the software houses who have been so generous with their compliments.

A magazine is a living entity — a kind of three-way partnership between publisher, reader and advertiser. After all the advertiser is the one who produces the games that you want to buy. What the magazine has to do is act as a forum for information — and that’s what we intend to be. That is a major reason for the CRASH HOTLINE (which is obviously proving very popular too)! It offers the reader an opportunity to tell us (and in turn the software houses) what you enjoy. There may be some teething troubles with the HOTLINE because it has exceeded our expectations, so you may find it constantly engaged! We apologise for any inconvenience, and suggest you use the write-in coupon if you have problems. We are doing our best to make further arrangements to expand the phone system to cope. But keep it up!

Along the same lines of sussing out what you like, we are planning a CRASH QUESTIONAIRE for issue three. The more people who fill this in, the better and more accurate the results will be. It will help us in presenting information in a way you prefer, and we hope it will be of benefit to the software producers too. So look out for that next month.

THE TERMINAL MAN

I’d like to thank readers for all the nice letters that we have received already (as I write CRASH issue 1 has only been on sale for a week) and quite a number of you expressed an interest in our comic strip THE TERMINAL MAN. So to satisfy your curiosity, here a few details about the two people who make the strip possible.

Oliver Frey poses for a CRASH MICRO publicity still.

Artist Oliver Frey, who is also designer for CRASH Magazine, has been drawing comic strips for longer than he cares to remember starting off with IPC’s War Picture Library series of which he did over twenty. Some are being reprinted even now. He has also done a lot of illustrative work for the old Look & Learn and drew that publication’s strip The Trigan Empire for over a year before the comic was stopped. He had a close brush with Superman too. If you’ve seen the film (the first part that is), perhaps you remember at the very beginning, the little boy reading his Superman comic that then turned into the title sequence? The whole comic book was only two specially drawn pages which Oliver did for director Dick Donner to use in the film.

In recent months Oliver has been busy with several Dan Dare strips for the Eagle annuals, and has also drawn the weekly version in the comic. In The Terminal Man Oliver has been partly responsible for planting the seed of the idea in the writer’s mind.

Author of the The Terminal Man is Kelvin Gosnell. Kelvin wanted to be a pilot. Two physical drawbacks thwarted this ambition: less than perfect eyesight (medically undesirable) and a propensity to throw up during aerobatics (undesirable for cleaners of cockpits). He therefore resigned himself to a non-aerial life many years ago and was delighted, shortly afterwards, to discover that he not only enjoyed writing about flying but that people were willing to pay him money to do it.

His writing career started on the comic Action in 1975, scripting a World War 1 tale called Suicide Club. A long enthusiasm for science fiction was rekindled when he realised there was no SF comic in the UK. The result was the very successful 2000 AD comic launched in 1978 and a top seller today. Kelvin became its editor.

Since then he has handled a number of strip characters from Dan Dare in the UK to Storm in The Netherlands. He continues to handle feature work, particularly in aviation, since he discovered this gets him free flights in an assortment of flying machines. He cannot decide what has been his best aerial experience — playing at the Battle of Britain in a Tiger Moth v Chipmunk dogfight over Kent was good, but so was being ‘target for the day’ for an RAF rescue Sea King in Norfolk.

In last month’s issue we gave an incorrect price in the review for GRAND PRIX DRIVER by Britannia. The price of £5.95 quoted should have read £6.95.

Also, in our Guide section the review JUNGLE TROUBLE should have ascribed the game firmly to Durrell Software, the producers of the game, as Martech are actually Durrell’s distributor and have no hand in the writing or producing of the game. We apologise for our error.

LETTERS

Each month I’ll be choosing the best letter from the postbag, and, as well as publishing it, I’ll send the writer £12 worth of software of his or her choice (it can be two cassettes as long as they come within the £12). I’ve had to grovel on bended knee to the editor for this, so you’d better be grateful!

Send your letters to Lloyd Mangram, CRASH Forum. I can’t promise to print everything that comes in because space is precious (I’m told) but I’ll do my best.

I am shocked to see just how many letters we have received already. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining — but aren’t you all supposed to be banging away at that collapsing keyboard or something? Still, I guess it’s only fair that after us boring you half to death, you should be able to get your own back ...

Seriously though, thank you for the letters. Quite a lot have made the CRASH team blush to the roots of their dyed hair. There are some that if we printed them would make people believe I made them up. In the event it was a tough task to pick out a winner, especially as some cute cookies offered me bribes in the form of flattery (it’ll get you nowhere...) After some reflection I thought this plea from Mr. Ashton to treat the simulation game with more respect was the best of some very good letters.

THAT’S HOW IT SHOULD BE

First of all, congratulations on your new magazine. If further issues live up to the first, I am sure it will be a success. Reading your criticisms, I would however like to make a point.

There are basically two types of game — fantasy and real life. Fantasy games, arcades, mazes, dungeons, etc, are all figments of vivid imagination. Nobody knows how safely Horace can cross the road or how easy it will be to laser an alien space craft. Accordingly, speed is immaterial — the games designer can program the game as fast or slow as he wishes. In all these games the criticism that it is, perhaps, too slow can be valid.

On the other hand the real life games must be as realistic as possible. Yes, motorbikes can travel quickly, aircraft land at speed and accidents happen fast whether the flight is simulated or not.

But please remember one thing — as an ex-R.N. rating I can assure you that submarines do dive as slowly as Hunter-Killer works.

I have been a table-top wargamer for some years and Hunter-Killer seems to me to be the first real, and good, computer war game in the strictest sense of the word. This, to my mid, is a ‘real-life’ game, and the speed of the sub, the controls that need using, etc. are excellent. Torpedoes do run that slowly, and the agonising wait that the real submarine Commander goes through is ideally represented here.

If you want fast action, buy either a fantasy game or a real-life game of a fast subject. Please do not dock points from Protek for being amazingly accurate.
W.H.Ashton

Thank you for your kind comments, Mr. Ashton. This is the kind of reaction we want to hear from our readers. Of course, you are right about Hunter-Killer. I’m afraid I’m a poor judge as I am not by any means a dedicated war-gamer, so the slow simulations tend to leave me cold. Unfortunately, a lot of our young reviewers at the moment are dedicated arcade players and less given to the joys of more thought-provoking games perhaps. Hopefully the Reviewers’ Competition in the last issue will arouse some adventurers and war-gamers into action on our poor editor’s behalf!
L.M.

SOON TO BE

I have just bought the first edition of CRASH and I cannot wait for the second one to come out. Although I am not yet a Spectrum owner, I hope to be one soon, as I have had one on order for the past three weeks.

I have also bought a number of other magazines and software reviews, but none of them go into so much detail as CRASH. This magazine will certainly help me and I hope many others in choosing the best programs to buy. I also liked the article on interfaces and joysticks and I hope you continue to include items like this each month.. All in all, 75p well spent! Keep up the good work.
D.M. Markillie

HACKERS

Just thought I’d write to say what a great mag you’re writing. Does that get me the 12 quid? No?? Ah well, we always live in hope! Anyway, at last us Spurtocratic Hackers (Spectrum users with an affinity to modems, alternative databases, shooting many a green man and loud noises) have got a decent magazine that deals specifically with the Spectrum. Many readers may not know it but the best add-on for the Spectrum in my opinion is the Prism VTX 5000 modem. It’s great fun. Especially using Micronet — all that software with no postal delays!

As for my favourite software, that has to be Lunar Jetman, Atic Atac (completed), Ant Attack and Chequered Flag.

Oh well, I suppose I’ve said enough, do I get the £12? grovel, grovel!
Stephen Lacey aka The Mad Hacker.

Keep up this unbridled quality of letter writing, Stephen, and you could earn yourself a fortune in no time!
LM

A LONG READ

I’ve nothing earth-shattering to say about games as I am very new to the scene, but I would like to congratulate you on your superb new magazine. Please don’t alter it, it is just perfect the way it is. I’ve never known a magazine to take me so long to read, not because it was boring but because there was so much information crammed into it. The reviews were the finest and most complete available and are the only ones I’ll be reading in future to determine whether or not I buy a game. Even though I only had my Spectrum for Christmas, I spent the previous couple of months buying and reading computer mags to determine which I would continue with once I had my micro.

I thought I had seen the best until seeing your (delayed but worth it) mag, which forced me to change my mind. Keep up the excellent work and best wishes for the future.
Ian Foster

Thanks for your comments, Ian. Sorry about the delay too! We had an issue lined up for November 18 last, but there were so many new titles due out before Christmas that the news trade asked us to delay until after the holiday. By the time we knew of this delay it was too late to pull out those two ads that appeared with the earlier date.
LM

NO LISTINGS

Thanks for the new magazine CRASH. It’s just what the majority of Spectrum owners have been waiting for. I hope you don’t lose sales because of the name CRASH. I think SPECTRUM should have been part of the title.

Please review utility programs. I’m glad you haven’t cluttered up the pages with program listings, which never compare with the commercial games. I don’t like comic strips, I’ll look to the BEANO for those.
R.J. Hammond

Some interested newsagents have said the same about CRASH too but we think people will get to know the name soon enough. Utility programs will have an increasing area of CRASH as we go along and will soon be appearing in the Guide Section I’m told. Program Listings were never, ever on the agenda for CRASH! There’s just not the room anyway. Sorry about the comic, mind you you won’t find something like THE TERMINAL MAN in Beano. The overall plans for the story are extremely interesting — it’s going to be quite mammoth. You might argue that it doesn’t look though it’ll have much to do with computers, but in fact it will, in an indirect way. But more importantly it’s intended as a piece of entertainment with strategy, adventure and arcade overtones. I don’t see why only Quicksilva should be allowed to get away with the Faluvian Empire!
LM

ATIC ACRASH

I am writing to you for advice. I would like to know why, when I load ATIC ATAC with my Currah Microspeech unit plugged in, the game crashes when I press 0 to start. The Currah advertisement states that ATIC ATAC and LUNAR JETMAN are usable. LUNAR JETMAN works, so why doesn’t ATIC ATAC? Hope you can help me.
M. Beynon

I think if you read through the review on the Currah Microspeech unit in this issue, you will be able to see why ATIC ATAC crashes when played with the unit in the Spectrum. I’m only a key pusher myself, and I don’t know what goes on inside these things at all! What’s more surprising is that the Currah ad does state that ATIC ATAC is compatible. I’ll check into this, but I suspect the reason is simply that agreements were reached between the Currah people and various software houses that certain games would use the facility. ATIC ATAC was a little delayed in its release, and I think there may have been alterations made at the last moment to fit the program into 48K which made it impossible to play with the Microspeech unit. But of course, by that time the Currah ads were already in magazines.
LM

WHY SO MUCH?

Why do software houses have to charge so much for their software tapes? Most tapes are priced around five to six pounds, for that you usually get a few minutes of tape with a program recorded once or twice on each side. For around the same price you can purchase a music cassette with much more value for money.

Congratulations, CRASH is fantastic, it is just what people need to read before they spend their money on computer tapes.
S. Hall

It isn’t really fair to compare a music cassette with a software one. Even a reasonable music album is expected to sell about half a million copies in its life time — chart toppers sell several times that.

According to unofficial figures approximately 25 million software cassettes were sold in the last 12 months or something like the equivalent of 15 top selling music albums. As you know, there were many more than 15 Spectrum games last year! What it means, is that an individual title, even a popular one, isn’t selling in the quantities a music cassette sells in, and don’t forget, the majority of Spectrum cassettes are sold only in the UK. Now if you look at how the ‘cake’ is sliced up, as they say, take a tape costing £5.95. Knock of the VAT to leave a price of £5.17. Of course the software house doesn’t get that by the time the retail shop, wholesaler and distributor have taken their cut the software house receives about 40% of the price, or £2.07. Off this they must dock the cost of duplication, cassette and box and inlay printing, say 50p. Then they are paying the author a royalty on the selling price of probably 10% (52p) which leaves them with £1.05. Out of this ‘profit’ must come the cost of advertising and the overhead costs associated with running any business like salaries, rent etc. As you can imagine, at the end of the day the software house isn’t left with all that much. Of course, if they could sell a million on one title alone, it might be a different picture!
LM

SINCLAIR TALKS TO CRASH

Details have just been arranged for Alison Maguire, Software Manager for Sinclair, to be interviewed by three CRASH reviewers and readers. By the time you read this, the interview will have taken place on the 9th February at Sinclair’s London Offices. The interview will be published in next month’s CRASH.

ABACUS ARCADE PACK

The multi-digited gamesters Abacus, have just released a four game pack under the name Space Odyssey. The four games are Sentinel, Fireflash, Avenger and Proteus, and they all form a continuing arcade story. Avenger sold 40,000 copies, while Sentinel remained in Smith’s top ten for months. Fireflash received a rave CRASH review in last month’s issue. Author Kevin Flynn has recently completed Proteus, which unfortunately we can’t review until next month due to pressures of space. Abacus are still selling the game separately at £5.95 each but you can buy all four games in the ‘arcade pack’ for only £14.95 — a saving of almost £9.

The Quill Drips Gold

Gilsoft, whose adventure writing utility The Quill has been responsible for helping many authors produce Adventure Games across a range of software houses in recent months, have announced a series of Adventure Games for the 48K Spectrum.

The series is called The Gold Collection and contains eight titles. One is yet to be announced but the others are Magic Castle and Diamond Trail, which have been out for some time (and were the first to be written with The Quill), Africa Gardens, The Adventures of Barsak the Dwarf, Spy Plane, Devil’s Island and Mindbender.

Africa Gardens by Tom Davies takes its name from the hotel featured in the game and is set at the turn of the century. It has graphics and displays The Quill’s versatility with UDG’s and block graphics. Barsak the Dwarf is written by P & V Napolitano. You must help Barsak collect nine treasures of his forefathers and ‘it’ is set in a mythological underworld. Spy Plane by D. Brammer, has an unusual setting for an adventure in as much as the game takes place in the plane and over the locations. You’re flying over locations set in the Arzelan sea, gaining military intelligence. It should be realistic as the author is a pilot and used to be in the RAF. Devil’s Island by Colin Smith poses you the problem of escaping from the infamous French island prison. You must face the prison guards, the jungle and unfriendly natives, find a boat and escape to the mainland. Mindbender by B. Jenkinson has you suddenly transported by aliens using some mysterious ray to their underground base. You have the mental power to resist and escape, and your task is to locate the source of the ray and destroy it. This game starts off, apparently, with a description which includes a desk with a Quill sitting on it!

All titles in the Gold Collection will be available individually, priced £5.95 each and Gilsoft hope to have them ready for release sometime in February this month in their own distinctive packaging.

MICROMEGA SCREENS IN BOOTS

Shops are normally too busy to be able to demonstrate games to their customers, but software house, Micromega, are making attempts to alter that. They have recently set up demonstration stands in two of the larger Boots stores where there are large computer sections.

The demonstrations have taken place at Boots’ branches in Portsmouth and Slough, and involved two members of staff with six Spectrums and screens. A spokesperson for Micromega told us that the idea had proved popular, and that in discussions with Boots there had been an informal agreement to expand the service to other stores across the country.

Boots carry all four Micromega products, Haunted Hedges, Luna Crabs, Starclash and, of course, the fabulous Deathchase. Micromega see the demonstration stands as a part of company support for their games as they do no mail order, only supplying retail outlets directly and through distributors like Websters. The call for games has been enormous. Only the Thursday before Christmas Websters asked for several thousand copies of Deathchase and Micromega made a super human effort and was able to deliver them before lunch the next day.

The next game from the company, as we reported in last month’s issue, is another Derek Brewster title, which he gave a working title of Invasion 2000. At the moment Micromega haven’t decided what to call it, but they told us that it is going to be a big seller.

Reclusive programmer Matthew Smith makes a rare appearance for the CRASH camera between manically mining.

JET SET FROLICS

After a visit to deepest Woolton (Liverpool) we can report that the errant Jet Set Willy is alive and well, if a trifle late in emerging from that Surbiton Mine of his. Author Matthew Smith told us that the main reason for the delay was due to the builders who have not finished work on decoration of Willy’s enormous new mansion. The size of the house is a rather daunting, as it contains 64 rooms, and is therefore some three times bigger than the mines below! Each room is in an indescribable mess because when Willy’s new found fairweather friends have a party, do they have a party!

Alan Maton of Software Projects had hoped the game would be released before Christmas and planned accordingly. But the sheer size of the game, the amount of animation in it, and the fact that it is intended to be a big improvement on Manic Miner has caused Matthew the kind of headaches that Willy himself would appreciate. Another week should see the program work finished, we were told. The inserts are already printed and waiting — so, come on Matthew, get off your Eugene’s Lair and back to the surface!

FALUVIAN REPORT

Quicksilva have just launched a club members only magazine called The Game Lords Megazine. It’s eight pages of game hints, news on the company’s products, a chart and competitions. There’s also a report on the Faluvian Empire, which someone at Quicksilva had threatened to write a novel about. I hope this isn’t a cheapskate way out of writing the real thing — don’t they know how many Spectrum owners are saving up to buy the Chronicles of the Faluvian Empire when the trilogy of novels are released? Whether you’re an Xxkraan Raider or a mere earthbound alien-zapper, details on the club are available from Quicksilva.

Terry Grant — Rabbit’s software director.

ROLAND MOVES HIS WARREN

Software house Rabbit have recently moved from their premises in Harrow to a new home in Wealdstone — in fact it’s called ‘The Warren’ and is a suitable name as Roland Rabbit appears to be breeding games faster than a hamster fed on oysters. At the same time 18 year old Terry Grant has been promoted to the post of Software Director. Terry has worked at Rabbit for some time, and has been responsible for the production of 15 games now. Rabbit consider the concept of a software director to be a new one, and they feel there is a need for such a job. Terry, who studied computer science before joining Rabbit, feels that a detached view of a game will often produce more realistic results and that it’s very easy for a programmer to get too far inside the game. His role is to ensure that Rabbit games have consistently high levels of playability and will maintain the interest of players for longer periods.

COMCON TAKES OFF

In last month’s joystick article, we reported on a programmable joystick interface called Comcon and made by Frel Ltd. CRASH is always interested in any small company making a debut with an item of interest to games players, and it’s doubly pleasant when the company turns out to be a close neighbour in little old Ludlow itself. A Frel spokesperson has now informed us that production models of the interface will soon be available. It features a matrix board representing the Spectrum keyboard, and is said to be the simplest method of programming a universal joystick so far.

Arcadians Mark Butler & David Lawson.

IMAGINE-ATION

Known colloquially as the ‘Glass Tower’ in micro-software conscious Liverpool, Imagine’s new headquarters office in Sir Thomas Street is actually a beautifully renovated four storey building of red brick. Appropriately enough, it is situated only a short distance from the site of where Liverpool’s famous Cavern Club used to be. Appropriate because there are some uncanny parallels between Imagine-ation and Beatlemania.

When Brian Epstein discovered the Beatles playing in the Cavern they were unknowns. Epstein was an accountant running a record business. Imagine’s Director of Operations is Bruce Everiss. In the late 70s Bruce Everiss started up a unique shop called Micro Digital, one of the first shops in the UK to sell home computers over the counter to an unsuspecting populace. The shop was a great success, so much so that Mr. Everiss attracted the attention of the high street giants, and eventually the business was sold to Laskys. Like Brian Epstein’s record shop in the early 60’s, Micro Digital was a hot bed of young talent — in this case not musicians but software enthusiasts. Among the employees were names later to emerge like David Lawson and Mark Butler. After Micro Digital went to Laskys the various enthusiasts merged their energies into what became Bug-Byte, but with so many young, go-ahead talents involved it was not surprising that they should want to go their separate ways. Lawson and Butler founded Imagine and released Lawson’s program Arcadia.

The infant company was a phenomenal success and within months had earned its first six million pounds selling Spectrum games. With growth had to come planning so Lawson and Butler did the obvious and asked Bruce Everiss to come and run the company.

Today, just a year after it started Imagine is a company with over 100 employees, a head office block, two warehouses and a Contract Programming Building. The founders are worth an estimated £30 million and the management live and work in a fine style.

Bruce Everiss showed us around the main office block. The company’s affairs are run from here and it also includes the sales team and games programming department. An area for six programmers is set out on a lavish scale, backed up by a computing power which is quite staggering, and a Technical Support Area which can provide the programmers with whatever resources they require. As we walked about Ian Weatherburn, author of Imagine’s latest game Alchemist, was already at work at one of the desks on another project. A lot of the other programmers have been ‘locked away’ to work on Bandersnatch which should be ready sometime around May.

When the game is finished it gets ‘play-tested’ by a panel of 20 local games players which Imagine uses. Their recommendations will then be used to make alterations to the game before it can be released.

From the quiet, carpeted splendour of the main office, Bruce Everiss explained that Imagine have had to employ a lot of top management experts in recent months to guide the company as it expands. Between these new managers there are a lot of degrees in science, psychology and business management. They know an awful lot about computers and software, but very little about games. To fill in this gap in their experience it seems CRASH Magazine is being used as a ‘training manual’!

Just as Epstein and the Beatles created an awareness in Liverpool and then throughout the world about popular British music, so the guiding hand of Bruce Everiss and Imagine have created an awareness first in Liverpool and now throughout the world about British games software.

