Issue No. 32 September 1986

REGULARS

EDITORIAL
An exciting Autumn lies ahead...

NEWS
Another update on the goings-on in the Spectrum world

FEAR AND LOATHING
The merry-go-round of software launches picks up a little speed...

CRASH HOTLINE AND ADVENTURE CHARTS

LLOYD MANGRAM’S FORUM
Further concatenation this month, but Lloyd will be back at full strength come October. Promise.

HANNAH SMITH’S PLAYING TIPS
No wrestling this month — at least not with people, just POKEs and Tips. Maps and maps and maps again...

TECH NICHE
Jon Bates gets down with a Spectrum based keyboard add-on and evaluates THE MUSIC BOX

TECH TIPS
Another pot-pourri of techno-comestibles from the Black Country workshop of resident Tipster, Simon Goodwin

DEREK BREWSTER’S ADVENTURE TRAIL
Some off-beat humour features in this month’s top adventure game...

SIGNSTUMPS
More adventurers find their way again, thanks to Mr Brewster’s guidance

PBM MAILBOX
Brendon Kavanah’s been playing IT’S A CRIME, as well as taking a peek at CAPITOL, another game from KJC

SEAN MASTERSON’S FRONTLINE
No space for a Forum this month, but Sean is gently impressed with the latest offering from MINDGAMES

LLOYD MANGRAM’S HALL OF SLIME
The high score gore continues through the holiday season

RESULTS
Prizes, prizes, prizes

FEATURES

A BIT OF BLARNEY ABOUT BYTES
CRASH Irishperson Tony Flanagan meets MIKROGEN Irishprogrammer Dave Perry

STILL STRETCHING COMPUTERS
The concluding portion of Pete Tamlyn’s look at the computerisation of role playing games

A NEW WAY OF CREATING ADVENTURES
Sean Masterson investigates THE GRAPHIC ADVENTURE CREATOR written on the Spectrum for INCENTIVE by Brendon Kelly, and gets the opinions of a couple of reviewers to back up his assessment

UP AND COMING ON THE SPECTRUM
Lloyd takes a holiday and turns over the MERELY MANGRAM pages to the CRASH team, who takes a look at the goodies that should be on show in Olympia early this September...

DIY

A FISHY BUSINESS
A new software label has arrived, and PIRANHA celebrate with a competition. You could win a cuddly fish, amongst other goodies!

READ GOLD UP FOR GRABS
Get on the trail of a solid gold TRIVIAL PURSUIT set, on offer in a national competition sponsored by DOMARK. Win this comp and you’re in with a chance of a £10,000 prize!

PUMPKIN MAGIC
PALACE are offering an oil painting of the stars of their Witch versus the Veggie kingdom games, as well as copies of ANTIRIAD...

A whole lot more Libra people are going to be born next month. They won’t be old enough to read the October CRASH, so whatever your starsign, beat the new Librans on 25th September!