CRASH editor Roger Kean, Imagine’s Director of Operations, Bruce Everiss, and PA, Jenny.

CHRIS PASSEY & MATTHEW UFFINDELL revisit some old favourites (and some new versions) in our second Game Type comparisons

Ever since Mario lost his girl to the clutches of King Kong, there’s been trouble up at t’Empire State Building! Quite how the particular story line for the original game emerged is now lost in the mythology of what the arcades called Donkey Kong or Krazy Kong. Their popularity in the arcades was probably due to their non-violence and perhaps because people had become fed up with shoot the invaders games.

The simple object of the game is to reach the top of the screen and ‘rescue’ your girl from Kong’s clutches. To do this you must run along several levels of platforms and climb ladders while Kong rolls barrels and fireballs down on top of you. This recipe should ideally continue for several screens of increasing difficulty. There are several versions for the Spectrum ranging from bad to very good, and the selection here (which is very representative) contains two titles which masquerade as something else, but are still Kong type games really.

KONG (Ocean)

Ocean’s Kong is a close copy to the original. It starts off well with Kong making his entry, climbing to the top, then stomping and causing the girders to slope. Now the ape starts the barrels rolling. They go sideways down the ladders (Killer Kong’s seemed to favour falling through holes). There are a total of four screens, featuring fireballs and elevators as well. The graphics in this game are the best of all, and are large (terrifyingly large barrels), well animated and fast. The man jumps well, in fact he goes so high his head passes through the next floor up. The keys are well laid out, it’s Kempston compatible and there’s a training mode.
CP

It takes a long time to load but it’s worth the wait. A screen appears with five options, keyboard, Kempston joystick, Quickshot and Protek interfaces, demo mode and training mode. All four screens are identical to the arcade original — even the detail of the ape smashing down the girders into different angles at the start. Graphics are big, bright and smooth with just the right amount of ladders. Even the hammer on the second platform is there, to enable you to smash the barrels for bonus points. None of the other games has this feature. Tunes are played at the start and end of a screen, and at the start it says, ‘How high can you get?’ — just like the original. I think this Kong is the best one.
MU

KILLER KONG (Blaby)

I thought this was a good version. Here there are five screens to complete — all are difficult. It requires the most skill in timing because the last bit of the top section is too low for jumping barrels. The game has good graphics on the whole, but they aren’t super-smooth due to ‘character position movement’ being used as opposed to pixel type. This game, however, has the best sound. Keyboard play could be improved — the keys are all along the top row. There are bonuses for getting green burgers and also a time bonus. I would recommend this version.
CP

Killer Kong is a version with many ladders and is not at all like the original really. It is just a miss-the-fireball game, though I found it very playable. The jumps need to be timed right (like Anirog’s version) because the graphics aren’t smooth. I can say the sound is great and the colour is well used. It’s much more addictive than Anirog’s version and has more joystick options.
MU

GODZILLA & THE MARTIANS

This one has the most original title and also the classiest packaging, but it is also the worst of the bunch, primarily because it’s written in BASIC, which immediately limits the program’s capabilities (it’s also the only 16K version). The idea is to run along and jump over the martians (resembling invading barrels) which move from side to side. There are also ladders to climb on your way to the top and holes to jump. (Godzilla, meanwhile, is protecting your girl — not ‘holding’ her). Only one screen and only one life. The graphics are jerky, and jumping is a hit-and-miss affair. On the whole, very unaddictive.
CP

This version barely resembles the original at all except in the ladders, platforms and rescuing ‘the girl of your dreams’. Jump control is very bad, unresponsive — just up, over and down — terrible. The graphics are limited and the keys poorly positioned. Sound and colour are also poor (all in BASIC), no joystick options and generally well below today’s standards.
MU

KONG (Anirog)

A different story here — this is more of a Kong copy and quite reasonable. It contains quite good graphics and is possibly the most colourful. The keys are well laid out, making it very playable. Four screens featuring barrels, fireballs, lifts etc. Bonuses are available in the form of umbrellas and handbags, and there’s a time limit to deter waiting around. The jumping is rather quick and needs careful timing though.
CP

This version doesn’t start off too well — no screen page, and the inlay says nothing about joystick options although once loaded it informs you that it’s Kempston compatible (sigh — unplug computer, fit interface and reload). A demo autoruns after 30 seconds. Screen 1 looks like screen 2 of the arcade original except there are no conveyor belts. Screen 2 is very much like screen 1 but with more ladders leading up to the next platform. There are lifts on the third screen, but only the fourth screen looks like the original, where you must pull blocks out of the floor and watch Kong fall. The demo had nice smooth graphics, but the game didn’t. I found the jump disappointing — you must jump when a fireball is right against you, or you’ll land on top of it. The colour and sound is well used, and a fair game can be played on this version, although I think Anirog have overdone it on the ladders.
MU

KILLER KNIGHT

Apart from Krazy Kong, this is the only version with a loading screen picture. The game itself is a variation on the Kong theme — rescue your girl from the clutches of the evil black knight. There’s the usual barrels and holes to jump and ladders to climb. Also a handy umbrella to break an accidental fall (once). The game is very fast, probably the fastest of the lot, but the graphics are rather small and colourless. Jumping is sudden and control generally is difficult due to speed and poor keyboard layout. Ladder climbing is automatic, so there’s no going back! This is a difficult game to play (not a bad thing), but with its uninspiring graphics and lack of playability, I didn’t really enjoy it.
CP

I found Killer Knight very difficult to play because jump control is very difficult. I know I’ve said the same about the Anirog Kong and Killer Kong, but here there seems to be no ‘feel’ to the jump, perhaps because it happens so quickly. Poor sound and even worse colour drops this game’s value. I also get the feeling this is compiled m/c — the poor block graphics with uninteresting UDGs make it not worth considering if you are after a real Kong game.
MU

KRAZY KONG (P.S.S.)

This is quite a close copy of the arcade Krazy Kong and includes barrels, fireballs, conveyor belts and lifts. The barrels drop through the platforms randomly as well as descending the ladders on top of you. The man is well animated and jumps very generously (which doesn’t mean it’s easy)! I didn’t like the key positions — all on the top row. There is a time limit for a bonus and water buckets for bonuses. Nice loading screen which matches the cassette inlay. Four screens in this version with well combined hazards.
CP

P.S.S.’s version, which has only just come out, is very like the arcade original. Your man is well animated and walks smoothly on his way to rescue the girl. All the characters are a bit small but nothing to complain about, and the man jumps very well. The game is colourful, tuneful and very playable — second to Ocean’s Kong in fact. All the keys are well positioned — could be used with Sinclair Interface 2 but not stated anywhere (Kempston compatible). Ocean’s version comes out with flying colours, closely followed by this one.
MU

KONG COMPARISON TABLE

We asked our two reviewers to rate the games compared on a scale from 0 to 100.

A — Use of computer
B — Graphics
C — Playability
D — Addictive qualities
E — Value for money
F — Retail Price (in £)

A

B

C

D

E

F

GODZILLA &
THE MARTIANS

CP

12

20

10

20

15

5.95

MU

0

0

0

0

0

KILLER KNIGHT

CP

23

50

19

30

40

5.95

MU

20

20

10

20

20

KONG
(Anirog)

CP

60

78

50

70

75

5.95

MU

60

65

46

34

50

KILLER KONG

CP

80

98

90

100

90

5.50

MU

70

70

60

60

80

KONG (Ocean)

CP

92

100

100

97

100

5.90

MU

100

100

100

100

100

KRAZY KONG
(P.S.S.)

CP

75

90

95

95

90

5.95

MU

90

90

98

95

90

Next month: Missile Command

With computers now abounding in British schools, there is a growing awareness that computer games can be much more than a play toy. The computer can act, quite uniquely, as both teacher, calculator, blackboard and entertainer all at the same time. To match the swelling interest in education by computer, more software houses are producing more and more teaching materials in a games form. To reflect this trend CRASH will be doing regular articles on educational games and reviewing programs as they become available. These reviews, like all others, will also be entered in the Guide Section as we go along.

One of the first software houses to specialise in programs for young children is Widgit Software. They have just announced their two newest titles (on a single tape). The Humpty Dumpty Mystery and Who Killed Cock Robin are two detective stories to develop skills in logical thinking (see the review in this issue). This latest tape is only one of a range of seven titles which Widgit have released over the past six months. Counting, Adding & Subtracting and Quickthinking (which is published by Mirrorsoft) are for developing numerical skills. Spatial observation and skills are developed with Shape Sorter and Pathfinder. A further title in this series will be released before Easter.

There are plans to release more titles early in 1984, and also to convert existing titles to the Commodore 64, BBC Model B and Electron. Mike and Tina Detheridge, who run Widgit, have increased their programming workforce to meet these needs, but they still maintain a very firm editorial control. The programs must meet the Widgit criterion of giving the player enjoyment and motivation but at the same time having a real educational content to develop a child intellectually. Widgit programs are tried out in schools and are modified according to the reactions of teachers and pupils. Tina says that general standards in educational software have risen a lot in the last few months and that Widgit are intending very definitely to keep in the forefront of developments and provide programs of high quality and good value for money for home and school use.

MR. T

It’s a bit of a mouthful, but The National Magazine Co, under the imprint of Ebury Software, are soon planning to release titles under the heading of Good Housekeeping Software. The series is tied together by a mascot called Mr. T.

The first six titles are Mr. T’s Alphabet Games, Mr. T’s Number Games, Mr. T Tells The Time, Mr. T’s Money Box, Mr. T’s Measuring Games and Mr. T’s Shape Games. These are currently available on the BBC Micro, but Spectrum versions should be ready very soon. Mr. T Tells The Time and Mr. T’s Money Box are already in the shops for the Spectrum. The games come very nicely packaged in large white video style boxes and include a detailed parent’s manual with comprehensive operating instructions and a step-by-step guide to getting the best out of the program.

Good Housekeeping Software reckon that the child should not be left isolated at the keyboard, but that the parent should join in the games, discussion and activities promoted by the games. Mr. T is also designed to act as a friendly guide enabling the child to play not against the cold, inanimate computer, but in the company of a lively and personable fellow who reacts with encouragement or slight dismay at the child’s choice.

Mr. T programs are aimed at children between the ages of three and six. The cassettes retail at £12.95, and run on a 48K Spectrum.

ABC GAMES

Producer: Artic Computing Ltd
Author: Chris A. Thornton

This program is aimed at primary school children 5-8 years old, and is designed to improve spelling skills. You are asked to ‘press a letter’. Depending upon which alphabet key is pressed, the screen displays a drawing and a large graphic of the letter chosen, and tells you what the drawing is. For instance, pressing V results in a van being drawn. At the top it says ‘V is for VAN’, and at the bottom, ‘Now spell VAN’.

These details remain for a few seconds so they may be digested, then the word disappear and the child may press the keys V-A-N. If the word is incorrect the computer beeps as soon as the incorrect letter is pressed. If spelt correctly the child is rewarded with flashing border colours and a tune. There are several tunes in the program. Although most words incorporated are very simple, CAT, DOOR, FISH, there are longer words like UMBRELLA and XYLOPHONE included.

This program is certainly for younger children and will undoubtedly prove an entertaining way of doing elementary spelling. A drawback to its durability might prove to be the tunes, which rapidly become repetitive, although they are all popular nursery rhymes. It also seems a little pricey for what it does, but it is a very easy program to use.

BULL TABLES

Producer: Lotus-Soft
Author: Derek Jones

Bull Tables contains three programs on one cassette. Bull Tables itself is an arithmetic game. After loading a menu offers the option of addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. When you have made your choice you can select between 6 levels of skill. At the highest level questions can be as difficult as 23 x 35 =? At the easiest level, as simple as 1 x 3 =? The screen displays the sum to be done at the top left. At the bottom a ‘Table Man’ stands ready above a table of numbers 0 to 9. On the right is a paddock with a bull in it. As soon as the game starts, the bull charges at the paddock wall, slowly eating chunks out of it. The object is to get ten sums correct before the bull breaks out and destroys the numbers. The game is personalised by the child when he or she is asked to enter their name at the start.

After the work comes the play. The two programs following are games. Nine Lives provides the task of catching twenty mice. You are a cat, your enemy is a black dog. The mice are dotted about the screen and the cat must go round touching them, avoiding the dog, who will chase the cat. Three bones per life are the best way of slowing the dog down for a moment. Any mice touched by the dog are sent to safety.

Candyman is for two players, who must get their ‘men’ through a series of opening and shutting doors. They can see how long it takes them as they are playing against the clock.

Throughout all three programs the simple graphics are very entertaining and move nicely despite the program being written in BASIC. The package offers good value for money.

FRENCH IS FUN

Producer: CDS Microsystems

This is a French learning package with considerable versatility although it only teaches some basics, phrases and words which may be helpful to beginners and tourists. The program is menu prompted offering; The House, The Countryside, The Beach, The Cafe, The Street, The School, Numbers and Time. Whichever topic is selected you are then presented with four options; 1) Pictures only — which provides graphics, slowly building up, each new item annotated at the top in English and French: 2) Pictures with test — the graphics are repeated and you may opt to type in the French when the computer prompts with the English, or vice versa: 3) Phrases only — no graphics here, but a range of useful phrases in English like, ‘Is it possible to go riding?’ which may be translated into French by pressing key C: 4) Pictures and phrases — which runs through the pictures again and then into the phrases with your memory refreshed.

Under Numbers, the screen displays imperial and metric equivalents whilst large figures at the top count up from 1, giving the French spelling beside them. Under Time, the display gives the days of the week and the months in English and French, displays a clock face and invites you to ask the time. You can key in a time, say 12.30, and this is then drawn on the clock face, and the French spelling for the time given.

The program contains a lot of quite attractive graphics, some with simple animation, and it will obviously be valuable for young French beginners as well as adult starters. It won’t, however, do much for your pronunciation!

THE HUMPTY DUMPTY MYSTERY

Producer: Widgit Software Ltd
Author: Gordon Askew

Side A of the tape, Humpty Dumpty, contains two programs, and side B contains Who Killed Cock Robin. The programs are aimed at developing skills in logical thinking and require the player to ask questions and make guesses based on answers. The mystery -? Which of the king’s men pushed Humpty off the wall? After a graphics sequence of Humpty being pushed off by a mystery soldier, all twelve men appear and the player may either ask a question prompted by the words, ‘Did he have ...’, or take a guess. Each of the twelve men have a name and some characteristic which distinguishes them, so that asking questions immediately eliminates some of the suspects.

The second game loads with a program contained in game 1. Here the player is given a glimpse of the culprit and must describe him. Five distinguishing characteristics must be entered correctly to describe the colour of the suspect’s hat, badge, eyes, mouth and jacket. Both programs allow for children of developed spelling skills, and for early readers as inputs may be spelt out or selected by using the colour keys. Two skill levels make for easier and harder games.

Who Killed Cock Robin asks the daunting question, can sparrow’s confession be believed? The player must find out who killed the robin, where and when by using clues and logic. Some reading ability is required and there are four skill levels.

The quality of the graphics in these games is very good, lots of large drawings, brightly coloured and with some simple animation. Describing the identity of the culprit in the second Humpty Dumpty game, is quite a skilful) process, and surprisingly difficult to get right, even for adults!

PATHFINDER

Producer: Widgit Software Ltd

This tape contains four programs based on maze structures and is designed to help children develop spatial skills and forward planning.

In the first you must guide a rabbit through a maze, eating carrots on the way. This is fairly easy, the idea being to look ahead, and pick the shortest route to the exit. There is only one proper route through. The second maze game is much more advanced. In this one, a kangaroo must be guided through, but the player must program the moves by selecting the required direction and then inputting how many moves are needed. The scope of the game expands with the player’s growing skill, since the kangaroo’s route through the entire maze can be planned and inputted before executing. To begin with a single move at a time can be executed by the computer. Incorrect entries are immediately highlighted on sound as well as on screen, while the entries made are slowly added in a column to the right of the display area.

The third program is called Picnic. Guide a hungry monster through a park and let him eat his lunch. The idea is that the monster should eat four items dotted randomly in the ‘park’, by visiting them in a pre-set order, and that this should be done without crossing his own trail or reversing on his trail. There are two levels, one with the playing squares clearly marked, and the second where the park is a solid area.

The final game is Frogs. Guide a frog across the pond and collect frog friends on the way. The ‘pond’ is a grid of 7 squares by 10 across. In some there are water lillies, and in some there are frogs. The object is to discover the best way across that allows you to collect more frogs on the way, remembering that you cannot cross a square with a water lilly in it. This becomes a surprisingly subtle game, since not all the frogs are collectable — some may be unreachable because of the positions of the water lillies.

All four games use the cursor, or arrow keys, which are easily identifiable by the child playing. The graphics throughout are large and brightly coloured. These games should prove very entertaining to play as well as providing a very real challenge. The Kangaroo game actually leads the player in the direction of programming as well.

ROBOT RUNNER

Producer: Longman Software
Author: Micromega (Tony Poulter)

Robot Runner is a number game for children aged 6 years and upwards. Pilot your robot across the number ways of Andron. You’ll need to know your tables and be prepared for unknown dangers of a far off planet.

When the tape has loaded the player’s name can be entered, after which a menu comes up asking which multiplication table you want to use from 1x to 9x or a mixture. Having selected the table the screen cuts to the coloured number ways, five in all. The robot runner stands at the bottom, waiting to enter the first way.

Down this first way comes a sum, say 2 x 7. Using the cursor keys 6 (down) and 7 (up) a figure at the top left can be made to increase or decrease. When it reaches the right figure (14 in this case), your robot may cross safely. Now in the second way another sum appears and you continue in this fashion across the ‘ways’.

When he has reached the fifth way you may guide him to one of several treasures on the right of the screen; when these have all gone, you progress onto another and more dangerous screen.

The cursor keys 5 (left) and 8 (right) are used to guide the robot across the ways. To make life more exciting there are de-energising obstacles that live on the ways and float down, threatening the robot unless you can get the sum right quickly and move on, but the cursor keys are also used to avoid them if all else fails.

The game is accompanied by parental program notes and full instructions for using the game. Loading screens are very good, and the use of colour throughout is excellent.

SPECIAL AGENT

Producer: Heinemann/Hill MacGibbon
Author: Five Ways Software Ltd

This game is designed to develop the ability to read, understand timetables, interpret information quickly and make logical decisions based on information in a situation where there are many possibilities. It includes insights into the relative speeds and costs of air and rail travel, and lets children become familiar with the positions and names of Europe’s cities and towns.

The game comes in a large plastic folder with the cassette tucked in one side and the large format, colour book (16 pages) in the other.

The game is played on a very large scale, and in fact comes very close to a mixture between adventure and strategy games that might well appeal to much older people. Basically you sit in your control centre of spying with a map of Europe. Below the map all sorts of reports come in from secret agents in the various locations.

These may be in clear or code (which can be deciphered bit by bit). Information may well be from informers (which must be purchased) or it may tell you a spy has been eliminated. More spies can be hired.

If you decide you must go to a city to make contact with your agent there, a sheet of various timetables can be displayed and journeys may be undertaken by various modes of transport relative to speed, cost and convenience.

The graphics are very detailed and complex, but the game is fun to play, backed up by a heavily illustrated book with background to spies in fact and fiction as well as information on the many cities and towns involved in the adventure.

Despite the slightly high price, this is an undoubtedly excellent package for the price.

LIVING GUIDE
TO SPECTRUM SOFTWARE

Crash Guide Game of the Month

Our reviewer Matthew Uffindell delves into his software library for this month’s reappraisal as he hops onto FROGGY, the most engaging Frogger for the Spectrum, a game by D.J.L. Software.

As long as you can go along with the fact that frogs drown if they fall in the river, then as a game type ‘Froggers’ have a lot going for them. The object of the game is to guide your frog across a busy road without getting squashed under the vehicles, and then across the river on logs and turtle backs without falling off, getting eaten by crocodiles or run off the screen edge and so into a frog home on the far bank.

On the road in this version, there are trucks and much faster hot rods to leap between. The river has four lanes alternating between logs and rows of turtles, each moving in the opposite direction to the other. You must hop from one to the other without falling into the river. The turtles have a nasty habit of submerging, and if this happens while you are riding on one, you will lose a life if you don’t jump across to a log in time.

Nice frog homes — low deposit, mortgages available — DJL’s charming game turns a frog into a prince.

Once onto the last lane (logs) you must jump neatly into one of the five frog homes. A miss-jump loses a life — a successful one results in a large smiling frog in his home. Every now and then a baby frog appears, floating down the river on a log and crying out for you to rescue it. To do this you must jump onto the log carrying him and let it leap up onto your back. If you get him safely home a bonus of 200 points is awarded.

As the game goes on more hazards appear, such as alligators in the river and snakes on the bank of the river. The game will also speed up as each screen is cleared, until the maximum speed is reached on screen 7. Turtles also get scarcer and the logs get smaller in size. The entire game is played against the clock — about 25 seconds is allowed to get a frog across and home on screen one but this reduces with each screen. There is also a demo mode and a hall of fame.