REVIEWS

- ACE Cascade

- The Boggit Delta 4/CRL

- Dan Dare Virgin

- Dangermouse Making Whoopee Sparklers

- Dynamite Dan II Mirrorsoft

- Gold Run Macsen

- Mandragore Infogrames

- Mermaid Madness Electric Dreams

- Mission Omega Mindgames

- Planetopoly Celerysoft

- Sbugetti Junction Bug Byte

- Stainless Steel Mikro-Gen

- Summer Santa Alpha Omega

- Tujad Ariolasoft

- Very Big Cave Adventure St Brides/CRL

- Virgin Atlantic Challenger Virgin

- Xarq Electric Dreams

PUBLISHERS

Roger Kean, Oliver Frey, Franco Frey

Editor

Graeme Kidd

Staff Writers

Tony Flanagan, Hannah Smith, Lloyd Mangram

Adventure Editor

Derek Brewster

Strategy Editor

Sean Masterson

Tech Tipster

Simon Goodwin

Contributing Writers

Jon Bates, Brendon Kavanagh, Rosetta McLeod, John Minson

Production Controller

David Western

Art Director

Dick Shiner

Illustrators

Ian Craig, Oliver Frey

Production

Gordon Druce, Tony Lorton, Cameron Pound, Jonathan Rignall, Matthew Uffindell

Advertisement Manager

Roger Bennett

Advertisement Assistant

Nick Wild

Subscriptions

Denise Roberts

Mail Order

Carol Kinsey

Cover by

Oliver Frey — with special thanks to the late + greatest FRANK HAMPSON

Transcriptions

Matthew Wilson, http://www.crashonline.org.uk/

Additional review transcriptions

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

Thanks to those CRASH authors who have allowed their work to be reproduced.

This year there have been a few ‘minor’ computer shows, mainly for single machines — the Amstrad and Commodore Shows — and of course several ZX Microfairs. The CES Show, intended to be a major home computer trade extravaganza was poorly attended by software houses, and home computer hardware manufacturers hardly made a showing. The general consensus of opinion was that everyone was saving up their effort (and show budgets) for the Personal Computer World Show which runs from September 3rd to 6th this year.

Considering that it’s easy to spend £30,000 and more just on a stand at the PCW Show (and lots of companies plan to do at least that), it’s not surprising that firms take the show very seriously indeed. This year — as our seven page preview section illustrates — there’s an awful lot of interesting software due to make an appearance at Olympia. Several new labels, including Piranha and Faster Than Light are using the show as a springboard into the Christmas marketplace, and of course we’ll be there in force on the Newsfield stand.

But there’s not going to be a vast amount of exciting Spectrum add-ons unveiled at the show, by all accounts. The odd joystick or two will no doubt turn up, and of course the Spectrum Plus Two from Amstrad may well make its first public appearance. It seems the demand for Spectrum add-ons has largely been fulfilled. Perhaps once folks have got their basic requirements in the form of a joystick, interface and cassette recorder, they have all they need to play games and tend to leave it at that.

Mel Croucher, in partnership with Rod Cousens of Quicksilva and latterly, Activision fame, plan to reveal a very interesting black box at the show, however. Scorpio Interactive has been working on a device that allows you to interface your computer with the pictures provided by an ordinary video recorder and then play a game in which you control computerized graphics moving over the video image. Several pop videos and a couple of films have already been given the Scorpio treatment, and a demonstration of the possibilities should be running during the PCW Show. A neat idea, which has interesting possibilities — perhaps the most exciting innovation on the games/hardware front to be found at the show.

Only time and a good look round Olympia will tell. Maybe we’ll see you on the Friday, Saturday or Sunday. Wednesday and Thursday are trade only days, folks...

GRAEME KIDD

A SLIGHT DIET...

Holiday time comes round again, and this month’s CRASH has gone on an H-Plan diet! Staff hols, in combination with one or two other factors, have lead to a slightly slimmer issue this month — condensed rather than cut short. Lloyd has been a bit tied up with work on the new magazine mentioned last month, and handed over his MERELY MANGRAM pages to the team of wordsmiths in the CRASH office so that they could take a fairly comprehensive peek at the software offerings due at the PCW Show. Normal service will be resumed with the October issue, as the team returns from sunning its knees in a variety of locations across the globe and gets back to some serious work, thoroughly revitalised by a summertime break.

PROJECT GENESIS

Not one, but two winning game designs were selected by the team of GENESIS judges assembled in a Birmingham hotel room. After much deliberation, representatives from Design Design, Domark, CRASH (Yours Truly), Solution Public Relations and Mel Croucher Worldwide Entertainment Enterprises Unlimited (Mel Croucher) felt they couldn’t avoid picking two winners. As a result two GENESIS games are planned: a shoot em up should appear in time for Christmas followed by an arcade adventure early in the Spring. Full details of the designers and their winning designs appear in the News and Results pages this issue. You can expect to be reading a lot more about the progress of the GENESIS project over the coming months...