This game is a very good copy of the arcade original and is very well produced. When I first saw it I thought the character block movement would spoil the game, but I was proved wrong. It is very addictive and enjoyable to play. This must be the best ‘Frogger’ around and I would recommend it to anyone. The game plays with a Kempston joystick (load one side of tape) or cursor keys (load other side of tape) and so cursor key joysticks like Protek and AGF. Use of colour and sound is excellent as are the instructions and general presentation.

Matthew Uffindell.

1984

Producer: Incentive Software Ltd
Author: Rob M.H. Carter

When George Orwell finished his famous novel about the future in 1948 it seemed logical to reverse the last two figures and call it 1984. Since then the date has had a semimagical connotation. Well, now it is 1984, and to mark the occasion, Incentive (who brought you Splat) have released this governmental strategy game — a game of economic survival.

The object is to prove that you can do better than our existing politicians. You, of course, are to be Prime Minister. Can you ride out three terms in power and survive two General Elections? At the start you inherit certain figures under the headings Sources of Revenue in millions of pounds, and Details of Spending, also in millions. These include (Revenue) Corporation tax, Value Added Tax, Income tax, Customs & Excise, and Loans: (Spending) Government contracts, Grants to industry, Public Sector spending, Govt. Department wages, Pensions, Unemployment, Benefit, Child Allowance, Foreign Aid, and interest on borrowing.

This screen is followed by Major Indicators, a chart of 8 items which chart your progress, and which can be called up at any time to see how you are doing. This is followed by details on the Minimum Lending Rate, set at a given figure, but which you must adjust to suit your requirements. There is a bar code chart which indicates how well the economy is balanced between Government, Industry, Population, Banks and the World. If any one of these sectors gets dangerously out of balance, you may be forced to resign — a flagging industry, for instance, may be given a boost by an increase in the Grant to Industry.

The game also incorporates the major nightmare of any modern government, the wages claims. You have to deal with those in the Public and Private sectors as well as Civil Servants. You must decide on the level of Government Investment in banks, balance the effects of raising money through Industrial levies, keep an eye on the funding of your own government departments, sort out the budget for each year, organise the levels of foreign aid, subsidise industry through grants, and finally, attend Cabinet Meetings on a wide variety of problems.

The game is accompanied by a detailed 13 page leaflet called A Pocket Guide To Running Britain, which explains the various functions of the game and the economy generally.

CRITICISM

‘After an ominous title screen of the Houses of Parliament, the nightmare begins! The game proceeds along very sensible lines, informing of the next problem to be faced, and offering some prompts for beginners. I was doing really well, I thought, as I added nominal amounts to my departments (Health, Education, Housing, Defence etc.) but then a notice informed me that runaway government spending had brought me down! Well of course, I’m honest — politicians are.

COMMENTS

Colour and graphics: all very clear, with well used colour
Sound: useful entry beeps and the sound of Big Ben chiming
Skill levels: 1 — and that’s enough!
General Rating: a excellent strategy game with tons of scope.

Use of Computer

75%

Graphics

68%

Playability

85%

Getting Started

79%

Addictive Qualities

63%

Value For Money

85%

Overall

76%

ALCHEMIST

Producer: Imagine Software Ltd
Author: Ian Weatherburn, Paul Lindale

This is Imagine’s first step into the mist-shrouded world of terror and mystery, Warlocks and monsters, Wizards and spells. It still isn’t a proper adventure, much more of an arcade type game, but with adventure overtones. You, the most skilful Alchemist on Earth, have been summoned to do battle with the Evil Warlock who is terrorising the Land. You must enter his dread castle, find the four sections of the magic scroll, which will enable you to render the Warlock powerless by using his own Spell of Destruction against him.

Playing the game is quite a complicated matter. The Alchemist can wander about as himself until he reaches a drop or a steep hill, and these obstacles may be overcome by transforming into an eagle, which is made to fly by flapping its wings. The dread castle is full of rooms, caverns, passageways and stairs, filled with a wide variety of monsters, useful objects and minor spells which may be used once, and of course the four pieces of the magic scroll. The Alchemist is only allowed to carry one object at a time (and he’s the most skilful!) so a strategy element creeps in.

Any type of movement, or bumping into objects, or transformations, deplete your stamina. This is maintained by passing over food packs (if you were an evil warlock keeping skilful Alchemists at bay, would you leave food packs lying around your castle?)

The two weapons you possess, hurling lightning bolts or casting spells if you have found one, use up your energy, which is replenished only by time. Encounters with monsters also drain you, though this depends on whether you are carrying some useful object like an axe or a sword. So there it is, O Skilful One — care to have a go?

CRITICISM

‘On your mission you will encounter many problems, like finding a key to open a door, and many Guardians such as lobsters, ghosts, brooms, skulls, bats, evil butterflies, swords which attack you, snails, caterpillars, bones, axes, a boulder and much more. The presentation is very good, with a high quality title screen and adequate instruction, although a bit more advice would not go amiss! The graphics are very good and so is the sound, with a rather spooky organ tune which sets the scene well. In playing, the game is extremely good, fun and very addictive. Definitely another winner for Imagine. Oh, by the way — don’t pick up the trap thinking you can use it as one — it will explode during the game, destroying you!’

‘The Alchemist is an original game which is fun to play, not only because it is difficult, but because it also has exceptional graphics, lots of them, all well designed and animated. Controlling the game requires a handful of keys which take some mastering, but they seem quite well laid out. The game is not unlike Atic Atac in feeling, and has about the same level of playability. Although it couldn’t be called a shoot em up, it still manages to be very addictive, since it is so easy to lose your one life.’

‘This is a game which is fun and has so much detail to explore in the massive castle that it makes you want to keep playing. That said, I didn’t think it was terribly addictive, although I’ll probably want to go back after some time and have another go. Excellent graphics and use of colour. An Imagine-ative game and obviously worth the money.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: seven keys are used to walk/fly left and right, transform, cast a spell/hurl lightning, flap wings, pick up/drop objects and pick up/drop spells. The Quit key (1) seemed dangerously near the other action keys.
Joystick: Kempston, Fuller
Colour: very good
Graphics: excellent
Sound: very good
Skill levels: 1
Lives: 1
Screens: continuous scrolling
General Rating: Excellent

Use of Computer

80%

Graphics

85%

Playability

90%

Getting Started

68%

Addictive Qualities

89%

Value For Money

95%

Overall

85%

ANDROID 2

Producer: Vortex
Memory required: 48K
Retail price: £5.95
Language: machine code
Author: Costa Panayi

In the film industry they tend to say that sequels are never as good as the originals, whereas in computer games the opposite seems to be true. If you bought and played Android 1, then you may be in for a shock with Android 2 — it’s not only better, it’s staggeringly better! A lot of recent releases have featured wonderful graphics and it’s unfair to compare one with another when the graphics often have to do different things, but overall our reviewers thought Android 2 had just about the best, possibly as good as any other game for the Spectrum to date.

Android 2 — the a-mazing superior Robot.

The story is as old as the Spectrum itself — stop the advance of the Millitoids, survive the maze of death, rationalise the paradox zone, overcome the dangers of the flatlands and achieve all this before the departure deadline. No problem! Vortex describe this as a mindblowing action game and deservedly so.

It’s hard to describe the screen display, because the area is huge, part massively convoluted maze, part open space within areas of the encompassing maze. The view is solid 3D, seen from well above and slightly to one side. The attract mode scrolls at a furious pace in a diagonal direction across the playing area, and gives a frightening idea of what is ahead of you.

The object is to destroy five Millitoids in each of the three zones. These otherwise pleasant creatures require three shots to the head. In carrying out this mission you must watch out for the numerous land mines, Hoverdroids (one blast), and Bouncers which are indestructible but very predictable. Android 2 is equipped with a head mounted photon blaster of unlimited power — he needs it! Good luck!

CRITICISM

‘If you have seen 3D Ant Attack then you will know that the graphics are great but that the game itself is not so good, well Android 2 is a game with great 3D graphics and is also a good game in itself. The animation is good, a well laid out screen, and generally a great shoot’em up game.’

‘Every detail of this game has been polished, even the instructions are beautifully done. The sound is excellent and very characterful. It’s such a massive undertaking that I’m sure people will be playing it for ages without ever getting anywhere near exploring all the maze. You have to watch out for mean landmines, especially in passages where the floor is obscured by the perspective view. Addictive because of the game idea and the fantastic graphics.’

‘The game is very challenging, in fact I found it hard and good to play. Good graphics, with lots of movement and good value for money.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: 1/Q up/down, O/P left/right, bottom row = fire
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard play: very responsive
Colour: excellent
Graphics: excellent
Sound: excellent
Skill levels: who needs ’em?
Lives: 5
Screens: continuously scrolling
General rating: excellent on almost all counts, highly addictive and first rate value for money. Highly recommended.

Use of computer

80%

Graphics

96%

Playability

92%

Getting started

90%

Addictive qualities

90%

Value for money

89%

Overall

90%

APPLE JAM

Producer: DK’Tronics Ltd
Author: Ed Hickman

DK’ Tronics have generally tended in the past to write good introductions as to the objectives of their games, but the recent releases have suffered with little or no explanation. Hard Cheese is a case in point, where a game starts without aims being made clear and where the scenario is obviously too complicated to sort out easily. The danger with this is that players can run out of patience before tapping the game’s potential.

Apple Jam is another example. In this case there are no explanations at all. It is, in concept, a very simple game, and the broad intentions of the author are immediately clear, or rapidly sorted out, but as at least one reviewer found, points of the game still baffle.

Basically, the screen has a lift at the left, a sauna box at the right, a jam dispenser in the middle, overhead, and above that, a conveyer belt which produces apples. In a lower portion is a rat tunnel.

The screen also shows the game score and the hi-score, three purple pills and the words RAT BAIT! A little man is made to run back and forth.

He opens his mouth when correctly positioned under the dropping point of either jam or apples. Each time he gulps down another mouthful, he grows a bit fatter. To work off the excess weight he must enter the sauna for a few seconds and when he comes out he’s all slim and wonderful. If he fails to go to the sauna each mouthful after a certain point, it loses him one of the purple pills. When all three have gone he dies.

Below in the rat run, the rats are running. Should the man miss any apples or jam, they fall through and the rats eat the food. Once this has happened they tend to come up a floor and eat the man. He can escape by getting into the lift, but that means missing more food. Should you do really well against these miserable odds, there’s a giant hornet to watch out for.

CRITICISM

‘A non-violent game for the younger games-player, that’s my impression. There’s a fair use of colour and the character block graphics are smooth and fair in quality. It’s a nice touch when an ambulance comes up to collect the dead hero after being rat-bitten, but I think they cheated by having it back-up — it could have driven forwards and turned around.’

‘This game made me feel quite dense — it looks simple, it is simple, but I couldn’t work out what was going on at all. I never found out what the RAT BAIT! was for, if anything, and someone had to tell me what the pills were for. I had figured out what the sauna did, and became obsessed with my hero’s figure. Consequently my opinions are somewhat coloured. On the whole, a rather poor game.’

‘The odds have been stacked up too high to make this into an addictive game. Once the rats emerge you never have a chance to catch more food, or sweat it off, and it all becomes pointless. It is, anyway, very repetitive.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: 5 & 8 left & right
Joystick: Protek, AGF
Keyboard play: responsive
Colour: fair
Graphics: reasonable
Sound: poor
Skill levels: 1
Lives: endless, but three pills
General Rating: Poor on instructions, a game for younger players with a limited addictivity.

Use of Computer

65%

Graphics

59%

Playability

35%

Getting Started

40%

Addictive Qualities

40%

Value For Money

50%

Overall

47%

ATIC ATAC

Producer: Ultimate
Memory required: 48K
Retail price: £5.50
Language: machine code

In last month’s issue we promised a fuller review of Atic Atac as our review copies arrived too late to do it full justice. It turns out to be difficult to do full justice to this program anyway! There’s such a lot of it. You’re stuck in this castle which contains five floors with lots of rooms on each floor. The total number of rooms, staircases and passageways is a subject of argument, although the best estimate we’ve heard about from one reviewer (who’s been busy mapping the place) is 40 rooms per floor, making a total of 200.

Tic Tac, who’s there?

The rooms are seen in a sort of splayed perspective from above so that all four walls as well as the floor are visible. Put simply, the object of the game is to find the key, which comes in three pieces, open the main door and escape. You can do this as three different characters — knight, wizard or serf each having different weapons and knowing different secret passages.

Very like Lunar Jetman, Ultimate have provided little or no instruction as to how the game is played to your best advantage — the entire thing is a learning experience, like life!

CRITICISM

‘There’s really nothing much to be said about Ultimate’s graphics that hasn’t already been said. Just marvellous. But the details of events is also fantastic, like when you lose a life, a cross marks the spot, but it stays there until the end of the game. From this you learn that if you pick up an object, and then put it down somewhere you’ll be able to recognise which was the room from rediscovering that object. This becomes the best way to map out the rooms. If you aren’t nuts already, Atic Atac is likely to be the turning point.’

‘Atic Atac is in no way a true adventure but neither is it a shoot the baddies game. But it is one thing — FANTASTIC! There are many types of baddies, ghosts, spiders, ghouls, pumpkins and guest appearances from Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, Devil Witch and Mummy. You certainly get your money’s worth from content alone! It’s fast moving, fun to play and its originality, graphics and addictiveness make it excellent value for money. This is one of the best arcade games I have seen in a long time.’

‘A drawback with complex games is that the control keys can get difficult to manage. Atic Atac uses Ultimate’s favourite layout, but the keys are a handful and it’s not possible to get full value from the game’s potential if you use a joystick. Definitely a game for those with nimble fingers! Otherwise — just excellent. Ultimate have done it again.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: Q = left, W = right, E = down, R = up, T = fire, Z or SYMBOL SHIFT- pick up and drop
Joystick: Kempston, AGF, Protek
Keyboard play: highly responsive, 8-directional but needs practice!
Colour: very good
Graphics: excellent with masses of detail
Sound: good
Skill levels: just generally impossible!
Lives: 3
General rating: excellent

Use of computer

90%

Graphics

95%

Playability

95%

Getting started

85%

Addictive qualities

93%

Value for money

95%

Overall

92%

BATTLE 1917

Producer: CCS
Author: Mark Lucas

The author, Mark Lucas, won the Cambridge Award for writing this program. The competition is run by C.C.S. in conjunction with the magazine Sinclair User, and the Award plus £1000 goes to the winner, and of course the winner receives the satisfaction of seeing the program marketed. Battle 1917 is likely to prove popular with wargamers and perhaps with chess players too, as there is a resemblance in part.

The board, or war zone, is laid out with the opposing forces at the top and bottom of the screen, each side has a King in the centre, protected by artillery and flanked by tanks, cavalry and infantry. Each unit, except the King, is subdivided into four characters. The characters move as a group, but can easily get split up by the terrain. Each unit also has a fighting strength and a movement allowance.

The battlefield, 21 by 32 squares large, is dotted with obstacles like rivers, forests, barbed wire and minefields. Tanks aren’t bothered by wire or trees, but cannot go through water. The rest can’t go across any obstacle. Minefields have a percentage chance of exploding when contacted. In addition to moving around, the artillery can fire in any of the 8 compass points desired, although extreme short range runs a risk of self destruction since shots may not land on the exact square they are supposed to.

A prompt at the bottom of the screen tells each player which piece is to move next and reminds him or her how many squares it can travel and asks for the direction wanted. When one player has moved all his pieces, it is the second player’s turn. When units of opposing forces meet, battle ensues and is won or lost by adding a random figure for each, from one to five, to the unit’s official fighting strength. The higher figure wins. The aim of the game is to kill off the opponent’s king.

Directions are inputted using the numeric keys 1 to 8, 1 being North and 8 being North-West. There is an onscreen compass prompt as a quick visual aid.

CRITICISM

‘If chess appeals to you, you might like this, although it hasn’t got the same sort of tactical clarity as chess. I thought the graphics were rather average and the moves and goings on rather slow. At least it does allow two people to compete against each other — really the computer is only used as a playing board and score keeper. It might have been a good idea to have a single player versus the computer option — after all you have to have an opponent also addicted to play properly and that’s not always so easy.’

‘It does take quite a long time to play — but then, so does chess. Whether it’s as good as chess, I’m not so sure. It has more variety than chess but also a strong element of luck as to who wins a battle. This does rather destroy the tactical value somewhat. It certainly isn’t what you would call an addictive game, and I think you would have to play for some time in two before deciding whether it had real lasting value as a game.

‘Definitely a game for the strategy, wargamer freaks. I’m sure it has lots of scope for them. It left me cold as I never quite know how to take this sort of game. The graphics are pretty good, although only character squares which vanish in one spot to reappear in another, nothing is really animated. It does have very amusing instructions in the 2-part load which involve some graphical shenanigans.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: 1-8
Colour: quite good
Graphics: fairly small but recognisable
Sound: very little
General Rating: good of its kind, but a specialised taste.

Use of Computer

75%

Graphics

54%

Playability

58%

Getting Started

65%

Addictive Qualities

55%

Value For Money

68%

Overall

63%

THE BIRDS

Producer: Rabbit Software Ltd

The Birds is a simple and straightforward shoot em up more in the tradition of ‘Galaxians’ than ‘Phoenix’. Your laser base can move left and right while three types of bird hover, flap and sweep down on you. Points scored relate to the bird hit.

Each of them drops bombs, and you can score points for hitting those. Additionally, a duck flies across the top of the screen from time to time, and you get most points for hitting that. Most of the birds have a habit of turning into a falling bomb when hit, which makes it necessary to have a good ‘getaway’ technique.

CRITICISM

‘The colour is reasonable and graphics quite good, if a bit jerky. The bird characters are animated by two frames and might have looked smoother with three. There’s plenty of sound too, the chattering of birds, but it is all a bit clicky. There’s not enough to it to be really addictive.’

‘I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone who has a decent collection of shoot em up games, because it is only average. This sort of game has been done to death and done much better. Only the trick of dead birds turning into bombs makes it even playable. The program itself is quite adequate, but the game and its details are so out of date now.’

‘I didn’t think this was particularly challenging. You’ve got to be much more original with the plot twists today if you want to put out a ‘Galaxlan’ type game, and this one just doesn’t have any new angles at all. It’s fun to play for about four minutes.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: 6/7 left/right, zero for fire
Joystick: Sinclair 2
Keyboard play: reasonably fast
Colour: reasonable
Graphics: just average, bit jerky
Sound: reasonable
Skill levels: 1
Lives: 3
General Rating: not enough going on to make it really worth the money

Use of Computer

56%

Graphics

50%

Playability

45%

Getting Started

60%

Addictive Qualities

40%

Value For Money

40%

Overall

49%

THE BIRDS AND THE BEES

Producer: Bug-Byte Software Ltd
Author: Adrian Sherwin

As a game type, The Birds and The Bees is a sort of ‘Scramble’ cum ‘Defender’ with ‘Centipede’ connections. It’s all about Boris Bee from Birkenhead, who has discovered a fabulous field full of flowers, and dragged his hive into the field ready to start collecting nectar. Unfortunately there are a number of problems. For a start off the birds aren’t too happy about the bee’s intrusion, and the more nectar Boris collects, the more they chase him. Centipedes also appear, and a bear, which tries to steal the nectar from the hive, or rather the honey being made in there. Towards the end some wasps make an appearance. Boris’s life is hard!

The screen display shows the blue sky and green ground. The sky is full of clouds, some raining, and the sun. It’s also full of various birds which fly back and forth. On the ground ducks waddle about, centipedes and caterpillars crawl up and down, and of course there are the flowers. If Boris manages to land properly on a flower, it opens up and releases its nectar.

Below the main display is a bar code which shows how much nectar Boris has collected on his trip. There comes a point when he is fully loaded and must return to the hive to deposit it. The more flowers he visits, the slower he flies, and the more birds home in on him. There is also a ‘Scramble’ style radar screen which shows Boris’s position and that of other creatures. The playing area is totally shown on this screen with the landscape scrolling back and forth as Boris flies about.

The game is compatible with the Currah Microspeech unit, which enhances the sound enormously, as well as providing spoken comments like ‘Nectar’ when a flower is touched, or ‘Oh dear’ when a bird is run into.

CRITICISM

‘With a micro speech unit on, the sound is very good, but I tried it without, and it’s still very good. The title tune, ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee’ of course, sounds marvellous. At first I thought the controls were soggy, but it becomes apparent that this is done on purpose, and simulates real life better. Boris has to slow before he can turn, and before he can change height. The more nectar he has on board the more sluggish he gets, so flight tactics and radar watching become very important to honey production! If it looks a little simple at first, don’t be misled, it turns out to be very difficult to play, and satisfyingly frustrating too.’

‘The graphics, as one might expect of Manic Miner’s author, are very good. The bee is nicely animated, legs and wings on the go, so are the ducks and other birds, and the flowers when they snap open. Every character is big, and drawn with lots of detail. The game is a lot of fun to play, because of the graphics, and because the basic idea is quite original. I think it will prove to be quite addictive too.’

‘This isn’t one of those massively complex games to play, but the problems are sufficient to make it interesting and the graphics are powerful. It takes a bit of getting used to the way Boris is controlled, but once you can fly him about, you can get to be clever at avoiding the birds until they all gang up on you.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: sensible, Q/Z up/down, I/P left/right, B drops nectar to speed Boris up in an emergency
Joystick: Kempston, Protek, AGF
Keyboard play: responsive when used to it
Colour: very good
Graphics: excellent
Sound: very good
Skill levels: 1 gets harder
Lives: 5
Features: Currah Microspeech compatible
General Rating: Very good, addictive, recommended.

Use of Computer

88%

Graphics

90%

Playability

80%

Getting Started

75%

Addictive Qualities

80%

Value For Money

83%

Overall

83%

BUBBLE TROUBLE

Producer: Arcade Software
Author: Bruce Rutherford

Like the majority of Arcade’s other games, Bubble Trouble is built on a massive scale, and consists of 50 screens. In effect these are all reasonably simple mazes made up from all sorts of symbols and having a vertical or horizontal wrap around ‘tunnel’. The story is that you’re a burglar and your aim in life, not unnaturally, is to steal anything you can lay your hands on. This usually consists of four valuables per maze, and the more you steal, the more the points you receive. Life could be so simple, but of course there is a serious problem, and it comes in the form of overfriendly bubbles who want to smother you with love. Perhaps the author got the idea from the recent re-showings of Patrick McGoohan’s 60s TV series The Prisoner, where the unwilling victims of ‘The Village’ were kept in control by vast, white balloons that bounded after them.

There is no start and no end to this game, since you may select any of the fifty screens for a beginning. Once you have collected the four valuables in a screen, bonus points pop up to be collected by moving over them. The screen finishes after an elapsed time limit and moves you inexorably onto whatever screen follows. Your only weapon is a dispersal key, but it only works once every 10 seconds and isn’t terribly effective.

CRITICISM

‘Bubble Trouble is a ‘Pac Man’ variant but an imaginative mutation on the theme. Nice graphics, I liked the burglar, who’s called Basil, really a hat on legs. For keyboard players, however, the cursor keys for control are not a good arrangement; and I thought the key/stick responses were a little poor.’

‘Rather like The Detective, this game works on the principle of wearing you down over a space of time, since in itself it isn’t all that difficult to play. The graphics are attractive and move smoothly, but the game lacks something to make it really addictive. It does have three skill levels (an extra bubble per level) but each level also moves slower. In the end I don’t think this is quite up to the standard of The Detective.’

‘Bubble Trouble is fun to play, reasonably addictive and very simple. It’s single-mindedness is what makes it good to play — no concentration required! So it fits quite nicely as a pleasant interlude between other games. Not great, but certainly a reasonable game.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: cursors with zero to fire, not the best arrangement
Joystick: AGF, Protek, Kempston
Keyboard play: slightly hesitant
Colour: good
Graphics: good
Sound: average
Skill levels: 3
Lives: 3
Screens: 50
General Rating: Above average.

Use of Computer

58%

Graphics

65%

Playability

70%

Getting Started

68%

Addictive Qualities

57%

Value For Money

60%

Overall

63%

CASTLE BLACKSTAR

Producer: SCR Adventures
Author: Mark Sheppard, Andrew Cummins, Geoff Richardson

The task in this text-only adventure, which is the first of a planned series of ‘Artemis Quests’, is to enter Castle Blackstar at the behest of a beautiful, mysterious woman glimpsed in a dream. There you must recover her power orb from the vast underground caverns. To achieve maximum points all treasures found must be cleaned of their evil, all puzzles solved and the orb returned to our dear lady, who is, of course, no less than a Goddess — Artemis. She promises to covertly help you during your quest. The maximum score is 240 and, if successful, you may keep all the loot!

A note in the accompanying 8-page booklet says that the driver software for Castle Blackstar is based extensively on the Adven-80 program developed by Peter Scargill.

CRITICISM

‘As a text-only adventure amongst the new wave of graphic adventures, Castle Blackstar manages to hold its own very well. The location descriptions are nice, detailed and manage to create atmosphere in simple terms very well. The computer’s replies to one’s more nonsensical commands have a good touch of humour, and with fast machine code response this works very entertainingly.’

‘I quickly found the castle at the beginning of the quest, but having strayed two moves away from it into the forest, I found the compass directions magically faded and I couldn’t get back. Twenty steps later I was still stumbling blindly through thick forest. ‘Climb Tree’ to get a better view only elicited the response that such a dangerous undertaking was useless and I wouldn’t find anything up there anyway! Starting to think the forest was intended as a death trap, I suddenly came upon a Gingerbread House in a clearing — and that was a death hole — three moves later I’d been turned into a wriggling worm and ended up inside some bird’s tummy! Great!’

‘A good text adventure beats a mixed graphics/text one anyday, and Castle Blackstar ranks with Artic’s best. But SCR had better reconsider their pricing — £8.95 is way over the top for what they offer. Otherwise a great start for a new company and I look forward to Artemis Quest 2. Exploring the inside of the castle was great fun, and I was impressed that turning a winch in one room actually operated something four or five locations away without my even knowing it until later when my apparently meaningless activity proved valuable! Beware of the fierce musical eagles (neat), and I hope you have more luck than me in getting a source of light to set about exploring the dark lower regions (sorry, Artemis, let you down there...) Great game, pity about the price.’

COMMENTS

Graphics: text only, very simple, black letters on white ground, clear and easy to read
General Rating: A good adventure, but pricey.

Use of Computer

80%

Playability

80%

Getting Started

89%

Addictive Qualities

83%

Value For Money

45%

Overall

75%

CHUCKIE EGG

Producer: A’n’F Software
Author: Nigel Alderton

A & F have added to the mythology of the Platform Game with their Chuckie Egg, which contains some of the best screen combinations since the original arcade versions of ‘Donkey Kong’. The aim of the game is simplicity in itself. You are a little yellow — well chicken it looks like, but probably a li’ll ‘ol farmer boy, with a wide brimmed hat, and you must travel the wide platforms collecting eggs, whilst avoiding the understandably agitated chickens. Depending on the screen, there are various combinations of long and short platforms at different heights, connected with ladders and/or lifts.

As you go through the screens so the set ups become more difficult, with more eggs to collect and more hens chasing, and more piles of — hen manure, to put it politely, to avoid.

CRITICISM

‘This game has a very good use of colour, very good, bright graphics, neatly animated and detailed. It has you climbing ladders, jumping over holes, jumping down from one level to another, riding lifts and generally collecting eggs like a maniac. I found it fun and addictive! It also gives you user definable keys and games for up to four players.’

‘This is hardly a new game type, but it’s certainly an excellent addition to the collection of holejumping-ladderclimbing-nastyavoiding games for the Spectrum. What makes it addictive, apart from the very good graphics and sound, is the construction of the various platforms. These soon get to be very complicated, and like the best arcade originals, you must plan your way round carefully. The control keys are highly responsive, your man jumping beautifully, even reversing direction in mid-jump if you time it right. Very addictive and nicely frustrating.’

‘I had a lot of trouble at first getting my man to climb or descend ladders, but this is a trick of the program. He’s very difficult to centre if you’re being careful about lining up, whereas if you dash at a ladder and have the ascend/descend key also pressed, he whizzes straight up as desired. What must be remembered is to change directional keys while whizzing, or he may end up going in the wrong direction at the top of the ladder. One kindness is that he can withstand some tremendous falls from one level to another. An excellent arcade game, with high addictivity built in. But it’s very expensive at almost £8 — the one drawback.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: user definable, 4 direction and one jump needed.
Joystick: Can be set up to cope with most and works with Fuller anyway.
Keyboard play: highly responsive
Colour: very good
Graphics: very good
Sound: continuous and good
Skill levels: gets harder with every screen
Lives: 5
Features: speech vocabulary with Fuller Box, and 1/2/3/4 player games
General Rating: Highly addictive, and very good.

Use of Computer

90%

Graphics

80%

Playability

85%

Getting Started

78%

Addictive Qualities

80%

Value For Money

65%

Overall

80%

CRUISE ATTACK

Producer: Mikro-Gen Ltd
Author: Chris Hinsley

Mikrogen make little secret of the fact that this is another ‘Missile Command’ copy, stating the fact in their inlay to the game. In most respects it turns out to be a very reasonable version. There are the six cities, but only two laser bases rather than the more usual three, each one firing independently. Apart from the incoming missile trails, there are also blue torpedoes to contend with.

CRITICISM

‘Of the ones I’ve seen recently, this game probably has the best graphics for a ‘Missile Command’ version on the Spectrum. The graphics are fairly close to the original, in fact the atomic clouds on impact are an improvement. But control of the targeting sight is always a problem. The keys are not well laid out (it’s difficult to play this type of game with keys anyway). But if you have a Mikrogen joystick, then definitely buy this version of the game.’

‘Realistic explosions and hi-res graphics make Cruise Attack look good, but the movement of the cross hair is fairly slow and spoils the playability. And the right hand controls are badly placed.’

‘This is a very passable version of ‘Missile Command’ with very fine explosion effects. The major difficulty is moving the cross hair because of the control keys, and your missiles seem to take an age to do their job. It seems a shame that they haven’t allowed for more than one skill level, and I missed the enemy satellites, although they would have been hard to get without a joystick.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: poorly laid out; Q/A up/down, U/P left and right, Z fire left base, S/S fire right base
Joystick: Mikrogen
Keyboard play: apart from the ergonomics, reasonable. The inlay states user-definable keys, but there aren’t any
Colour: above average
Graphics: good
Sound: average
Skill levels: 1
Lives: 6 cities
General Rating: Average.

Use of Computer

48%

Graphics

70%

Playability

68%

Getting Started

56%

Addictive Qualities

70%

Value For Money

60%

Overall

62%

DIMENSION DESTRUCTORS

Producer: Artic Computing Ltd
Author: Jon Ritman

Suddenly from the outer reaches of space, a dot appears on the scanner of your fighter craft. As you tear forward, the dots grow until you can clearly see them in 3D form. Prepare for combat! Your trembling finger reaches for the firing button.

You pull across to avoid an enemy fighter as it whistles past you in its kamikaze attack. The inlay intro for this game is quite prosaic in comparison with many, and becomes justified when you see the graphics. Dimension Destructors is a sort of ‘Battle Zone’ game in space, and employs three dimensional graphics very reminiscent of Artic’s earlier 3D Combat Zone. The object is quite simple, use the directional keys to line up the approaching enemy fighters (hollow pyramid and diamond shapes) in the central cross hairs and then zap them with your laser. This fires twin bolts of energy which converge a distance ahead in the cross hairs.

The title card is very bright, well drawn, and the credit card and points/hiscore table is very effectively done in scrolling letters which run off into the distance in perspective, rather like the titles for Star War movies.

CRITICISM

‘The graphics are fairly simple but well animated in 3D and the enemy explode into chunks battle zone style. I found it quite exciting to play and I think it’s one of Artic’s best releases yet. The titles and hi-score are very impressive, if a little slow.’

‘At last, a good 3D shoot em up — shame you move so slowly! The various enemy craft have different flight tactics. If you’re good enough you will find out where the enemy fighters come from. The graphics are fair to good. It’s difficult to play and in the end I found it a little bit boring, probably due to its difficulty.’

‘Perhaps the lack of a landscape makes this game less spectacular than Artic’s 3D Combat Zone, but it is much faster to play and so more fun. The graphics are simple and somewhat colourless as you might expect with hollow 3D, but they work very effectively. The control response is very good, one of the easiest cockpit view games to control I’ve ever seen. Very playable, but perhaps not massively addictive.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: QWERTY up, ASDFGH down, O=left, P=right, bottom row fires
Joystick: Sinclair, Kempston, Fuller
Keyboard play: very responsive and easy to control
Use of colour: simple
Graphics: effective 3D, good title cards
Sound: reasonable and continuous
Skill levels: gets harder
Lives: 4 shields, 5 lives
General Rating: above average to good

Use of Computer

73%

Graphics

69%

Playability

64%

Getting Started

70%

Addictive Qualities

61%

Value For Money

70%

Overall

68%

DODGE CITY

Producer: Phoenix Software Ltd
Author: Fraser Orr

Dodge City comes packaged in a large video-style plastic box and contains two cassettes. The first is an action game, the second an adventure game, each inextricably tied to the other. The object is to master twelve skill levels in the action cassette, and if you do you will be given the running code for the adventure cassette. Without this secret code you will be unable to play the adventure. At the end of each skill level you will be given a clue, and all the clues are vital to solving the adventure.

The action tape shows you a Western desert plain with mountains in the background, and ‘you’ are a Pony Express rider. The aim is to collect four mail bags while avoiding the baddies on black horses chasing you.

They shoot at you, and you can shoot back. If you hit one, he falls off his horse and dies, only to replaced a second later by another. The other problem takes the form of cactus plants — running into one results in a prickly end. On the first screen you find yourself chased by one baddy at a time, but on succeeding screens there are more baddies to contend with. These may be rotten cowboys, bandits, Mexicans or Indians and mixtures of all.

You lose a life if hit by a baddy, if you run into a cactus or if you fail to collect four consecutive mail bags. Between each skill level the picture cuts to the office, where a message has arrived for you — a clue to collect for the adventure.

When the adventure is loaded, you are asked for the code, if you get it wrong the program NEWs itself. The scenario for the adventure is that you must prove your innocence in the murder of Dodge City’s deputy sheriff, who has been found dead in your hotel room with a pearl handle gun, presumed to have killed him, lying at your feet. Now, read on...

CRITICISM

‘The graphics of the horses are very good, smooth and quite realistic, and those of the adventure are all quite detailed, taking up the top third of the display area. In the action sequence, the pursuers fire very quickly, sometimes when they’re not even on the screen. I thought the adventure was quite a good one, but it takes a long time to get into as you must master 12 skill levels in the arcade tape. This is a daunting task. (I only managed five, but the producers were thoughtful enough to provide me with the secret code so I could get to see the adventure. Frustrated adventurers should send a stamped addressed envelope and fifty pounds to...) Seriously though, I think there is a danger of becoming bored with the arcade game before you manage 12 levels. If you want an adventure buy one, if you want arcade, buy it. The idea of Dodge City is debatable because unless you manage the first you cannot see the second, and I wonder how many adventure fans will want to wade through hours on an arcade game. Nevertheless, both games are above average in quality.’

‘Both games have a nice sense of humour — the title page to the adventure is very good, and so is the first location which tells you ‘Dodge City welcomes careful drovers’. A warning when entering the secret code -the characters entered don’t appear written on the screen, only dashes appear, which may confuse you into an error. The idea is a good one, although it probably won’t appeal to serious adventure fans because of the arcade game coming first, and it is difficult to yet through the adventure without those vital clues. ’

‘The action and adventure graphics are pretty good, but there’s not much sound. The worst thing is the poor instructions which don’t tell you the control keys, which are numerous in option and very badly laid out.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: poorly positioned; left = 2/0/W/S/SYM SHIFT, right = 1/Q/A/CAPS/P/ENTER, down = 3/E/D/X/I/K/M, up = 4/R/F/C/N/J/U, fire=5/T/G/V/Y/H/B
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard play: responsive, although confusing with the keys
Colour: good
Graphics: good
Sound: fair, none on adventure tape
Skill levels: 12 essential 24 in all (arcade tape)
Lives: 5 (arcade tape)
General Rating: Above average.

Use of Computer

45%

Graphics

70%

Playability

65%

Getting Started

40%

Addictive Qualities

57%

Value For Money

64%

Overall

57%

DOOMSDAY CASTLE

Producer: Fantasy Software
Author: Bob Hamilton

Doomsday Castle is the sequel to The Pyramid. Often follow-ups lack the flair of the original, but in this case the same excellent graphics have been used and added to. The scenario has also been enormously expanded, and the cassette is accompanied by a long, highly amusing and informative inlay of instructions which clearly explain the various roles of the 5 different alien creatures you will encounter, the layout of the castle halls and passageways.

It’s a long scenario, but in brief, it seems that the Elves, ever hopeless at keeping their magic rings and crystals, have allowed the infinitely evil Scarthax to house 6 large elfin stones in Doomsday Castle, where their dangerous power can be harnessed for his own nasty ends. Super hero Ziggy has been sent in to find the stones and escape with them. Some hope! Each chamber is filled with Urks, Garthrogs, a Googly Bird, Nucleoids and Orphacs. Ziggy, in his by now familiar defence capsule, has to laser Urks to death to keep up his laser power, which he needs to blast away one of the four red exit doors. Most of the time these doors are protected by the Garthrogs, who sail up and down on lifts, shooting blindly at anything. Only when a Garthrog is ‘up’ can Ziggy get in a shot at a door. When the door is sufficiently destroyed, Ziggy will be sucked through. Each chamber has an anteroom which may contain a crystal or one of the 6 ancient stones. Only these 6 give you scoring points, which are being eaten away the longer you remain in the castle. High scores are coded and may be sent to Fantasy for publishing in their list of top 1000 scores every 6 months.

CRITICISM

‘What makes this game fun to play, is the complex relationship between all the creatures. Googly Birds only want to sleep, for instance, but Urks keep trying to wake them up and make them fly about, so it becomes as important to shoot Urks to prevent this happening as it does to shoot them for laser replenishment. Added to that, there are numerous routes through the castle but not all are as useful as others, so there as an adventure and strategy element thrown in. Mind you, coping with the furiously fast arcade element is quite enough for me!’

‘The graphics are excellent, smooth, detailed, animated and amusing. Not only must you survive in a hall, shoot out the door, get the crystal and move on, but you get shut in a passage with a time-locked door, where you must survive for as long as possible against the Orphacs before being released into another hall to do battle again. A great follow up to The Pyramid, and another challenge to Ultimate’s great game name. All I can say is BUY IT!’

‘Fantasy certainly seem determined to drive people nuts with immensely long games at impossible odds. Not that this is unplayable, quite the opposite, it’s great fun, with good graphics and good sound. To offer any real criticism one would have to play for months! Excellent value.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: 3 options — see review for The Pyramid
Joystick: Fuller, Kempston, AGF, Protek, Mikrogen
Keyboard play: very responsive — Ziggy floats downwards under his own steam, so you have to work hard at this one
Use of colour: excellent
Graphics: excellent
Sound: good
Lives: 1
Screens: 25 halls, 49 passages
General Rating: Addictive, playable, very good value.

Use of Computer

85%

Graphics

90%

Playability

88%

Getting Started

78%

Addictive Qualities

86%

Value For Money

92%

Overall

87%

EARTH DEFENCE

Producer: Artic Computing Ltd
Author: Donald Campbell

‘Missile Command’ games for the Spectrum must rapidly be coming up for a comparison article — almost every major software house has now had a go at a version, one of the most recent being Artic. In Earth Defence you are given the usual 6 cities to defend with your three missile bases. In this version only the middle one actually fires, the other two supplying missiles. It also features a moving cross hair sight like other versions, but when the fire key is pressed a cross is left until the missile arrives, leaving your main sight free to dash off to the next incoming enemy missile trail. Since the game is well known there’s little point in describing it further.

CRITICISM

‘The graphics are fairly simple with nice explosions, but with only one of the three bases firing it’s difficult to cope, especially with the poor control key layout provided. The original used a tracker ball for controlling missiles, and unless you have a compatible joystick, I would not personally recommend this game.’

‘I thought the use of colour was good, the graphics are smooth and the sound is also good. A very addictive game.’

‘It has simpler looking graphics than some of the other versions, but the explosions are about the best I’ve seen. All three levels are fast, the highest being virtually impossible without a great deal of practice. Pity about the silly control keys though — it’s not an arrangement for what is avery game to play.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: poor, 6/7 left/right, 8/9 up/down, zero to fire. These are keys for the Sinclair Interface 2, and an alternative should have been provided
Joystick: Sinclair, Kempston
Keyboard play: responsive, but difficult to control well
Colour: Average to good, changes with screens
Graphics: simple with good explosion effects
Sound: reasonable
Skill levels: 3
Lives: 6 cities
General Rating: Above average to good.

Use of Computer

62%

Graphics

64%

Playability

60%

Getting Started

68%

Addictive Qualities

62%

Value For Money

64%

Overall

63%

ENERGY 30000

Producer: Elm Computers
Author: Paul Braithwaite

The cassette inlay explains that it is the year 30,000 (that’s a long, long way off) and you have been recruited by Dr. Minestorm who has discovered that Pink Tar left over in the old mines of the 20th Century can be used as an alternative fuel to Uranium, which is running out. Your task is to mine the Pink Tar by using a bulldozer (bang up to date in the year 30,000). This is done by driving the bulldozer down onto the tar and moving quickly with it to the fuel store. Ten chunks will fill the quota for that mine, and work then moves onto another.

The mine is infested with creepy crawlies (show us a mine that isn’t these days), and if the bulldozer runs into one — it’s kapoom.

The screen is divided horizontally by four mine shafts (floors really) with a vertical shaft down the centre. There is also a bottom floor. The rock floors actually resemble Pirelli tyre marks, and are made up of numerous little black rocks, with the occasional pink one. Your bulldozer can crawl left or right, descending or returning by the shaft. The screen is wrap around.

CRITICISM

‘This is an extremely single minded game — either you’ll love it, or you’ll hate it. If you like it, it’ll probably drive you mad! The bulldozer moves very quickly and positively, so it requires lightning reflexes and a mastery of techniques. What they don’t tell you in the inlay is that if you so much as brush a black blob of rock you blow up, and if you manage to drop down (at that speed) accurately on a pink blob, the second you have got it, where it turns black and — bang! So you learn to get the bulldozer just above the level of the floor, wait for a pink blob and then hit the down and forward key almost simultaneously. So simple, so maddening and utterly addictive.’