NEWS INPUT

ACTING AS MIDWIVES IN THE BIRTH OF A GAME

Both the volume and standard of entries to the GENESIS — Birth of a Game competition were “stunning” according to the judges who assembled in a darkened hotel room somewhere in Birmingham for the final judging ceremony.

John Eggleton, designer of KAT TRAP, soon to find fame and fortune as his game concept is turned into reality by DESIGN DESIGN for release by DOMARK

An Executive Minion at CRASH Towers spent over twelve hours just opening the entries to the competition and sorting them into some semblance of order before they were loaded into the Editor’s car and shipped to Brum.

Judging began shortly after 11.00am, and after some discussion as to how they were ever going to manage to come up with a shortlist of entries let alone a winner, the judging panel set to work with a vengeance. As they ploughed through the entries, the members of the team specially assembled to pick a winner were continually amazed by the standard of presentation and quality of ideas contained in the entries. After a working lunch — a few plates of sarnies — and many difficult decisions, it was nearly teatime and the vast pile of GENESIS entries had been whittled down to a manageable shortlist.

Coffee was served and some detailed analysis of the remaining game designs followed. Several designs that were full of merit but somehow didn’t seem likely to make a mainstream game were put to one side. With their senders’ permission, these will be forwarded to companies active in the budget software market for further consideration.

After much discussion, two game designs were left in the lead, and two entries marked for an ‘Award of Merit’. Finally, two contestants were left to slug it out in the ring of ideas. The judges pondered, agonised, talked amongst themselves, ordered more coffee and then held a full meeting. It was clear that there had to be two winners, not one.

KAT TRAP — Planet of the Cat Men, dreamt up by John Eggleton was selected as the first GENESIS inspired game and should be out before Christmas, while The Sewer from Martin Lee is going to be programmed in time for a Spring release.

Leper Attack at Lemming Rock, a design submitted by Ian Bell was well received by the judges — in the game you play the part of a lemming hero whose aim in life to free his lemming colony from the threat posed by the Leper King and his evil minions. The final confrontation with the King requires the hero to fight in a very unorthodox manner — a flatulence attack is the only way to kill off the arch baddie!

Nigel Palmer’s game design for Headache was felt to be a little short on actual gameplay, but the core idea was sound and supported by a wealth of material covering the marketing and presentation of the game itself. Both Ian and Nigel win a Special Commendation from the judges. CRASH/DOMARK/DESIGN DESIGN goodiebags will be on their way to the two runners up very shortly.

Graham and Dave from DESIGN DESIGN duly scampered back to their Manchester lair to begin work on KAT TRAP, and by the time you read they will have had a meeting with John Eggleton and the game should be well underway. Take a peek at the Results pages for a few more details of the judge’s shortlist and stand by for a progress report on the programming next month...

SO YOU THINK YOU CAN PLAY MATCH DAY?

There’s no doubt that there’s a strong Match Day following amongst CRASH readers — one of you is even planning to set up the MATCH DAY APPRECIATION SOCIETY. Perhaps it is time to admit that we should have made the game a Smash when we reviewed it...

During an interview with John Ritman and Chris Clarke, the people who wrote this famous OCEAN game, the idea of holding a Match Day Challenge was mooted and met with all-round approval. So, towards the end of October, John and Chris are going to wend their way up from The Smoke to the sleepy market town of Ludlow with the aim of taking on the cream of the CRASH’s Match Day playing readership.

Which is where you come in. We’re going to pit this programming duo against a CRASH staffer and a selection of readers, and report on the tournament in the December issue. If you can win at International Level with a score of 15-0 or better, John and Chris reckon you might be in with a chance (!).

There’s no way we can validate your prowess in advance, but remember, if you tell fibs about your footballing skills you’ll look a real wally when Chris and John inflict a crushing defeat, and all the other CRASH readers get to read about your humiliation...

IN SEARCH OF SHERBERT

Last month, something went severely wrong with this column. It was nothing more than rumour and scurrilous gossip. And FEAR AND LOATHING is more than cheap jibes.

Sadly jibes come no cheaper than those aimed at Cracked and Tubby at Thalamus. They’re ten a penny. Latest from the Islington institute for overindulgence is that the dynamic duo, Flathead and Captain Corpulent, the tea boy wonder, crashed their Pratmobile.

Yes, in just one week, they managed to total the company car — a Datsun Cherry — no fewer than three times! The last concussion was so conclusive that the poor Nipponese auto is nixed. But commiserations to both of them on the loss of their Cherry.

But no more. We turn to more serious criticisms. My fan club has been writing in to complain about my self-indulgent fantasies. I was particularly taken with Mr C H Evans’ query, “Who is this stupid little prat?” Well, CH, actually I’m rather a big “little prat” and as to your brave challenge, “he can try to rip out my liver if he wants to”, I wouldn’t wish to touch any of your organs. Instead I have an electric drill, hammer action, reserved for my next visit to Powys!

J A Attwood of Norwich, a city torn apart by its inner city hooligan element, comes closer to the mark. He complains about my fixation with food and a certain vodka and tomato juice cocktail. I agree! Boozing and drinking are not fit subjects for young, impressionable readers. But what can replace them? I fancy a certain white powder that you suck up through a straw. Yes. Sherbert. This months quest is for a baggie of sherbert.

And this month’s quest begins at the Grosvenor House launch of Dragon’s Lair by Software Projects. The Spectrum version of the game they said couldn’t be done wasn’t done, of course, apart from the final screen. It looked fun, but don’t expect the laser disc graphics of the arcade original.

No guzzling here though, Attwood. The butties were curvier than boomerangs. I suspect they were of Liverpudlian origin but the poor delicate things had not travelled well.

The Edge was celebrating its fourth birthday and a move to new Covent Garden premises with a bit of a bash a day or two after. Plenty of icing sugar topping the cake, but no sign of sherbert. Still, a wacky time was had by all, especially my Swedish girlfriend, who was chatted up by a succession of software types.

Funniest faux pas came from a tyro freelance journalist who was wandering round touting for business. He sidled up to her and having introduced himself, asked her if she heard any software stories to tell him. I can only think this is the sort of guy who would ask Paula Yates for gossip about Bob Geldof!

By now I was itching for some of the fizzy stuff. Sure I could have scored a deal down at the corner shop, but I prefer to lig everything! So I went Beyond Southampton Street, where I found Francis Lee and the gang sporting pointy ears and uttering “Beam me up, Scotty.”

The Eligible Baxter, mapped outside a London Eaterie wherein he was about to reveal the secrets of BEYOND’s next scheduled release, the official STAR TREK game. Certain of my readers will be pleased to learn that alcohol is not served inside such establishments...

Luckily Baxter was present to lunch me and drop the odd hint that this outbreak of irrational behaviour was related to some new release or other.

Apparently the Beyond stand at the PCW show will be shaped like the Enterprise... though why anybody should want a stand modelled on a now defunct micro is beyond me.

Something fishy about the next port of call. Piranha software is a new name, but behind it lurks an age old concern, Macmillan, the book publishers. So when they splashed out on an informal launch do, it was in the oak-lined splendour of the WB Yeats room.

The meal was rather less staid than the surroundings, consisting of a selection of painfully punning nibbles on the piranha theme. The Piranha Balls caused much merriment, I can tell you. The Piranha Cocktail, which turned out to be Black Velvet, was much more palatable. But I’m talking about alcohol again.

Suddenly a charming lady named Mandy sidled up to me, and offered me something very special if I’d only let her digitise me! What she meant was that Strike Force Cobra, one of the first Piranha releases, is to feature photos of the team members, and it was up to us mega-butch journos to portray those micro-chip marvels.