‘The graphics are nothing to write home about, very simple and quite small, and the game idea is very simple, but because of its speed and the accuracy it demands from the player, I’m sure this is going to appeal to a lot of snappy arcade players.’

‘The least of your problems are the creepie crawlies, although just when you’re one chunk away from a quota, and sailing back up the shaft, you can be sure a wretched thing will snake out and wallop you. Ever so fast, and requires hair trigger responses, which fortunately the keys provide, but the fingers don’t always! Good value.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: Z/X left/right, I/J up/down, well laid out
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard Play: highly responsive
Colour: average
Graphics: fairly small, simple and perfectly adequate
Sound: good
Skill levels: gets impossible after being hard
Lives: 3
General Rating: Maddening, addictive, good value.

Use of Computer

68%

Graphics

60%

Playability

80%

Getting Started

63%

Addictive Qualities

95%

Value For Money

70%

Overall

73%

KRAKATOA

Producer: Abbex
Memory required: 48K
Retail price: £5.95
Language: machine code
Author: Paul Reynolds

Krakatoa — East of Java — the first disaster game.

First shown at the December ZX Microfair, Krakatoa grabbed the attention of most passers-by because its wealth of detail is amazing. There’s such a lot going on. And there’s a lot to do in the game, most of it neatly shown in the excellent demo, which runs automatically after loading and between games.

Your task as a chopper pilot is twofold. A tanker is sheltering in the bay from attacks by V1 missiles and submarines armed with torpedoes. Across the bay the dormant volcano (hence the title) has come to life and is threatening to erupt. You must try to rescue as many people from its threat as possible. Your helicopter is equipped with a machine gun, depth charges and a rope for rescuing people. The game starts with the chopper on the ground on the heli pad, beside the workman’s hut. When your fuel gets low and you return to the heli pad to refuel and re-arm, the workman dashes out and does it all in a very busy animated sequence. On taking off, you pass out over the bay and reach the massive tanker. Its crew start to leap overboard as soon as the enemy do them damage, and so pose another problem for you and your trusty rope!

Beyond the tanker is open sea, full of enemy, and the Volcanic Island with its hapless inhabitants. The screen shows all this in profile, scrolling as it goes, ‘Scramble’ style. To the left and right of the display area are ammo and fuel bars, and below are instruments including a radar display, and score.

The busy workman polishes up the helicopter in Krakatoa.

CRITICISM

‘This has to be one of the busiest games in a long while! There are such a lot of keys to use that it takes a lot of practice before you can even become slightly proficient. The graphics are really excellent, well drawn and animated, and there’s also a lot of detail in the game ideas too. If you accidentally drop a depth charge on the tanker there’s a very good explosion with chunks flying off, and a second later a crew man appears and takes a leap off the stern and begins swimming around. If you successfully pick him up on the end of the lowered rope, it is very tricky to get him into the chopper as he must be on the very end of the rope otherwise he gets knocked off as the rope is pulled aboard, and falls back into the sea! This is a complicated and demanding game, which I can’t see losing its appeal for a long time.’

‘Krakatoa is both addictive and hard to play. But I thought the keys were poorly laid out and there is no joystick option. This makes it even more difficult to play. And it’s a shame that there isn’t much in the way of instructions, because there are quite a few instruments which are not explained. But these are small niggles because the game itself is marvellous. Excellent graphics (fantastic explosion when you are hit), very colourful and with plenty of sound. Watch out for volcanic explosions!’

‘It’s only in some small details that Krakatoa is less good. Why, for instance, didn’t they print the 10 control keys on the cassette inlay? During the attract mode, the keys are listed for a very short time and there are too many to get written down that quickly, and too many to remember. The control keys are difficult to manage and laid out in a rather odd way. Once over these problems the game proves to be very good to play, with loads of detail, great graphics and sound and a lot of imagination. It should keep players going for a long time, if only because it takes ages to become any good, and the scope for getting better scores each time you play is enormous with so many people to rescue.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: 5 = up, 3 = down, 7 = forward, bottom row = reverse, 9 = fire, zero = drop depth charge, W = rope down, R = rope up, ENTER = pause
Joystick: none
Keyboard play: undeniably a handful, but very responsive
Colour: very good
Graphics: excellent, very animated
Sound: excellent
Skill levels: 1 — it’s enough
Lives: 1 — it’s enough
General rating: very good — highly recommended

Use of computer

70%

Graphics

92%

Playability

87%

Getting started

70%

Addictive qualities

88%

Value for money

90%

Overall

83%

FIGHTER PILOT

Producer: Digital Integration
Author: David K. Marshall

If you have ever hesitated over buying a flight simulation program on the grounds that it will be too slow to make an interesting game, Fighter Pilot will probably change your attitude (or should that be altitude)? This simulation moves at 802 knots (at sea level, full reheat) and can create total panic at a moment’s notice! The game allows one player to control a jet fighter plane in several modes, which include landing, taking-off and air-to-air combat.

Your machine is a McDonnell Douglas F15 Eagle with 2 Pratt & Whitney F 100-PW-100 turbofan power plants, and the program writers claim that the simulation is as realistic as limitations of the computer allow.

When loaded you are presented with a menu; 1) Landing Practice 2) Flying Training 3) Air-to-Air Combat practice 4) Air-to-Air Combat 5) Blind Landing 6) Cross Winds & Turbulence 7) Skill levels 8) Control selection.

Before we take a look at the options more closely, let’s examine the aircraft’s equipment. In the centre of the instrument panel is the Artificial Horizon, showing the roll angle and pitch angle. An aircraft symbol rotates to show wing angle relative to the ground, and a moving tape in degrees indicates whether the aircraft is flying nose up or nose down. When it’s blue you’re flying nose up, when it’s yellow, nose down. To the left of the AH is the speed indicator in knots. To the right is the Altitude in feet and below is the VSI — Vertical Speed Indicator, which gives rate of climb or descent in feet per second. Below the airspeed instrument are the flaps, and below the AH is the engine thrust indicator, a bar scale running from 0% to 100% with a red section for reheat. This boosts the engine but uses up much more fuel. There is also a radar and compass with beacon selection, and an ILS/Flight Computer. The Instrument Landing System offers runway approach guidance or it can be switched to Flight Computer to show your precise ground position from any beacon within a 6 mile radius. It also indicates the altitude of an enemy aircraft when in combat mode. The remaining instruments are a fuel gauge and beneath it, the undercarriage indicator, showing up or down.

To control your aircraft there are fifteen control keys, although fortunately these are not used all at once! Joystick left, back, forward and right is controlled by the cursors (or by a joystick!) and CAPS SHIFT/Z moves the rudder left and right. Q/A increases or decreases engine thrust, W/S puts the flaps up or down, U raises and lowers the undercarriage, B puts the brakes on and is indicated on the instrument panel as a red light. N selects the next beacon and M switches the cockpit view to a map. SYMBOL SHIFT switches between ILS and Flight Computer, and finally zero fires the guns when in combat mode, which is selected by pressing G.

Back to the menu: Selecting Landing Practice immediately positions you at 1700 feet and 6 miles from touch down with the undercarriage down. In Flying Training you are on the end of the runway and ready to take off. Air-to-Air Combat Practice positions you two miles behind an enemy aircraft and you catch up, select combat mode and open fire when he appears in your sights. The enemy will not fire back — at least, not until you opt for straightforward Air-to-Air Combat. In this scenario you must defend four airfields; you are scrambled, must locate the enemy with your radar and engage. He will lock on to you when there is less than a mile and 5000 feet altitude difference between you. Four strikes from him is fatal. If you break off the enemy will pursue his mission once again, and you may find the airfield damaged.

The remaining option, Blind Landing, renders your viewscreen useless, and forces you to land on instruments only.

There are three skill levels, Trainee/Squadron Leader/Ace to choose from. Kempston, Sinclair, AGF/Protek joysticks or keyboard are selectable. The display through the windscreen is fairly simple, green ground, blue sky. The other features are the runways of the four air bases named BASE, TANGO, DELTA and ZULU. These are seen in full, correct perspective with centre lines, distance markers and end lights. Additionally, you can see enemy aircraft as you approach, also in full perspective. The tape is accompanied by very clear instructions and technical details.

CRITICISM

‘A full evaluation of Fighter Pilot, would take an age as the program has enormous potential for playing. Also, flying my F15 was not an easy task. The set up for landing sounds soothingly simple. But in eight initial attempts we nose-dived with loss of all aboard! I had a go at a dog fight. It took some time to find my enemy — getting the hang of banking and turning takes time — but when I did we had a jolly time and I went down in flames after a few hectic seconds. I’m going back for more!’

‘The map facility is excellent in this game. An advantage is that you can switch to map without losing your instruments — you can see where you are and keep flying, rather important at 800 knots! The map provides a scale, locations of the airfields and their beacons, which can be selected by number to get the correct heading, and it shows two ranges of mountains with their heights. What struck me about this simulation is its overall speed. You can sit back and relax to some degree on the longer training flight, but mostly it’s hard work and it all happens pretty fast. Very good resolution on the graphics and instrument displays.’

‘Definitely the best simulation for the Spectrum yet, and one of the most exciting to play. Key control is a fraction slow, you have to keep a key pressed for results, but with so many keys that’s not surprising. What does work well is that the instruments respond very well with quite a lot of fine tuning possible. I’m no pilot, but I reckon this is all very realistic.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: see review
Joystick: see review
Colour: very good
Graphics: very good
Sound: none
Skill levels: 3
Lives: 1 — how many more do you want?
General Rating: An excellent simulation and game — highly recommended.

Use of Computer

82%

Graphics

90%

Playability

85%

Getting Started

90%

Addictive Qualities

85%

Value For Money

85%

Overall

86%

FREEZ’ BEES

Producer: Silversoft Ltd
Author: David Leitch

Freez’ bees adds another version of ‘Pengo’ or ‘Pengy’ to the Spectrum file. The object of the game is to walk your penguin round the ice fields, burning away the ice blocks to create space, or send them shooting off to try and crush the nasty snow bees who are out to get you.

Features in this version include the penguin’s ability to electrify the fence, stunning the bee that touches it for a moment, and the illumination of ice blocks containing bee eggs at the start of each phase. You receive extra points for clearing these blocks before the eggs hatch out.

CRITICISM

‘The graphics in Freez’ Bees are very nice, quite large and very colourful on a white ground. They move smoothly as well, and at a fair pace even on the slower of the ten speeds. I quite enjoyed playing it and the game itself is very addictive when you get fluent at controlling the penguin.’

‘Once a snow bee is on your tail you may as well give up as it’s hard to get away, and extremely difficult to get round a block, turn and fire at your tormentor. Apart from this aspect, which I think spoils the game’s playability, this type of game is really very simple and not worth buying. This version has good sound though.’

‘This version is frantically difficult to play — perhaps too hard to keep your attention — so it’s as well that there’s a range of speeds to select. The colours and graphics are good, so’s the sound and tunes. If you’re looking for a ‘Pengo’ game, then this is a good and hard version.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: Z/X left/right, K/M up/down, L = slide or crumble an ice block
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard play: single key action, but fast
Colour: simple but bright
Graphics: good
Sound: very good
Skill levels: 10 speeds
Lives: 3
General Rating: Reasonable implementation of a fair game.

Use of Computer

60%

Graphics

57%

Playability

59%

Getting Started

63%

Addictive Qualities

68%

Value For Money

57%

Overall

61%

GAMES DESIGNER

Producer: Quicksilva/Software Studios
Memory required: 48K
Retail price: £14.95
Language: machine code
Author: John Hollis

If you’re tired of actually playing games perhaps you might like to have a go at designing one yourself? Of course a lot of Spectrum owners are not programming geniuses, so Quicksilva have now brought out a package which at least offers control over the various features of some standard arcade games. In a way it’s the computer equivalent of the chemistry kit.

Games Designer comes packed in a neat betamax-sized video cassette box, and contains a detailed booklet on the program. On loading the program the first thing you are offered is a main menu with a list of eight options: Play Game, Select New Game, Alter Sprites, Configuration, Movement, Attack Waves, Load from Tape, Save to Tape.

At any time, pressing ENTER returns you to the main menu. Selecting Play Game allows you to play whichever is the ‘current’ of the eight different games included in the program. Control keys may be altered to suit the users own preferred layout. The second option, Select New Game, lets you choose between any of the other seven games. The eight titles are: Attack of the Mutant Hamburgers, Cyborg, Reflecttron, Turbo-Spider, Tanks a Lot, Halloween, Splat and Qbix.

Having played these as they exist, you may fancy redesigning them. Option three allows the sprites to be altered and a menu tells you what can be done. This includes the shapes of the aliens, ships or laser bases, missiles and bombs, shields and explosion sequences. Their colours can be changed as well. Having selected the sprite type to be altered a sprite editor fills the screen, showing all the pixels that make up the sprite. These can then be manipulated from the keyboard without difficulty.

Configuration, the fourth option, allows you to alter the way the game takes place. You can change the game format, control keys and joystick options; the background and foreground colours may be altered; special effects can be changed; and there are four classes of sound effect which can be played with, missile sounds, bomb sounds, ship explosions and alien explosions. Selecting one of these keys brings the sound editor into play, a visual display of faders controlling the overall frequency or pitch of the sound, the speed at which pitch increases; or decreases; length of sound.

Option five is Movement. This controls the patterns and pattern movement of aliens/ objects/ships etc. Again an editor is used with visual display so that you can create almost any pattern or movement you like.

Option six allows you to alter the attack waves of the aliens, including the animation, points awarded for each destroyed, pattern under which they start a game, numbers of aliens in each attack wave, whether or not they drop bombs, and also what pattern of attack wave follows the ‘current’ one.

The last two options allow you to save your redesigned game or reload it.

Obviously this is a very complex program, which allows great flexibility and offers enjoyment on two levels, both playing and designing. The instruction booklet is well designed, very clear, and includes a technical appendix which may be of interest, as well as various tables to aid games design. They have also been thoughtful enough to provide blank pages at the end for the player’s own notes.

Any combination of control keys or joysticks may be accommodated as desired.

CRITICISM

‘Excellent packaging and instructions. The eight pre-programmed games are quite simple but the graphics are of good quality, and anything can be redesigned. The variations and experiments are endless.’

‘I was disappointed by the actual games pre-programmed, which were all very simple. But then, half the fun is redesigning everything, and it’s possible to make some very bloody-minded and hard to play games from this little package.’

‘The graphics are excellent, and I’m not talking about the game graphics but those on the various menus. The little ‘fader’ type visuals are wonderful.’

‘The program is user-friendly so you don’t have to be an expert in machine code programming. Even at £15 Games Designer represents good value for money.’

COMMENTS

Keyboard positions: up to you!
Joystick options: up to you!
Keyboard play: positive
Use of colour: up to you!
Graphics: excellent and then up to you!
Sound: up to you!
Skill levels: up to you!
Lives: up to you!
General rating: Highly recommended

Since the ratings hardly apply to this program we asked the reviewers to give an overall percentage. It was 92%.

THE GUARDIAN

Producer: PSS

The scene is set: you are at the gateway to the antimatter world of Migon. Do you dare enter, will you survive? Well of course you dare enter, but whether you will survive in this mega-lightspeed game is quite another matter, or antimatter in this case.

The simple object of the game is to speed your ship in either direction around a square which is superimposed on a space background. A smaller square is offset within the bigger, and lines radiating out from it create segments. Your ship is a sort of picture hook shaped thing that runs on the outer square. From the central square four enemy ships fly outward in three successive waves. You can centre yourself on an occupied segment and shoot the enemy with your laser, zipping around to get the next, and so on. If an enemy reaches the outer square while you are stationary on that segment — you’re dead. The second screen has no segments, but meteor showers radiate out at a high speed. The third screen returns to the radial grid and the enemy are back with another danger, a V shaped energy thingie that zaps around the edges trying to get you.

Your only other weapon is a Star Smasher that destroys everything in the square. But you only have two of them. The more screens you get through, the more enemy there are. As you can see, holiday package tours keep well clear of Migon.

CRITICISM

‘I liked this game, one of the best yet from P.S.S., but I can imagine that it has a specialist appeal. It is insanely fast! The ship zooms round the grid at astonishing speed, so avoiding an enemy can take you uncontrollably into another. Definitely a game which develops split-second timing skills.’

‘The graphics are very simple, being mostly grid lines and small sprites, but there is a good use of colour even so and everything moves very smoothly. The graphics on the Star Smasher look quite exciting. I found playing the game was too fast for my taste, but it should appeal to those arcade addicts that like hand and eye coordination games.’

‘A good, hard, fast game. I thought the asteroid sheets were a little of a let down, since you can get through by just sitting still, but everything else is madness. I wonder whether these space shoot em ups have had their day — there’s something a bit ‘quaint’ about The Guardian — but it is an improvement on the earlier asteroid games. If you want something simple to play but exceptionally fast, then this will probably go down well.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: an ample selection — Y/U/I/O/P = fire, A/S/D/F/G left, H/J/K/L/ENTER = right, B-SPACE = Star Smasher
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard play: lightning fast responses
Colour: simple but well used
Graphics: very simple but very fast
Sound: good
Skill levels: gets tougher by the screen
Lives: 3
General Rating: Specialist arcade appeal, fast and medium addictive.

Use of Computer

75%

Graphics

59%

Playability

68%

Getting Started

66%

Addictive Qualities

72%

Value for Money

67%

Overall

68%

HOUSE OF THE LIVING DEAD

Producer: Phipps Associates
Author: Tony Barber

With another title sounding like an adventure game, Phipps offer The House of the Living Dead. This is a simple maze arcade game, a post-Pac Man variant. It seems your travel agent has booked you into a rather odd kind of hostelry, where you wake up in the night with a bat flitting above your head.

This noisome happening alerts you to the fact that your other room mates are all ghouls and monsters and creeping severed hands. Not a pleasant sight!

Fortunately, having seen many cheap Dracula movies, you are aware that if only you can collect the four pieces of the cross from the room’s corners and bring them all to the centre, the life force which will emanate from it will kill the nasties off and let you progress to the next level where there will be even more horrors awaiting you. Serves you right for opting to take a cheap holiday package.

CRITICISM

‘It’s an extremely simple game to play, just move your man around the uncomplicated maze and collect the four L-shaped bits of a cross. In the centre is a red square. If you are carrying a piece of the cross when you touch it, the piece is automatically located and you can go after the next piece. There are four different types of monster, starting off with one on screen one, two on screen two and so on. With each level you just get more monsters to cope with. On that basis it does get to be quite difficult.’

‘This is quite a good game, with reasonable graphics and it is fun to play, but not very addictive. An original version of what is now an unoriginal game. For what it’s worth, your little man resembles Morph off the TV — at least my cousin thinks so.’

‘The animation of your man is good, but there’s not much to the game really. It works on the attrition principle of just wearing you down by numbers. A better arrangement of keys would have helped too; the cursors never function well with fingers. Quite good sound; I would think a good, tough game for younger age groups in preparation for alien-zapping.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: cursors
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard play: average
Colour: reasonable
Graphics: good
Sound: average
Skill levels: gets harder
Lives: 4
General Rating: Average with more appeal to younger players.

Use of Computer

56%

Graphics

66%

Playability

70%

Getting Started

60%

Addictive Qualities

47%

Value For Money

54%

Overall

59%

HUNCHBACK

Producer: Ocean Software Ltd
Author: Paul Owens, Christian F. Urquhart, F. David Thorpe

Hunchback seems to have been quite a while a’coming, so it’s pleasing to be able to report that it seems worth the waiting. In some sense it’s a platform, hole-leaping game that takes place on one platform. The story, as the title says, is set on a real castle and you are the (well known) hunchback, Quasimodo. Your task is to rescue Esmerelda from the stronghold. To do this you must jump, leap and dodge your way across no less than 15 screens of sheer torture.

The screen shows a large wall reaching half way up. Quasimodo starts on the left and he must reach the bell rope on the right. At the base of the screen is a graphic representation of the 15 ramparts to be tackled. The problems encountered include fire balls which must be leapt, pits to be swung across on a rope, and others which need several ropes, castellations filled with spearmen who raise and lower their spears and must be jumped, and then combinations of all these elements. Additionally there is a red knight climbing the wall. If he reaches the top before Quasimodo gets across, he sticks his sword into his bottom! If you get through to the final screen you are rewarded by the sight of Esmerelda stuck in her tower, ready for rescue.

CRITICISM

‘The graphics are smooth, well detailed and nicely animated, especially Quasimodo, and the colours are well used too. Quite what the tune ‘If you go down to the woods today...’ has got to do with Quasimodo I don’t know, but it sounds good. I found this game very playable, although when you jump across the pit on a rope, timing has to be spot on with no +1 or -1 variation. I think that could have been made easier.’

‘At first playing Hunchback is fun and difficult, but the screens are made up of re-using the same elements in different combinations and eventually it gets visually boring. It certainly demands skills of timing and reaction, especially when jumping over spears and dodging two arrows or fireballs coming from opposite directions.’

‘Hunchback looks very good, bright, cheerful and with a loud tune. I think it could have had a bit more sound during the frame though. It’s also quite difficult to play well, but in the end I think it palls as there isn’t quite enough variation in the screens. This game will probably appeal to younger players as an intermediate stage between very simple games and the more complicated ones that are now appearing. But on the whole quite good value for money.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: good, Q/W left right and SYMBOL SHIFT for jump
Joystick: Kempston, Protek, AGF, Sinclair ZX 2
Keyboard play: responsive but jump timing very hard
Colour: good
Graphics: good
Sound: good tunes
Skill levels: 1
Lives: 3
Screens: 15
General Rating: Good value and reasonably addictive.

Use of Computer

72%

Graphics

68%

Playability

65%

Getting Started

70%

Addictive Qualities

59%

Value For Money

62%

Overall

66%

I’M IN SHOCK

Producer: Artic Computing Ltd
Author: Colin Jones

So this was what we were returning to; a scarred battlefield and ashes. We’d travelled across the universe to save the Earth, we’d seen off the invaders and suffered the casualties, only to find it had all been a decoy.

So I’m In Shock sets the scene for this grid/shoot em up game. You can move your laser base left and right, while shooting up. The screen is divided into one character squares by green grid lines with you (and the aliens above) sitting in the squares. The number of aliens depends on how many waves you have killed off. They move about randomly, very slowy descending. Should one reach the bottom the game is over. Some squares have diagonal lines filling them, which cause your shots to rebound at right angles, whereas the aliens can fire through them quite happily. This requires some strategical thinking to use the shields to double rebound and thus still hit an alien. Every 3 screens, a command ship, resembling a spider, crawls across the screen half way up, and scores a bonus if you hit it.

CRITICISM

‘The graphics are quite small and simple and the keys are over-responsive, making it very hard to move to an adjacent square. The game itself is quite reasonable, but something of an anti-climax after reading the intro on the inlay — “The moon was the colour of wide frozen shrieks of laughter, the frost ran down the window — I’m in shock.” See what I mean.’

‘I thought the graphics and colour were generally rather poor, and the game, though an original idea, does tend to get repetetive and is very easy to play.’

‘I like the energy reflectors, they added a dimension of strategy to an otherwise very ordinary shoot em up. But the alien craft could have been a bit more energetically nasty, it would have made the game more interesting to play. Very difficult to control small movements of the laser base too.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: very simple, CAPS — V left, B — SPACE, right, H — ENTER, fire
Joystick: none
Keyboard play: fast and over-responsive
Graphics: average, small, 1-character size
Sound: good
Skill levels: 5
Lives: 3
General Rating: Fair to average, but reasonable value for money.

Use of Computer

58%

Graphics

47%

Playability

52%

Getting Started

62%

Addictive Qualities

50%

Value For Money

58%

Overall

55%

KNOCKOUT

Producer: Mikro-Gen Ltd
Author: G. Shallcross

Knockout is a game in which you compete against the Spectrum or up to three other players, and is effectively a computer version of the popular board game ‘Rebound’. The object is to bounce balls around a board and leave them within firmly defined scoring positions. Each player has four balls to a frame and opponents take it in turns to play each ball of the frame.

The screen display shows a plan view of the board with black walls bent in the shape of a tight G, the ball being shot from the top right end of the G, rebounding off the end walls and ending up in the tail of the G where there are two blue areas of scoring and three green higher scoring areas before a yellow out of bounds.

The player’s ball (up to four different colours) is positioned vertically for its shot, an angle determined, and a strength of shot by onscreen prompts and the cursor keys 6 and 7. The balls all remain in play until the frame is completed so there is the chance of knocking an opponent’s ball, or your own, into better or worse positions for scoring. Players enter their names at the start of play and the computer scores for each and keeps a running total. If you are on your own and only enter one name, then you will be playing against the computer.

CRITICISM

‘You might think from the title that this is a ‘Breakout’ type of game — but it’s not, more a new breed of computer bowls, the sort they have in pubs. I liked it very much, why, I don’t really know! But it is a very simple game to play and suitable for all ages and all types. It’s difficult to say how addictive people might find it, but at a guess I would say very. It’s also good that you can play by yourself or with others.’

‘The game is played in frames up to a maximum of nine, and is a good conversion of a floor or board game to the screen. The game is quite good to play, although not very addictive because the true game calls for physical skill in placing shots, but the fact that it’s different places it above average.’

‘There’s nothing spectacular about Knockout. The graphics are essentially simple, but everything is elegantly planned and implemented. Of all sports simulations I’ve seen recently, I think this is the most appealing and a worthy addition to anyone’s collection.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: all done with prompts and keys 6 & 7, & Y
Colour: effectively plain and to the point
Graphics: simple, ball rebounds are very good
Sound: good
Features: against computer or up to 3 other players
General Rating: An excellent simulation, difficult to define addictivity properly, but good value generally.

Use of Computer

70%

Graphics

52%

Playability

65%

Getting Started

69%

Addictive Qualities

50%

Value For Money

68%

Overall

62%

LASERWARP

Producer: Mikro-Gen Ltd
Author: Chris Hinsley

Mikrogen claim that this game has it all. It certainly has quite a lot anyway! It is a very simple shoot em up which has you in control of a laser base while every known electronic alien in the universe is falling on you, swooping at you and hurling indestructible missiles of all shapes and sizes at you. ‘Paranoia’ might be a more apt title!

The various aliens (depends on the level of play chosen) each have different movement characteristics and drop different types of missiles, including very mean, red-coloured heat seeking missiles which veer towards the laser base as they get lower, following slightly as it moves away. Surviving ten attack waves leaves you facing ‘The Master’ who sounds like a nasty piece of work. Should you destroy him, he returns stronger than ever. The universe was never an easy place...

CRITICISM

‘The game works quite well as a shoot em up, and I like the idea of many aliens on screen at one time. The downward scrolling star background works nicely too, and in general the graphics are good. It has well used colours although I thought they seemed a little dull (dark).’

‘A very busy screen, which keeps you constantly on your toes. Strong graphics and plenty of them, reasonable sound and a very lively shoot em up. Two oddities though, the inlay says user-definable keys, but l couldn’t find any, and the game hardly requires them anyway. Also the instructions on screen say N/L = Fire, when actually it’s ENTER. Still, a very good game with a straightforward appeal.’

‘Laserwarp is the latest and greatest shoot em up game. It’s highly addictive and fun to play. This may even challenge Imagine’s Arcadia as the best ever Spectrum shoot em up. Extremely good value for money if you like arcade games. Only one niggle — the laser base fires rather slowly.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: S/D left/right, ENTER = fire
Joystick: none
Keyboard play: responsive, but laser can only have one shot on screen at a time
Colour: varied and reasonable
Graphics: very good
Sound: good
Skill levels: 5
Lives: 3
Screens: 10 waves plus master
General Rating: Very good.

Use of Computer

88%

Graphics

85%

Playability

78%

Getting Started

50%

Addictive Qualities

80%

Value For Money

80%

Overall

77%

MAGIC MEANIES

Producer: CDS Microsystems

This game is a good copy of an old arcade favourite, on the whole a not much copied game as yet. Blaby did a version, called Gold Digger, and in most respects this is very similar, although it boasts a rather splendid continuous music sound track.

The object of the game is to control your little wizard Meltec through underground caverns which he himself creates as he goes. Dotted about are lumps of lead, resembling blue diamonds, which are to be collected for points. There are also red apples (underground?) which can be pushed along an existing tunnel and made to squash the meanies by dropping them down a shaft, or one can be used to block a tunnel by undermining it. Meanies can also be killed by firing one of your five crystal balls at them. Killing meanies adds to your points. There’s also a cherry on each screen which must be collected.

This goes wandering about the place in a most distracted, not to say distracting manner. Clearing a screen of lead and cherry takes you on a level to more meanies.

CRITICISM

‘Cutting out the story of wizards good and evil and dark ages when they spent their efforts obtaining lead to transmute into gold, which sounds like an adventure game, Magic Meanies is an arcade game. It’s only a reasonable game, but it’s fun to play.’

‘The graphics are quite small, one-character size and they move quite jerkily, but they are called on to do very little, since much of the game’s attraction lies in the skill and quick thinking required. Once on the move your man can only be stopped by running up against an apple, or by constantly reversing his direction. It’s a simple game but manages to be addictive in playing. Nice, bright colours, and an insistent and continuous music track that can be turned off if it’s driving anyone else mad!’

‘Despite the simplicity of this type of game, it isn’t easy to play, requiring quick reflexes. C.D.S. have also provided nine playing speeds as well as rising skill levels. At the slowest speed the game can become a bit repetitive, but at medium fast it is quite demanding. The highest speed level is sheer madness. Fairly addictive, and a good version.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: Q/Z up down, I/P left/right, M fires
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard play: very responsive
Colour: average
Graphics: small, 1-characters size, but quite fast
Sound: good
Skill levels: 9 speeds, rising difficulty
Lives: 3
General Rating: Above average.

Use of Computer

60%

Graphics

45%

Playability

68%

Getting Started

58%

Addictive Qualities

60%

Value For Money

55%

Overall

58%

MICROBOT

Producer: Softek Software International Ltd
Author: Andrew Beale

Andrew Beale has done a number of games for Softek and this one will probably be accounted as among the best. It has similarities in its scenario with the ‘you’re inside this computer’ school.

In this, possibly your millionth re-incarnation now, you are a microbot, a miniaturised robot, whose task is to enter the electronic brains of proper-sized robots and repair damage to them.

The scenario points out that you wanted to be either a Brain Surgeon or a truck driver, and as you couldn’t possibly meet the necessary specifications, you had to become a Brain Surgeon!

A nice touch about this game is that the inside of these highly advanced but somewhat brain-damaged robots resembles the basement of some huge and rambling Victorian mansion with unlagged heating pipes.

There are two types of pipe — purple ones and green ones (scenario explains the difference, but it’s all far too high in technology to repeat here) and there are various bugs which are causing damage to the delicate electronic brain. Despite their varied shapes they come in two hues — blue and yellow (this is important, but wait for it).

Your job as microbot is to prowl around armed with repulsa blobs and fix the pipes. The repulsa blobs keep the nasties at bay for a mo, but lying around in each brainy chamber are blue and yellow fix-a-tive blobs.

Touching one turns microbot into that colour, and if he fires a blob of the correct hue at a nasty of the same colour, the blob will destroy it. But despite all these fun and games, the true nature of the coloured blobs is to fix the pipes. When fired close up a blue blob will fix a damaged purple pipe, and a yellow blob fixes a green pipe. Once used the fix-a-tives are instantly replaced ready for picking up again.

The brain consists of twelve chambers, and can be seen to the left of the playing area in plan form. This scanner also informs you of where the worst damage is being done by colour coding. It’s frightening!

CRITICISM

‘Fixing holes in the pipes made by the nasties is not so easy, I found that this only worked if you bumped into the hole several times and then fired the fix-a-tive ball at point blank range. The graphics are very good with a number of animated bugs (there’s a yellow Pac Man on legs in there somewhere) the game is fine, but there was something about it that made it not as much as it could be. Just a feeling, it’s still a good and interesting game and highly original.’

‘Graphics in Spectrum games have got to be so good in the last few months that it’s easy to forget how primitive they were only recently. In Microbot the scenery is mostly angled pipes on black, quite simple, yet they are very good pipes. You wouldn’t have seen pipes like those only a year ago! The creepies are good, too, and well animated. Microbot himself moves swiftly, but getting the hang of the game techniques takes some time, and could have been explained better. I shall certainly go back and get better.’

‘Nice large graphics and very smoothly moving. Not too sure about the overall qualities of the game — it grew on me with playing, but I get the feeling there aren’t quite enough objectives involved to make it very addictive, although it is fun to play. I got a bit irritated with the finickiness of fixing holes, and it seems a pity that the blue and yellow blobs can only be fired sideways when the damned bugs move all over the place. An original game.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: A/Z up/down, O/P left/right, M = fire
Joystick: Kempston, Sinclair, AGF, Protek
Keyboard play: responsive
Colour: good
Graphics: good
Sound: very good
Skill levels: 1
Lives: 3
Screens: 12
General Rating: Very good.

Use of Computer

73%

Graphics

80%

Playability

70%

Getting Started

65%

Addictive Qualities

68%

Value For Money

80%

Overall

73%

MOUNTAINS OF KET

Producer: Incentive Software Ltd
Author: Richard A. McCormack

Mountains of Ket is the first part of the Ket Trilogy. Each adventure is complete in itself, although one follows on from the other. The next two parts are to be released later.

Just two weeks ago you were framed with a murder and sentenced to death, but pardoned as long as you undertook a dangerous mission. To ensure your loyalty a magic assassin bug has been implanted in your neck which will kill you at the first sign of doing a bunk. It’s called Edgar (or Spectrum to you)! Your mission is to reach the far side of the mountains alive and to do this you must locate the secret entrance at the base of the Mountains of Ket. These lie a short horse ride east of the small village. Naturally, lots have gone before, but none have ever returned.

CRITICISM

‘This is a text adventure, where your constant companion, the implanted killer bug Edgar, is none other than your favourite Spectrum. So all the descriptions come couched in terms of ‘we, us’. If you dally too long, Edgar will get impatient and tick you off. The problems are traditional in as much as the village and its inhabitants can provide you with essential equipment, such as weapons, food and a horse. The initial problems are to discover how to get them to part with all this gear. I managed to buy an axe from a shopkeeper, but when I wanted the lamp there was no money left, so I tried using the axe! Adventure characters seem to have got very used to the bloodthirsty ways of Spectrum users who wander into their lives — this shopkeeper was more than ready for me! The statistics told me the sad story — my prowess and energy levels were all less than his and whereas my luck level was high his said ‘not applicable’ which I thought sounded very ominous! He won.’

‘The text is all nicely laid out and the program has what seems to be a reasonably large vocabulary. Entries are processed instantly, so there’s no waiting about. If you get into a fight the statistics appear at the top telling you your chances of winning, and the text is very lively in describing the blows, offering you fast options on continuing or running. Otherwise it continues round by round until one of you runs or snuffs it. I haven’t got all that far yet, but there certainly seems to be a large number of locations contained in the program. A map helps. This is certainly one to ponder over and come back to. It can be saved fortunately so you can cogitate in bed at night. Looks like more sleepless nights!’

Playability

68%

Getting Started

79%

Addictive Qualities

65%

Value For Money

80%

Overall

73%

MR. WIMPY

Producer: Ocean Software Ltd
Author: Paul Owens

Considering how frequently Spectrum software houses crowd each other with arcade copies, it seems surprising that ‘Burger Time’ type games are not common. Blaby must take the credit by quite a long mark for their Barmy Burgers, which appeared earlier last year, and is a very good implementation. Ocean have attempted to go a stage further in Mr. Wimpy (which actually uses Wimpy’s famous logo on the cover) by releasing a version which has two separate parts.

The first screen, reminiscent of Ultimate’s Pssst, has Mr. Wimpy attempting to assemble the ingredients. He must carry a tray from the left of screen over to the right where there are three items to be collected one at a time, a lump of cheese and two indistinguishable ingredients but doubtless things that put the ham in burger. The problems are three manholes (lord knows why) which sail up and down and kill old Wimp off if he touches them, and Waldo the burger thief who steals a tray if he runs into Mr. Wimpy. Waldo is fairly intelligent and tries to home in.

If you manage to get all three ingredients back across to the left, then you progress to the second screen, which is the more familiar ‘Burger Time’ format. Here the layers of the four burgers you must make are kept on separate platforms, connected at intervals by ladders. Segments of each layer are made to drop one platform by walking Mr. Wimpy over them. Kitchen nasties chase around dealing death and destruction, although they can be killed off by squashing them under a falling layer of hamburger, or by a squirt of pepper. It gets rid of them for 30 seconds. You only have 3 squirts available unless you pick up the bonus ice-cream or coffee cup, which gives you more chances to shoot. When all four hamburgers are fully assembled at the bottom of the screen, you are promoted to the next level.

CRITICISM

‘This is a very colourful game with smooth graphics and good synthesised sound. It starts off well with an excellent title screen. Waldo is an absolute menace, pinching your tray, and this part of the game can be frustrating because the thief is too intelligent. Good tunes, a fairly easy game at first, but it gets more difficult at higher levels. I found it tended to lose its addictiveness after 2 to 3 hours of playing though.’

‘The graphics are excellent and use of colour very good. I liked the tunes between games, although during the game the sound is rather poor. The nasties include Sid Sos, Ogy Egg, Sam Spoon and Pam Pickle, and a rotten bunch they are. This is a fun game to play. Very good!’

‘The graphics are nicely animated and very well drawn, which makes Mr. Wimpy fun to play. Added to that, I think they’ve got the levels of frustration about right to make it pretty addictive.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: sensible — S/X up/down, N/M left/right, A = pepper
Joystick: Kempston, AGF, Protek, Sinclair 2
Keyboard play: responsive
Colour: very good
Graphics: excellent
Sound: good tunes, poorer in game
Skill levels: gets harder each game
Lives: 5
General rating: very good.
General Rating: Very good.

Use of Computer

76%

Graphics

82%

Playability

76%

Getting Started

75%

Addictive Qualities

76%

Value For Money

78%

Overall

77%

THE OMEGA RUN

Producer: CRL Group PLC
Author: Richard Brisbourne

We’re at war again and fanatical elements have seized control of a heavily defended complex containing the ultimate nuclear deterrent, a Doomsday device constructed to cause worldwide devastation. The timer on this bomb has already started and is set to explode in twenty-five minutes. You must pilot your fighter bomber to the building and destroy it. Omega Run hovers between being a flight simulation and a straightforward game, but in the end, due to the fantasy nature of the scenario and the fact that the instrumentation is not based on anything actual, we decided to slot this under a game heading.

The screen displays a wide cockpit view with instruments below. The enemy’s defences are prodigious and consist of laser fields, which shoot beams up into the sky, and which must be avoided by dodging around them; fighter aircraft, which may be dodged but should be shot down otherwise they just keep on your tail; anti-aircraft fire which homes in on you if you fly above 350 feet; and ground-to-air missiles, which are more frequent lower down.

Another problem is that your aircraft carries insufficient fuel for the run, so you must rendezvous with a tanker for in-flight refuelling.

Your instrumentation provides a clock with minutes and seconds left before the Doomsday bomb explodes, a compass with your heading indicated, an altitude meter, a tanker/target locator, which is kept centred for an accurate heading, a miles-to-tanker/target indicator, and three bar codes for fuel level, ammunition level and damages status. There is also a rear view screen warning of enemy fighters with message display.

CRITICISM

‘Omega Run has an excellent on-screen introduction, which not only describes the object of the game fully, but demonstrates the instruments, how they work, and what the cockpit view looks like when you are flying in various aspects. All the instruction screens dissolve one from another like in a film, and when it’s all through you can then alter the conditions, like distance to target, numbers of enemy fighters and laser fields, and target run up.’

‘It keeps you on your toes okay, fighters, lasers, ack-ack, missiles, all coming thick and faster as you near the target, which is a red block. The instruments simplify your task and are very well designed. I liked the view, a dark blue, flecked with white, as though you were flying over the sea at night. The sky seems to light up when the AA guns are firing at you. Perhaps it’s asking too much, but it would have been nice to see enemy aircraft firing back at you! As it is, the screen flashes when they are. I found it highly addictive to play with plenty of scope for improving skill. What would be good in one of these flight games, is if they used a perspective grid to indicate the ground in lieu of any realistic landscape, that would really increase the feeling of speed.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: cursors and zero to fire
Joystick: Kempston, AGF, Protek
Keyboard play: very responsive
Colour: very good
Graphics: very good, with effective 3D
Sound: good effects
Skill levels: 5 selectable, with additional customisation
Lives: percentage of damage allowed
General Rating: playable, addictive and recommended.

Use of Computer

78%

Graphics

90%

Playability

83%

Getting Started

96%

Addictive Qualities

82%

Value For Money

90%

Overall

87%

PAINTBOX

Producer: Print’n’Plotter Productions
Author: Joe Gillespie

If you’ve ever tried to draw a high resolution picture with the bare and BASIC facilities of the Spectrum, you will probably want to investigate the appropriate tools and utilities which exist for this purpose. You have the choice of a hardware-based system using a light pen or a digital tracer with the required software routine/utility, or you can go for a less expensive software solution such as a graphics handling utility program.

Paintbox fits into the second category and covers all aspects of the Spectrum graphics. You may select between the cursor keys, cursor-controlled joystick of the Kempston joystick to use as a ‘drawing-pen’. the program is menu driven and splits into two major functions — the UDG creation and handling, and the high resolution screen plotter.

UDG EDITOR

The UDG Editor is excellent: it allows you to create four times as many UDG’s as there are in the normal Spectrum BASIC by storing in four banks of 21 UDG sets into memory, which can then be called selectively into the normal UDG area of the Spectrum.

The Editor allows you to view the UDG banks and to recall any of the four banks for editing. Selecting DRAWING BOARD will display the UDG bank, the UDG in magnified form, normally and inverted, and in actual size, and the decimal values for each line. You may call up a normal Spectrum character, an existing UDG character or a blank for editing purposes. Using the cursor keys/joystick and fire button, you can edit or completely redraw the UDG, and when finished, allocate it inside the UDG bank. In doing this, the inverse and rotate (4 x 90°) and mirror image facilities are very helpful.