There were eight of us who had our piccies snapped and no, I won’t tell you which one of the Cobra Force I am, except to say that the grease paint moustache and eye make up (eye make up!) didn’t wash off quite as easily as Mandy had suggested, and I was followed round the PC User business show all that afternoon by somebody called Bruce.

Back to my payment for suffering this indignity. Did I get a Barret’s Sinus Clearing Sherbert Fountain? No! I got a fluffy toy piranha. The company had fifty of these specially made, and extremely cute they are. I’ve called mine Alan after the biggest piranha I know.
Hunger S Minson

Strange times indeed. Sitting here in early August, sorting through your letters as I begin work on another FORUM, the snow is gently falling on Ludlow! Perhaps the unseasonal weather has something to do with the Russian nuclear disaster... Somehow I doubt we’ll all be sunbathing on Christmas Day! I really should remember to pack a raincape in the saddlebag of my bicycle, no matter what time of year it is.

Anyway, on with the FORUM this month — space is short enough as it is, owing to a slight holiday recess, and I’ve got to persuade the Doc Martened One not to insist I attend the PCW Show...

STAR LETTER
CRITICAL LITANY

Dear Lloyd
Just this minute read your letters, so I thought I’d comment on a few points while they’re still fresh in my mind.

1) The ULTIMATE Pentagram Shock Horror controversy. Another sucker bites the dust on your letters page. S Valente should have known better than to write in like that, surely he must have known what the response would be. But with regard to 3D rotation games, I think they really have gone on for long enough. When I first saw Knight Lore, I thought it was excellent, but a month later I was sick and fed up of it. Now, with the plethora of this type of game, I get bored of them in about three days. I mean Alien 8, MOVIE, Nightshade, Batman, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Gunfright ad nauseum. I can’t understand how people’s attention can be held for so long by this one type of game. The same problem occurs with every new type of game (eg the Gyroscope Marble Madness craze which I predict is just about to finish, and the karate games) but it does not go on for as long as the 3D walkabout game has. It’s interesting to note how when a fighting game comes out now, the reviewers first response is Oh no, not another fighting game, yet this does not seem to happen with the 3D style games. Surely 3D games cannot survive much longer...

2) Sexism in computing. This is fast becoming a popular topic. The sexist problem stems from the enormous majority of males in the computing business and anything else to do with computers. It is not helped by individuals such as Mr Schofield. No doubt issue 32’s letter column will be jam-packed with hordes of outraged bra-burners demanding Mr Schofield be burned at the stake.

Role-playing suffers from the same problem of gender. WHITE DWARF’s letter col has the occasional slanging match about portrayal of women as helpless on the covers, as they are usually seen being carried off by a beasty or protected by a Conan lookalike. On the other hand, you never see letters from males in knitting magazines moaning about lack of attention (or perhaps you do, I can’t say I’ve looked). Anyway, both computing and role-playing are hobbies which are likely to remain male-dominated, so there’s not a lot can be done about the problem.

3) Minson. You asked for comments, and I’m afraid I must agree with Mr Evans. Mr Minson’s articles have become totally predictable, a few free lunches, Mr Minson gets drunk, and wanders to another free lunch with a hangover to get drunk again etc. Mr Minson also takes great delight in sniping at other journalists and making ‘witty’ comments on the food at his free lunches (they probably just invite him to get rid of the leftovers). Get rid of him, and expand the excellent PBM section.

Pete Tamlyn’s (that guy sure gets around) article comparing adventures, gamebooks and RPG’s was interesting and objective, something which the opinionated offerings on this subject in the adventure trail most definitely are not.

Anyway, after a mammoth effort of writing almost a page of constructive criticism I’ll finish off with some gratuitous slanging: Melissa Ravenflame is a coward and a sexual stereotype of the worst kind. Go get her Hannah (great cover by the way, though I just bet there’ll be complaints, eg “Immediately after seeing CRASH my son went out and was smothered to death whilst trying to mud wrestle an alien gorilla”).
Phillip Coggins

An interesting set of views Philip. Some people argue that there are only four or five basic types of computer game and that everything is either a variation on a theme or a combination of a couple of themes. It’s not that surprising that there have been lots of 3D games — a lot of them clones admittedly, but some, like Batman, add a little more to the genre. As I’ve said before, it’s not what you do with an artistic form, it’s how you exploit it.