Having created all the necessary UDG’s you can save them on tape together with a machine code routine for manipulating them from BASIC, ready to be recalled in your own programs.

PRECISION PLOTTER

The Precision Plotter is the drawing tool for your high resolution pictures, and provides drawing facilities using the cursor keys/joystick with a constant display of the position co-ordinates.

Two moving speeds may be selected by use of the SHIFT key. All the drawing of Spectrum BASIC may be used including: Plot, Draw, Circle, Ink, Over, Copy, Save & Load. Selection of Paper Colour has been omitted from within the screen plotter quite deliberately to avoid the confusions which can arise from the low resolution colour map of the Spectrum (i.e. use of only 2 colours — ink & paper within the 8 x 8 character grid).

This user-protection may be overcome by breaking to the main menu and recalling the screen plotter, whereupon the new paper colour may be selected and the permanent memory screen recalled.

Additionally, there are the following useful facilities; Fill enclosed areas, Erase last operation, Radial Mode — retains starting point of the drawing line in the original plot position, Arc, Cursor Choice — crosswire or dot, Permanent Memory — retains the current screen in memory, Graphics — recalls screen, Break — stores screen in memory and returns to main menu.

IN USE

The UDG Editor and Screen Plotter may be combined by selecting Screen Planner from the Main Menu: all 84 UDG’s may be drawn on screen with the high resolution screen as background. The low resolution print coordinates are displayed in this mode, and Ink & Paper colour may be changed. By constantly switching between Screen Planner and Prescision Plotter you can build up a picture within the limits of your own imagination and the Spectrum’s limited screen display.

The current UDG’s may be expanded by loading previously stored UDG banks, thus increasing the amount of UDG’s on screen. Throughout Precision Plotter and Screen Planner you may select to save your efforts to tape with a SCREEN$ display file save or with a normal memory file save, which includes the machine code routine for instant recall from BASIC (using RANDOMIZE USR 59980). The memory file, however, must be protected from the BASIC area by lowering RAMTOP to 53059 (with a CLEAR command). The data to screen dump routine may be amended so that multiple screen files may be stored and recalled.

The program proves to be very foolproof in as much that if the permanent memory does get corrupted, there is still the Erase Memory as a backup facility, so you don’t risk losing hours of work. Nevertheless, it would be wise to save intermediate results to tape for protection against brown or blackouts!

A commendable effort by Print ’n’ Plotter — now if only the package included a pinch of artistic talent, I might be able to draw ...

COMMENTS

Control keys: Menu driven, self explanatory — cursors/joystick for positioning, SHIFT for slow movement. Plot = Q, Draw = W, Fill = F, Erase = E, Circle = H, Rad Mode = R, Line Mode = 3, Arc = A, Ink = X, Over = N, Permanent Memory = P, Graphics = 9, Dot Cursor = M, Crosswire Cursor = K, Break = CAPS SHIFT/SPACE, Copy = COPY, Save = S, Load = J.
Sound: none
Features: 24 page booklet and excellent Demo Program
General Rating: Good.

PARATROOPERS

Producer: Rabbit Software Ltd
Author: John F. Cain

It gets awfully lonely sitting on your own in a bunker until the enemy decides to drop in! ‘Your bunker’ is in fact a field gun which you control, sitting in the bottom centre of the screen. Above you, in the sky, helicopters stream by in both directions, spewing paratroopers out on top of you. Their object is to get three men safely on the ground, at which point they stride off and return in a large tank against which you are defenceless (and dead!) and that’s that. Your aim is to prevent them from landing any men and you score for paratroopers destroyed and helicopters knocked out.

The game continues on after loss of life, resetting the score to zero, quite automatically.

CRITICISM

‘Your field gun can be traversed to cover most of the screen, but you must be accurate as firing reduces your score. The graphics are quite good and the game is fun to play.’

‘The animation of the gun is very good. The sense of perspective is a clever cheat since both height and rotation of the gun are only done with a left and right key, but it means the drawing of the gun must go through what looks like seven different ‘frames’ to create the illusion. The details of paratroopers and helicopters are also good, with some paras opening their chutes immediately, other delaying to the last second, and some poor devils whose chutes fail to open and get splatted on the ground. You’re dead if three land successfully, or if one lands right on top of you. Fun, but perhaps not very addictive.’

‘This is quite a neat idea, which scores with its fine graphics, but there wasn’t quite enough depth to the idea to keep me enthralled, and I thought the sound could have been better — no gunshooting noise for instance. The user-defined keys are a good idea!’

COMMENTS

Control keys: user-defined for left/right/fire
Joystick: Protek, AGF
Keyboard play: responsive
Colour: reasonable average
Graphics: good, well detailed
Sound: below average
Skill levels: its main drawback — only 1
Lives: 1
General Rating: good, but not very addictive.

Use of Computer

70%

Graphics

68%

Playability

66%

Getting Started

62%

Addictive Qualities

49%

Value For Money

55%

Overall

62%

PAT THE POSTMAN

Producer: Mikro-Gen Ltd

Pat has to collect parcels from the houses and take them to the post office. When he has enough, he must put them on the train. Sounds easy?

There are twelve houses in the town, but not every house has a parcel for collection. Fortunately this game is in no way a simulation of real life, for if Pat attempts to collect a parcel from a house that hasn’t got one, the post office promptly, and inexplicably, bursts into flames. Pat must then dash to the fire station and get a fire engine. If he’s in time the conflagration is put out and work resumes as normal.

Depending on the selected skill level Pat must collect either three or five parcels before they go on the train. To make matters worse, there are two red cars driving around the streets like maniacs, and with a nasty tendency of homing in on Pat while he’s on his rounds.

CRITICISM

‘It takes a few attempts to work out what to do, since there are no on-screen instructions or advice, and nothing on the cassette inlay, not even the control keys. These turn out to be the cursors, always a poor arrangement, but made worse here by the poor responsiveness. Postman Pat is quite a good game for younger age groups, but will probably appeal to all. It soon becomes easy and this reduces its addictiveness.’

‘The graphics are fair and would be better if smoother or slightly bigger, but it does make for a lively screen. The game is a good idea, can be fun to play, and would be better still if it were more responsive. Sometimes you press a key and nothing happens, except a car running into you. For the younger player mostly.’

‘This is a little confusing at first, as there are no instructions as to the aim of the game, but as you get the hang of it, it turns out to be fun to play. What spoils it are the control keys and the program’s response to them. Moderately addictive for some, no doubt, but after a while it began to lose interest for me. Perhaps more objectives would have helped, and different skill levels with different problems to overcome, although I must admit, I never really discovered what the black objects that popped up occasionally on the roads were or what they did.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: cursors
Joystick: AGF, Protek
Keyboard play: poor responses
Colour: good
Graphics: above average
Sound: not much, but strong when it does
Skill levels: 2
Lives: 3
Screens: 1
General Rating: Above average.

Use of Computer

45%

Graphics

60%

Playability

68%

Getting Started

32%

Addictive Qualities

47%

Value For Money

60%

Overall

52%

PI-EYED

Producer: Automata UK Ltd
Author: Andrew Stagg

In a further attempt to undermine the integrity, purity and clean livingness of the noble arcade tradition, Automata, the well-known TV pundits on computerology, have released Pi-Eyed. This game is destined to go straight to the top of the Moral Majority Chart of unfavoured programs!

It stars none other than the Piman, but a Piman to whom success has had a deteriorating effect. He’s hit the bottle and now staggers bleary-eyed from pub to pub in search of liquid oblivion.

The scene is the street, and Piman is trotting along. If he gets hit by a car he loses points. You can take him into one of the many pubs lining the street, but he can’t leave until he has drunk all the pints on the bar. This involves diving in between the chatting regulars without disturbing them (loses points), slipping up on crisp packets and things (loses points) or slipping on slops (more gone).

And of course there is also the by now obligatory treat of a bonus hit single on the reverse of the tape. Pi-Eyed, described as a heart-rending message, written by Lurch, the office parrot.

CRITICISM

‘This is a sort of ‘Frogger’ both out on the street and in the pubs, dodging the cars and drinkers. It manages to be fun, and the things people say in some of the buildings is often funny or insulting or both. I found the Piman a bit difficult to control when inside a pub, as he tends to jiggle when drunk. Also, at one bar there was a figure with a dog in the way, and after all efforts, the final pint remained unobtainable on the bar. I would have to be honest and say that this wasn’t one of my favourite games.’

‘The graphics are very entertaining and colourful, and the game amusing to play for a short while. It certainly couldn’t be called addictive though. I would guess it’s the sort of game that appeals to Pimaniacs as light relief between trying to win 6,000 or a trip to Hollywood.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: 6/7 up/down
Joystick: Kempston, AGF, Protek
Keyboard play: fairly responsive, but difficult to control
Colour: well used
Graphics: small, but neatly drawn, although there isn’t much actual animation
Sound: continuous and average
Skill levels: how many pints can you take?
Lives: never heard of them
General Rating: May appeal to Pimaniacs, playable but not very addictive.

Use of Computer

56%

Graphics

57%

Playability

59%

Getting Started

67%

Addictive Qualities

45%

Value For Money

57%

Overall

57%

POTTY PAINTER

Producer: Rabbit Software Ltd
Author: John F. Cain

Potty Painter is an ‘Amidar’ paint the squares copy with three screens. The screen is divided up into 24 rectangles, six columns of four shapes all defined by dotted lines. Each box contains a score figure, 100, 300 or 500 depending on its area. You must walk your monkey along the dotted lines until a square has been surrounded, when it changes colour and you get the points. As this is going on there are two nasties chasing you. On completing the screen the scene cuts to a bonus screen of grids where you must get a teddy bear, who slides downwards, to slide down the correct pole to his banana.

The third screen is very similar to the first except that you are a paint roller now and the chasers are two teddy bears. Another mean trick is that there is a time limit which eats away the value of the rectangles, so it’s important to complete as many as you can in the least possible time. Completing this screen takes you back to the start screen again but with three chasers this time round. In some visual respects this game looks similar to Romik’s Colour Clash.

CRITICISM

‘This isn’t a particularly attractive looking game, although that is more the fault of the game type than the program, which uses a nice mix of colours. Just that the dotted lines tend to make it look like a job centre form to fill out! Overall I found it very playable, but it would have been better if there had been some speed selections, which might have given it a longer life; and some sound would have helped.’

‘The game is a fair copy of the original, with reasonable graphics, the nasties especially so. The sound is rather sparse, just a beep when you’re caught. The game is mildly addictive, it’s not original, but if you like arcade copies, then it is adequate.’

‘For someone who has never played this type of game in the arcades, I think it would have been better to say more about it in the inlay than it actually does. On the whole I thought this was a reasonable copy of what is now a fairly old arcade game — not bad, not wonderful either. The user-definable keys are a great help.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: cursors, or user-definable, 4 directions required
Joystick: AGF, Protek
Keyboard play: responsive
Colour: reasonable
Graphics: average to good
Sound: poor
Skill levels: gets harder each round
Lives: 5
General Rating: Average, but reasonably addictive

Use of Computer

68%

Graphics

55%

Playability

58%

Getting Started

60%

Addictive Qualities

57%

Value For Money

59%

Overall

60%

PUNCHY

Producer: Mr. Micro Ltd
Author: Issi

Punch & Judy shows probably still exist at the British seaside, but there’s no longer any need to travel afield to see a show. Mr. Micro can now bring you all the glitter and sand, right at home on your Spectrum. This game has similarities with Hunchback, but it is all couched in proper Punch & Judy terms — and it speaks!

The playing area is a very expanded and colourful puppet stage which makes up 16 screens, at the end of which Punch has Judy locked up. You are the hero, Bobby, and you must rescue Judy by jumping over or ducking under rotten tomatoes thrown by Punch, leap over gaps, use the flying carpet, swing from the angels’ tails and avoid the back-attacking custard pies, whilst leaping over gaps filled with soldiers and clubs. Every once in a while Judy will throw a sausage. If Bobby catches three of these they can be used in an emergency to transport him to the next screen without harm.

A scanner above the stage shows Bobby’s progress. Each screen is timed for points and each one completed awards a policeman’s helmet. For every five helmets collected, a bonus is added. A neat feature is that without any added hardware, the program talks — ‘That’s the way to do it’, or more famously, ‘Rock the baby, rock the baby.’

CRITICISM

‘It’s a very long load, but well worth it. The graphics must be among the most eye-searingly bright I’ve seen on a game! All the status details are contained in decorative scrolls, written in gothic text. I really liked the evil little theatrical mask ‘face’ that appears in the clouds and laughs when you lose a life. The game itself is reasonably difficult to play, with timing an essential part, and it gets extremely difficult when there are tomatoes coming from one direction and custard pies from another! Bobby jumps very well, although it takes a bit of practice as this is a very laid back hero! Very good value.’

‘The unique thing about this game is that it speaks understandable English without hardware. The use of colour is excellent and the graphics are smooth and very good. Apart from the speech there are very good tunes. The whole thing comes very nicely packaged too, with good instructions on the inlay and on-screen. You can see the task ahead of you with the very good demo. It really is great. Just buy it!’

‘Nice simple keys to control Bobby, and a difficult game. Perhaps it gets a bit repetitive after a while, but it’s certainly amusing to play and the graphics combined with the speech make it almost worth the money alone.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: 6/7 walk left/right, zero = jump, 8 — sausages!
Joystick: Kempston and will work with Sinclair ZX2
Keyboard play: positive, though jumping takes some practice
Colour: excellent
Graphics: very good
Sound: excellent speech and tunes, though a little bare during a screen
Skill levels: 1
Lives: 3 (1 more after 60,000 points)
Screens: 16
Features: programmed speech
General Rating: Excellent.

Use of Computer

91%

Graphics

85%

Playability

90%

Getting Started

88%

Addictive Qualities

87%

Value For Money

85%

Overall

88%

THE PYRAMID

Producer: Fantasy Software
Author: Bob Hamilton, Darren Hamilton, Ian Hamilton

In essence The Pyramid is a simple game, as all good games should be. Your hero is Ziggy, who sits in a little bubble capsule equipped with a ‘highly effective phased plasmic laser’ with which he can atomise any of the 60 weird aliens that live inside the Pyramid. This structure consists of 120 chambers on 15 levels, 1 chamber on the top level, 2 on the second, three on the third — and so on. The object of the game is to reach the exit on level 15 in as short a time as possible.

Each time the capsule touches an alien its shield power is depleted. When the shield has evaporated, Ziggy is vulnerable and will die if he runs into an alien. There are two exits from each chamber, protected by a force field. These are neutralised by crystals which drop from the top of the chamber after a certain number of aliens have been atomised. The crystals have three states — white, they destroy anything touched and deplete the capsule shield — yellow, they become vulnerable to destruction by aliens but are still too hot to pick up — and when blue they can be collected and used to neutralise the exit force field, although if the capsule is hit by an alien a crystal will still be destroyed. With each level the force fields require an extra crystal to neutralise them, so on level 3 it takes 3 crystals, level 4 needs 4 crystals — and so on.

And basically, that’s it. Scoring is done by giving you 9999 points when you enter a chamber and awarding what’s left when you exit. Points over 30,000 are coded and may be sent to Fantasy for publishing in their top 1000 scores every 6 months.

CRITICISM

‘At first I thought this was going to be an adventure, but no, it’s a very unique arcade game and well worth buying with 120 screens, each one more difficult than the last. It will take a long time to master. Another bonus is the graphics which are very good — like Ultimate’s style, smooth, action-packed and detailed. Good keyboard positions too. A very addictive game.’

‘This game is nicely packaged and presented with excellent instructions. In playing it’s enjoyable because all the colours are used, the graphics are smooth and very detailed, each character having its own movement and animation — there’s even a recoil effect on the laser. The game is great fun to play, frustrating when you start to get down a few levels, die, and have to go back to the start. Very challenging. I liked it!’

‘Presentation and graphics are excellent and the range of control key positions and joysticks that may be used all add up to very good value for money. A highly addictive game.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: 3 options — Q/A up/down, O/P left/right, bottom row fire; or — top row up, 2nd row down, A-G left, H-L right, bottom row fire; or — Z/SYMBOL SHIFT left/right, X/M up/down, C N fire.
Joystick: Fuller, AGF, Protek, Kempston, Mikrogen
Keyboard play: very resposive
Use of colour: very good
Graphics: excellent
Sound: good
Lives: 1
Screens: 120
General Rating: Addictive, playable and excellent value for money.

Use of Computer

85%

Graphics

82%

Playability

81%

Getting Started

78%

Addictive Qualities

83%

Value For Money

91%

Overall

83%

ROBOT RIOT

Producer: Silversoft Ltd
Author: Patrick Richmond

Working for the Acme Robot Manufacturing Co. is not an easy business when the robots keep running riot. You’re in the control room one day when you notice the robots are out and playing dangerously. The only answer is to send out the Bomber!

Silversoft have taken a well worn theme, turned it on its head, and come out with a new type of game. For want of a better comparison this is a backward ‘Pac Man’ type game. Instead of eating dots, here you lay them.

The screen represents the factory corridors, a reasonably complex maze. When the game starts the bomber, ‘you’, must move round the corridors laying mines. To complete the screen every corridor must be laid. This tempts the king robot out of his central lair, so that you can get in and progress to the next level.

What you’re up against is a handful of different robots (ghosts backwards?) which start to materialise in the four corners, until the screen is running with them. Fortunately there is also a power mite, which replenishes your rapidly fading supply when you run over it. As soon as you do, another materialises somewhere else. Another unpleasant problem is that all round the central enclosure the corridors are cut off by several sliding doors which open and close. Not only does this hinder your mine-laying program, it also can get you nastily trapped if you’re not careful.

CRITICISM

‘An original idea, and a good one at that. A bit slow at first, but as the game progresses the action gets livelier. Quite tense, when having laid the last mine, you have only 30 seconds to get into the control room once the king robot is out.’

‘Its similarity to ‘Pac Man’ is a bit off-putting at first, but I warmed quite rapidly to this game after 10 minutes playing. Although it isn’t exactly fast, it turns out to be quite demanding on the player. Perhaps better suited to younger players than hardened addicts, but actually quite addictive anyway. Nice colours and amusingly animated characters.’

‘A good use of colour and nice, smooth graphics combined with the continuous sound, make this into a good-average game. An advance on ‘Pac Man’, it is one of those maze games that will probably appeal to many. I didn’t find it all that addictive, although very playable after a few minutes. The opening and shutting doors, adds a touch of drama too, especially as it can put you in a tight spot, and frustratingly cut you off at the last second from your power mite! Not bad at all.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: very good, Z/X left/right, K/M up/down
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard play: responsive
Colour: good
Graphics: good
Sound: continuous, average
Skill levels: 1
Lives: 3
Screens: multiple
General Rating: Above average, very good for younger players.

Use of Computer

65%

Graphics

68%

Playability

75%

Getting Started

78%

Addictive Qualities

68%

Value For Money

65%

Overall

70%

ROMMEL’S REVENGE

Producer: Crystal Computing
Author: Martin S. Horsley

Both of Crystal’s pre-Christmas arcade releases were copies of well known originals from the arcades, Invasion of the Body Snatchas we reviewed in the last month’s issue. Rommel’s Revenge is probably the best Spectrum version yet of the favourite ‘Battle Zone’ game. There’s a natural comparison here with Artic’s very successful 3D Combat Zone, and it’s arguable as to which is the better since in many respects they are quite different.

The display is set on a flat plain surrounded by mountains and even an active volcano. Numerous buildings and other objects like telegraph poles litter the landscape. In the centre of the screen is a gun sight, and above it a radar screen with sweep arm on which enemy tanks are seen as dots. You, of course, are in command of a tank, and controls allow for forward and reverse movement with rotation left and right. All the graphics are in a hollow 3D which allows all sides of an object to be seen at once. The object of the game, quite simply, is to destroy the enemy tanks and stay alive. The more you destroy the more they come after you.

CRITICISM

‘This is the best version of ‘Battle Zone’ with more objects like poles, radar towers and spouting volcanoes. Missiles seem to take about the right time to reach a target and the game, generally, is faster. Against it is the sound, which is poor, no noises when an enemy explodes and only a weak plop when you fire.’

‘It’s a bit weak on colour, the 3D graphics are very effective and smooth, but everything is done in white lines on blue. The tanks all move a bit faster than the Artic version, as does the firing, but there aren’t as many up against you at one go although it gets progressively tougher. Rather thin sound and I was disappointed with the explosion visuals — the enemy tanks just seem to disappear when hit.’

‘This is a great game and very playable. The tanks aren’t as over-intelligent as the ones in Artic’s version. They always managed to twitch out of the way of your shots, but in Rommel’s Revenge they still manage to be a match. Also the landscape is much more detailed — it’s fun at first just to wander round looking at the various buildings and structures.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: Z/X left/right, N/M forward/backwards, SPACE = fire. In addition — 1/2 sound on/off, V = volcano erupting or not. Both of these options speed up the game if not in use.
Joystick: AGF, Protek, Fuller, Kempston
Colour: poor
Graphics: good
Sound: very poor
Skill levels: 1
Lives: 4
Features: note special loading program which might make you think it isn’t loading properly when it is!
General Rating: Good.