Sexism in the computer games world is no doubt a product of the domination of sexist males in the field — which doesn’t mean that women should be excluded or referred to as ‘bra burners’ if they occasionally make a voice of complaint heard.

Quite a few people have written in on the subject of Mr Minson’s column, and it seems people either love him or hate him — so far opinion seems split about 50/50. More letters on that particular subject next month.

Anyway, as a reward for your long epistle of constructive criticism I have decided to award you this month’s £20 of software. Try not to ask Aunt Aggie for a knitting program!

MANORAMANAGRAM

Dear Lloyd Mangram
I’ve sussed you Mangram, I was deep in thought counting computer games tapes jumping into cassette recorders, and I had just reached Make A Chip and was very nearly asleep. It hit me like a bullet from John Marsh’s gun, Mangram had always been a misprint it was really aangram, an anagram of anagram.

‘Now,’ I thought, ‘to find an anagram of LLOYD! I found it: Olly’d! The ’d bit standing for ver, hence Ollyver. You are Oliver Frey. As for the spelling it’s the proof readers fault. So Lloyd, you and Oliver are the same person. Admit it!
Francis Irving

Alwyas been a misprint indeed!
LM

128k BLUES

Dear Lloyd
I am a 128K Spectrum owner and, like many others sold my 48K Spectrum to buy it. Right now I am feeling quite depressed about my computer, as about a week after I bought it the price was slashed by forty pounds! Also adding to my dilemma is the fact that Alan Sugar is going to launch a new 128K Spectrum, which could make me lose all hope in what I have just bought, so much so that if Alan Sugar’s new 128K Spectrum does hit off with the people, I will definitely be selling my 128K Spectrum to buy the new one. Either I will do that or the 128K Spectrum picks itself up, in quality of games and in popularity. But for the moment I’m afraid the chances are I will be selling my computer, as time is running out for Sir Clive’s machine.
Lee Sayers

Which all goes to prove that our esteemed Editor was offering constructive advice in that editorial of his which attracted some criticism. Had you hung on in there a little longer you would have saved some money! (Can I have that pay rise now, please Graeme?)

Don’t worry about Alan Sugar’s new 128 — it will be compatible with your machine and could well provide such a boost to the 128 Spectrum world that companies actually start writing games for 128K Spectrums. You shouldn’t have to sell your pride and joy Lee.
LM

LOOKING BACK IN ANGER?

Dear Lloyd
As a computer veteran (ie aged over 18) who spends half his life standing in the dole queue, it has become increasingly apparent to me that the software industry though still entertaining, has lost some of its attractiveness and freshness. The businessmen behind the business are ‘progressing’ into bureaucrats who speak of ‘net profits, units of sale, marketing techniques and prospective themes’ rather than ‘play our games you’ll enjoy them!’

What I’m getting at is that the innocence seems to have evaporated from this once fun field. Either that, or someone has fabricated a well-constructed but now crumbling facade.

I accept that there has to be a business side to any industry but I’m talking about software marketing not car sales or insurance policies. The attitude of shoving the product via advertising down the public’s throat (even if we never see it) is typified by one of the true giants of the now-cynical software business: some companies persist in advertising products for ages before their release and the games may be getting more polished while we wait but at the same time, they get tarnished. Do you get the feeling their heart is not in entertaining but in making money?

I don’t know whether it is me that has mixed priorities or someone else... Contrastingly, people like Gargoyle Games impress me with their fresh approach; they seem to hold a determination as well as an ability to enjoy themselves and make money. Perhaps previously I was so naive and had so many expectations that I was blinded by the more attractive side of the then booming computer industry.

As more and more small companies vanish over the precipice into bankruptcy so larger companies consisting of board-rooms and directors swallow each other up... No I’m not some miserable old sod who despises people who are richer than myself, but I thought computers were supposed to be FUN not about capitalising nor opportunism to such a degree.

1982 was a year for entrepreneurs, sadly 1986 is a year for business-men and chartered accountants. In those days (strains of Hovis theme-tune can now be heard) a game was considered a bad deal at £3.95 and it probably was, now £9.95 is accepted as the norm... inflation? Or have people’s wallets fattened? Mine hasn’t. Believe it or not I’m not really nostalgic, well only a little.
Brian Gillespi

Nostalgia, like the game market, ain’t what it used to be. Yes, I agree that much of the raw fun element and energy has gone out of computer gaming nowadays, and it is perhaps sad that large businesses have moved into the market.

But the arrival of professional businesses has had a number of positive effects too, Brian. The shady deals of past years have been rendered almost extinct — people will always moan about poor product though, and that’s not actually a rip-off, more a case of Caveat Emptor as my mother used to remind me before I spent my pocket money.

In the days when games were sold for under a fiver from the programmer’s front room, distributors and retailers didn’t have to be paid and advertising budgets were minimal. Without advertising, significant sales of a product — be it a computer game or a fridge — can’t be achieved and without significant sales there’s not enough profit left to invest in development work. You must agree that the technical sophistication and game content of Spectrum software has risen dramatically since 1982, and I doubt you’d still be impressed with a £3.95 game today that offered 1982 graphics and playability.

The next correspondents have something to add about the advertising debate...
LM

ADVERTS WITHOUT SUBSTANCE

Dear Lloyd
I am writing to complain about the advertising of software in magazines. It’s not that I think there are too many adverts, it’s the software companies who have millions (!) of adverts all over the place, to promote games that don’t exist.

I think that software companies should not be allowed to advertise a game before it is released in the shops. Domark managed to do this with their game, Splitting Images and the game is still set to be a hit, so if Domark can do it why can’t Ocean, Elite and US Gold?
Simon Machell

LOST BUS FARES

Dear Lloyd
I know this subject has been in FORUM many a time before but I have had enough with software houses always advertising their games but when you go down town and go to a good computer store and ask for a game they always say it has not even been published yet! Please, please print advertisements with at least a date of release or I am going to keep losing 24p on bus fare.
Clive Stonebridge

Very valid points, Clive and Simon. Some while ago Roger Bennet, our Advertising Supremo, wrote to all the software houses who buy pages in CRASH asking them to refrain from putting ‘Available Now’ on their adverts if the game was not in the shops.

The trouble is, last minute delays often creep in, and given that companies have to let us have their advertising copy at least a month before their ad is printed in CRASH, all sorts of things can go wrong with an advertised game’s launch schedule while CRASH is being printed.

Advertisements are expensive, and I’m sure software houses would like to avoid ‘wasting’ advertising money Simon. It’s just that we don’t live in an ideal world where everything goes according to Plan A! The next correspondent has something to add to the advertising debate....
LM

COPYWRITER’S NIGHTMARE

Dear Lloyd
Advertising as it is today is a waste of resources and adds unnecessarily to the fixed costs of producing software. I’m not saying that all advertising is bad, in fact advertising is essential for both the consumer and the firm. People need INFORMATIVE advertising so that they can rationally decide whether or not a particular program suits their tastes and whether it is worth the asking price. This could be done in half a page containing clear screen shots accompanied by a brief but concise explanation of the game, what joysticks it works with and other relevant pieces of information like whether or not it is Microdrive compatible and so on. For monochromatic games (eg Knight Lore, Bobby Bearing et al) there need not be any colour. Black and White ads still work, as long as they are clear (which happens to be the case in CRASH because of the glossy paper used).