Use of Computer

70%

Graphics

75%

Playability

78%

Getting Started

50%

Addictive Qualities

58%

Value For Money

58%

Overall

65%

SCUBA DIVE

Producer: Durell
Memory required: 48K
Retail price: £5.50
Language: machine code
Author: Mike Richardson

With their latest release Durell, who brought you Harrier Attack and our Established Game of the Month in the last issue, Jungle Trouble, claim for it that it sets a new standard for animated graphics for the Spectrum computer. A rather high-handed claim, but one that seems amply justified by seeing Scuba Dive. If you’re one of those people who squirm with primordial horror at the sight of Great White sharks, then stay well clear of this game! The state of animated graphics in this highly original game is every bit as good as anything you will see in the arcades, and the jaws agape sharks look pretty real.

The basic object of Scuba Dive is to leap off your boat, dive down and collect pearls from oysters on the sea bed. If you think it sounds easy forget it! This is no game for beginners of the arcade art. For a start off, the sea is alive with fish of all shapes and sizes, from giant sharks and squids right down to tiny fish swimming in shoals, and if you’ve ever fallen for Jacques Cousteau’s line that they are really very cuddly, you can forget that too! These guys are all killers.

When you press the appropriate key, one of your three divers leaps out of the boat and can then be guided down to the rocky sea bed. If he runs into it he gets knocked out for a few seconds, and killed if it happens immediately again. The pearls can be collected only from open oysters. To the right of the display area is a status section which records how much oxygen is used up. It’s replenished by surfacing and finding the boat, which wanders off on its own. Only by touching the ladder at the rear of the boat are you safely aboard and ready to dive again.

A plethora of fishy animation in Scuba Dive.

Also on the sea bed, are hollows, actually openings to undersea caves. These are protected by an octopus, whose waving tentacles allow a precarious access. Should you get through, the bottom of the cave is covered with giant clams, whose pearls are more valuable, but the clams have a nasty habit of snapping shut on you! This cave in turn also has hollow accesses to deeper caves protected by an octopus each. The deepest caves contain treasure chests and also spare oxygen bottles to keep you going. And that’s it. You score points for pearls brought to the boat but if you get knocked out or eaten, you lose the pearls you may have collected. The four skill levels affect your scores, numbers of sea creatures, oxygen supply and the speed at which the octopuses move as well as other details.

CRITICISM

‘This is an original game with excellent colour and graphics, although it’s a shame about the almost non-existent sound. The fishy graphics are fantastic (one tends to get into trouble while admiring the various forms of marine life)! The game isn’t very addictive and I would have thought there could have been more to do like harpooning sharks, but anyway I liked it!’

‘The detail of the graphics is quite staggering. Not only are they large but they’re also realistically very small. The sharks have a lot of frames to make the movement work, including a very good turning action. The game is full of nasty touches like the giant jelly fish which float on the surface and hide behind the boat waiting to catch a diver as he jumps off. The diver’s movement, too, is just wonderful, both in diving off and in swimming. A bit of continuous sound, the effect of breathing bubbles perhaps, would have been a help, but to be honest, this game doesn’t need much help. Like Jungle Trouble I found it to be immensely addictive — it should probably be banned as a health risk before it has time to take off! Great!’

‘Despite the simplicity of the controls (user-defined keys too) this is not an easy game to play, and on the higher skill levels it’s downright maddening. This really shows what a bit of dedication can do in turning Spectrum graphics into something to be proud of. The game is also about as addictive as any around I’ve played recently.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: rotate clockwise/anticlockwise, accelerate and break. As preprogammed very sensible, but may be user-defined to cope with almost any joystick
Joystick: with user-defined keys you can set up for most joysticks
Keyboard play: once you get the hang, very responsive
Colour: excellent
Graphics: words fail
Sound: poor
Skill levels: 4
Lives: 3 divers
Features: a neat feature enables you to save just the hi-scores and then load them in to continue
General rating: highly recommended and excellent value for money

Use of computer

89%

Graphics

98%

Playability

90%

Getting started

89%

Addictive qualities

90%

Value for money

98%

Overall

92%

SPEED DUEL

Producer: DK Tronics
Author: K. Larter

Speed Duel is DK Tronics contribution to the elusive Spectrum version of the famous ‘Pole Position’ type game, where you roar around a race track in pursuit of, or pursued by, other racing cars in an attempt to reach the finish line first.

This version features solid 3D graphics, complete with bends, moving horizon and the road seen in perspective. There is a choice of five circuits to choose from and you can race against a choice of computer cars ranging from one to five.

CRITICISM

‘Overall, the graphics aren’t bad, with quite a large car, though smaller than the ones in Grand Prix Driver or Road Racer, a bright blue road with centre lines, clouds in the sky and black mountains in the distance. The road is in perspective, but it doesn’t narrow down all that much before hitting the horizon. There are no gears to change, which should make the game easier to play, but in fact the car tends to be very uncontrollable, wobbling from left to right much too quickly.’

‘The graphics are fairly smooth and there’s a good use of colour too. You must complete 3 circuits of the track before the computer’s cars. This is more difficult than I first thought because bends come upon you and allow no time to think. This makes the game rather unrealistic. On top that of you travel at not more than 50 m.p.h. or you end up in a mangled heap of steel and rubber! An important point to make is that the cassette inlay says this is a 16K and 48K game, but on the cassette itself it clearly says 48K only. Which is it?’

‘There’s quite a lot of good detail in this version, although I still think Road Racer is better. The choice of circuits and oponents is a good touch. The graphics are reasonable and the 3D works about as well as any other spectrum version, but it was irritating that you kept crashing when your car hadn’t even touched the edge of the road sometimes. This seems to depend on your angle to the verge, and I presume the program is reading character blocks, so that sometimes you actually have collided when it looks as if you haven’t. A reasonable racing game, but only an average game.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: CAPS/Z left/right, SYM SHIFT/SPACE brake/accelerate
Joystick: unstated
Keyboard play: difficult
Colour: good
Graphics: reasonable 3D
Sound: average, continuous
Lives: 5
Screens: 4 with scrolling
General Rating: Average.

Use of Computer

58%

Graphics

70%

Playability

62%

Getting Started

35%

Addictive Qualities

53%

Value For Money

58%

Overall

56%

STARCLASH

Producer: Micromega
Author: Derek Brewster

You are test-flying a new Starfighter in what was supposed to be empty space, when you are suddenly jumped by an Imperial Strike Force which has jumped from hyperspace. Tough luck. You can’t outrun them, so you’ll just have to fight it out alone. The enemy Mothership is protected by four waves of fighters. The object of the game is to destroy each wave in turn and fight your way through to the Mothership and then place a laser bolt in whichever of her two power cores is active. Added difficulties come in the form of meteor showers.

CRITICISM

‘This game has been taken right from the arcades. I can’t remember the arcade version name, but it’s been around a fair time now. The graphics are smoothly moving and quite detailed characters. A problem you must watch out for is the ammo supply which runs down, forcing you to be accurate. A good, playable game, but it might lose its qualities after a bit.’

‘It looks deceptively simple at first. The waves of attackers don’t seem to move all that fast, as they jig their way down, but their concentrated fire power homes in on your position, so you can’t stay still for a moment, and it’s easy to get trapped between fighter fire and the flaming meteors that also descend thickly from above. Reasonably addictive to play.’

‘Starclash is a shoot em up ‘Invader’ type in which each attack wave is more difficult to destroy than the last. It’s not easy to get through to the Mothership at all. I would say this is well above the usual galaxian/invader game standard, almost a scaled down version of the arcade original Altair. Quite good. ’

COMMENTS

Control Keys: simple, well placed — Z/X left/right, SPACE = fire
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard play: responsive
Colour: average to good
Graphics: good
Sound: continuous, fairly good
Skill levels: each wave harder
Lives: 3
Screens: 4 waves plus mothership
General Rating: above average type good shoot em up.

Use of Computer

72%

Graphics

69%

Playability

65%

Getting Started

72%

Addictive Qualities

63%

Value For Money

70%

Overall

69%

STONKERS

Producer: Imagine Software Ltd
Author: John Gibson, Paul Lindale

In an unusually terse and to the point scenario introduction, Imagine inform you that you are poised on the very brink of battle — the enemy have had their port and HQ under siege for weeks, and now is the eve of the battle. As commander of your forces, you must out-think, out-manoeuvre and out-fight your foe.

Stonkers is a graphical strategy and tactics game between the player and the computer. Unlike many popular war games already available, in Stonkers you are not expected to spend ages setting up the scenario, distributing weapons and moving your forces unit by unit. Both of you and the enemy already have tanks, artillery and infantry positioned round the countryside, and the enemy’s forces are on the move as soon as the game commences. In fact, this turns out to be a very fast moving game of an almost arcade nature.

The war zone is large, and is shown on screen in two ways; a large map which shows total playing area — two chunks of land, divided by a river estuary and connected by a bridge; and a large scale map, which shows a big close up with graphical details of the various units. On this map, when a unit is being deployed, you can see it moving, its speed depends on the terrain which is also shown as contours. On the total map a cross-hatched cursor block, indicating the area of the large scale map, can be rapidly moved by directional keys. Pressing the fire key switches maps. On the close up map a X cursor is moved with directional keys, and if positioned directly above a unit, will cause it to start moving towards the coast when the fire key is pressed.

Below the display area, a ticker tape keeps you informed as to what’s going on and how you have been Stonking.

Keeping up the strengths of your forces is done by moving supplies from your port (when the supply ship has docked) to where they are needed using your 4 supply units. If a unit fails to receive supplies in time it will be lost for good.

The game moves at a fast pace and holds a number of undisclosed surprises.

CRITICISM

‘The game is long and fairly “deep” due to the task of destroying either the enemy’s Port and HQ or his forces, and also due to the scale of the war. You may be needing infantry down on the coast fast, but can it be spared (or even get there in time) from the distant highlands? Stonkers appealed to me much more than most of the other wargames due to its higher quality of graphics, large scale and simple controls. Very addictive — I found myself having a bash during any spare hour.’

‘The graphics and overall presentation are excellent. I like the ticker tape which offers you the selection menu for keyboard, joysticks and skill levels. I was surprised by the speed at which Stonkers moves once all the various units are being deployed. It gets to the point where you barely have any time left to think, and you’re punching keys all the while. There are 2 skill levels, the harder only allows you to see an enemy unit if one of your own units is in the same vicinity, and this certainly stretches the tactical abilities to the limit. An excellent game.’

‘If only Imagine can get rid of the program bug which causes it to crash on occasion, Stonkers is set to be the best wargame I’ve seen yet. It keeps you on the go constantly without having to wait while the enemy “has his turn”. The simple controls help a lot, too, in making this game very playable.’

After checking with Imagine, we have been informed that the first two batches of tapes they received did have a problem which causes the program to crash inexplicably. This has now been corrected. If you have encountered this problem, you may return the cassette to Imagine and they will replace it. But anyone buying Stonkers now should encounter no problems.

COMMENTS

Control keys: CAPS, X, V, N left; Z, C, B, M right; 2nd row = up, 3rd row = down, top row = fire
Joystick: Protek, AGF, Fuller, Sinclair, Kempston
Keyboard play: responsive and fast
Colour: very good, lots of it
Graphics: very good
Sound: not much, but what is used is high quality
Skill levels: 2
Screens: 2, with smooth scrolling
General Rating: Excellent battle game which manages to be very addictive.

Use of Computer

90%

Graphics

70%

Playability

70%

Getting Started

58%

Addictive Qualities

90%

Value For Money

87%

Overall

78%

SUPERSNAILS

Producer: Games Machine Ltd
Author: David Hay

Despite a story about Doctor van Winkelhoff who has genetically engineered snails imported from West Africa into a breed of Supersnails who leave super glue trails behind them, and are now trapped in his laboratory trying to escape, this game turns out to be a ‘Light Cycle’ grid type game made famous by the movie Tron.

The aim of the game is to trap your opponent and kill him or her off by forcing him into a wall, your trail or his own trail. If you succeed in this, a hole opens up in the wall and allows you to escape. There are four directional controls for your snail, and in common with other games like it, hitting reverse of the direction in which you are currently travelling is instant death.

CRITICISM

‘The thing that most impressed me about this game is that two players can play against each other at the same time, or two players can play against the computer as well as one player against the computer. The inlay card explains all this very well, and it is repeated in menu form on screen. It is a simple idea, but that makes it all the more playable on the lower speeds. At the highest level the speed makes it unplayable!’

‘This game has the most simple graphics I have ever seen — just white lines on a blue ground. It’s simple but it is highly addictive.’

‘If you buy games as much for their colour and graphics (as anything else) then you may as well forget Supersnails. If, on the other hand, you enjoy a fast, utterly single-minded game, then this is about the best version around. The lines move extremely smoothly (only pixels after all) and I think I’m right in saying that this is the only 8-directional version, which opens up the game’s tactics quite a bit.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: player one, Q/A up/down, Z/X left/right: player two, P/L up/down, M/SYM SHIFT left/right
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard play: very responsive
Colour: sparse!
Graphics: extremely simple but very fast
Sound: continuous but poor
Skill levels: 9 speeds
Features: 1 or 2 players against each other or the computer
General Rating: Above average to good, addictive.

Use of Computer

71%

Graphics

34%

Playability

70%

Getting Started

68%

Addictive Qualities

74%

Value For Money

60%

Overall

63%

THRUSTA

Producer: Software Projects Ltd
Author: Patrick Richmond

You would think that it is getting difficult to come up with an original idea for an alien shoot em up game, but with Thrusta, Software Projects seems to have done it. This is not only a shoot em up, it’s also a crush em down! Your mission takes place on the planet Spectra (where else?) where you and your space ship Thrusta 1 must destroy alien nests, whose eggs are rapidly and continuously hatching. Not only are there the hatching aliens to contend with, but there are also guards which keep watch over the eggs.

The screen has nine red brick bins at the base. In the four on either side sit the yellow alien eggs and from the centre one the alien guards issue forth to do battle.

These resemble cross wing fighters, although they don’t fire at you. Above the bins, or nests, are a series of four platforms with holes in them at staggered intervals — actually, more holes with platforms in them. On the top one your ship appears — and a boulder. The ship can move in four directions and fire at the guards with its laser (though not at the hatched out aliens). The object is to push the boulder along until it drops through a hole to the next level, drop down and push it again, until, finally it drops right down on the aliens and crushes them. All three sorts may be crushed.

If you get through this screen, in the next the aliens hatched out much more vicious and eager to get you.

CRITICISM

‘I must say, that Thrusta is a unique type of game, and a very good one. It takes quite a while to complete a screen, nudging your boulders this way and that while dodging the damned aliens. As you progress to higher levels of play, the screen begins to get very crowded. There’s plenty of colour, all well used on the large and smooth graphics. Definately above average and very playable, good for 16K users as well.’

‘I thought the graphics were very neat with all those loathsome eggs wobbling, cracking, to reveal an ugly alien in each, and Thrusta I looks good too — a real space ship at last! This turns out to be a difficult game and playable with it, each level harder than the one before.’

‘Thrusta has an excellent keyboard layout, which makes playing very easy, while the game makes winning very hard! It looks simple when you first start, but getting those boulders down is complicated by the available routes and the aliens buzzing all over you. I found it hard to judge its addictivity, but it’s very playable.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: Z/X left/right, SPACE = up, ENTER = fire. The ship sinks by itself
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard play: very responsive, takes time to get used to the ‘gravity’ effect on the ship!
Colour: very good
Graphics: very good, nice and big
Sound: continuous, above average
Skill levels: harder by screen
Lives: 3
General Rating: playable, fun and generally good

Use of Computer

75%

Graphics

70%

Playability

75%

Getting Started

75%

Addictive Qualities

72%

Value For Money

69%

Overall

73%

TRIAD

Producer: Amba Software

As its name suggests, this is a compendium of three different arcade games on one cassette. The games are Snackman, Sub Track and Treasure Hunt.

Snackman is, quite obviously, a ‘Pac Man’ style game, which features 16 selectable mazes with 10 different playing speeds. Sub Track, provides you with the opportunity to lay depth charges from a surface ship, to attack numerous submarines at different depths, while they fire back with mines. In Treasure Hunt, a reasonably complicated maze is used in a very pure way — that is, you must find your way through it to collect valuable items. When one has been successfully picked up, another appears somewhere else in the maze, and all against the clock.

Side A of the cassette loads all three games into a 48K Spectrum, and each may be selected by pressing key 7. Each game comes complete with on-screen instructions.

Side B of the tape will load each game individually into a 16K Spectrum.

CRITICISM

‘In Snackman, the graphics are all quite small, but they move well and this isn’t a bad version. The Depthcharge Game is also reasonable and has quite large graphics. I didn’t think so much of the Treasure Hunt, despite its 29 mazes and 144 game variations — which must be a record! All the games are reasonable, but none are original and none of them are brilliant. The idea of putting several games onto one cassette is a good one, especially when they are all ‘old’ games. I won’t rate its value for money that highly because I would prefer one good game to three fair/average games.’

‘Anyone wanting a reasonable ‘Pac Man’ and the chance of two other fair arcade games, will find the Triad cassette to be fair value. Overall, the graphics are quite good, but there isn’t really anything here to thrill.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: indicated for each game, but all well placed
Joystick: none
Keyboard play: responsive
Colour: reasonable
Sound: varied and reasonable
Skill levels: depends on game, but several
General Rating: Fair to average

Use of Computer

60%

Graphics

57%

Playability

53%

Getting Started

60%

Addictive Qualities

43%

Value for Money

54%

Overall

55%

WHEELIE

Producer: Microsphere
Memory required: 48K
Retail price: £5.95
Language: machine code

Microsphere seem to have done it again, following up their excellent Train Game with another wholly original, beautifully put together game in Wheelie. You have just taken delivery of the ultimate two-wheeled machine — the four cylinder fuel-injected turbo-charged Zedexaki 500. While you’re out on the road trying it out, you see this sign saying ‘Private road — no speed limit to brave riders’. All excited, you enter the driveway, the gates slam shut behind you, and you are trapped in Nightmare Park. Your only way out now is to find the ghostrider, who’s dozing somewhere off to the right, wake him up and then race him back. The park is full of wildlife, all trained in karate, so bumping into any is not so good for the health.

Become Eddie Kidd for the day — Microsphere’s wonderful Wheelie.

The screen display takes the form of four ‘roads’ stacked one on another almost like a cross section through caves. There are not always four visible, and any road travelled may well go steeply up or downhill to another level. There are thin ‘up/downhill’ lines across some, and the bike will travel down a level if the down key is pressed, and the same for uphill.

Apart from the vicious wildlife (includes leaping kangaroos and giant hedgehogs getting their own back for truckers) there are other problems to be encountered. Humps in the road can only be got over by accelerating rapidly at the last second and doing a ‘wheelie’ — front wheel riding up and over. Sometimes you have to jump over a bus! There’s also ice on some roads, which must be taken with caution. Running into a dead end will kill you off if you don’t brake in time, and going downhill too fast can also be rather fatal! Gas stations are few and far between, so it’s worth backtracking for them. To be promoted to a new level requires completing the one you’re on, when you’ll be given a code to let you enter the next one up. Good riding!

CRITICISM

‘When I first saw another reviewer playing ‘Wheelie’, I thought that it was totally different and looked good. Then I got round to reviewing it and my impression that it was a sort of ‘Scramble’ game faded! It’s much, much more! Revs are important when jumping cars and buses — too fast and the bike cartwheels, flinging the rider off, too slow and you won’t make it. Once you get to the end of the complex you meet the ghost rider, a tune is played, and the race back begins. You must beat him but he has a distinct advantage — he can travel in a straight line across the screen, but only at about a third of your top speed. All that I can say is that I spent about three hours playing before I remembered I was supposed to write something about it! A dangerously addictive game. Great, Brill, Fantastic — super words fail. Just buy it!’

‘The makers boast that Wheelie has some of the best graphics you’re ever likely to see on a Spectrum. I’d like to think that there’s still room for improvement as time goes by, but certainly these are exceptionally good. Smooth, very detailed with loads of animation. The spills the biker takes are all quite varied, depending on the type of mischance he hits. It’s all quite realistic. At first you might assume that you can memorise the layout of the caverns, but I’m afraid not, each game they change. All in all, this is one of the most enjoyable games I have played for a long while, and I’m sure it’s going to keep players entertained for hours.’

‘If you’re playing with the keyboard, it has a very sensible layout, but there’s a menu for selecting Kempston or cursor type joystick as well as a routine for setting up other joysticks via user-defined keys. Very good. As for the game, well it is pretty good. Lovely graphics, very, very difficult and challenging. Excellent value.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: left = bottom row left, right = bottom row right (these act as accelerate and brake), second row = down, third row = up and top row = freeze
Joystick: Kempston, AGF, Protek and user-definable keys
Keyboard play: very responsive
Colour: good
Graphics: excellent
Sound: good (excellent on bike effects)
Skill levels: several
Lives: 4
Screens: new regenerated, and scrolling
General rating: addictive, generally excellent, good value.

Use of computer

89%

Graphics

86%

Playability

90%

Getting started

95%

Addictive qualities

99%

Value for money

99%

Overall

93%