What I object to is the pages of hype that we are faced with when reading computer mags. This PERSUASIVE advertising entices people to make irrational decisions which they very much regret afterwards. Software houses cannot keep conning the consumer who has to pay ten pounds for a lot of garbage which was advertised in two pages of bright colours as being ‘the ultimate experience’ etc etc.

Firms are now paying the price for this; high fixed costs because of advertising, increases in the levels of piracy, and the growing success of the budget labels. It is time the software houses changed their marketing strategy and used the money they save to reduce the price of software, but maybe it is now too late...
Michael Imprato

One thing’s for sure — you’ll never get a job with SAATCHI AND SAATCHI Mike! Advertising has been blamed for a range of society’s ills, and it’s not surprising to hear that adverts have damaged the software industry.

As you so rightly say, advertising is an essential part of any industry — but it must be up to the consumer to decide which products to buy. Adverts don’t MAKE people buy things, they just let people know that something is available and they are bound to attempt to catch the consumer’s eye. Reviews, on the other hand, attempt to offer assistance when it comes to making the purchasing decision, so read the ads and the reviews and at least look, if not try, before you buy.
LM

BIRTHDAY TREAT

Dear Lloyd
I have been an avid reader of your column since July 1984 when I bought my Spectrum 16K. I then upgraded to 48K. However I have, on average, sent you two letters a month. Yet not one of these letters has been printed in CRASH so please print this letter in time for my 18th birthday.

I have recently bought a Spectrum 128 and was wondering if there were any other 128 owners who would like a pen pal who also owns a 128 so could you print my address please? I have been trying to get a MIDI lead for a synth so could you tell me where I could get hold of this lead?
JA Morrison

Happy Birthday To Yoo, Happy Birthday to Yoooo. Can anyone out there help Mr Morrison?

LONG LIVE HANNAH SMIFF!

Dear Lloyd
I have been reading CRASH since November 1984 (and that is 2 months even before I got my Spectrum!) I am writing about Robin Candy (RIP) leaving. At first I was disappointed at this and I didn’t think Hannah Smith would be much but how wrong I was.

In June she printed tips for Way of the Tiger, and Spellbound, then pokes for Spellbound, Bombjack, Green Beret and Starstrike 2. ‘Just a lucky month for me’, I thought. As I have a paper round all these games have joined my collection of 80 games.

But again I was proved wrong as the month afterwards (July) she printed tips for Knight Tyme, Turbo Esprit and again Way of the Tiger, Also pokes for Turbo Esprit, Batman and Bounder and a map for Rambo.

Just one plea, how about POKEs tips or maps for Ghosts ’n Goblins and Jack the Nipper, long live Hannah Smith.
Garth O’Mara

Glad to hear you like the output of our new ‘Girlie Tipster’. I’m not that much of a fortune teller, but I can predict a long life for her as she annoys Graeme Kidd rather than me! Now her predecessor has gone on to other things, my desk space is safe...
LM

PHOTOCOPIER PROBLEMS

Dear Lloyd
I am writing this letter concerning CRASH No 30. On page 101 there is a competition for the Biggles computer game etc... On page 102 there is a competition to win a disk drive. I was keen on both these competitions, so I went ahead and did the Biggles one first. I completed the wordsearch, so I got out the scissors and started to cut. I realized I had cut part of the disc drive entry coupon.

Next day I went down to my local library to use the photocopier. This was so I could cut one out and photocopy the other. To my astonishment the lady said it is illegal to photocopy competitions! I left disappointed. I do not know if she was right or not, but this would not happen if CRASH took their time to space the competitions out. The only solution I can think of when comps are on either side of the page is to buy two mags...
Gary Ballingall

Well, buying two copies of CRASH every month would be a nice idea...

Seriously though, we do try and avoid such awkward positioning — but the Artroom boys do slip up from time to time which is understandable given the pressure of work they have to cope with. (Can I come to tea now ART?) I think the librarian was being a bit of a stickler for regulations — we don't mind if you photocopy an entry form and often say as much, because some folks don't like cutting up their copies of the magazine. We only get cross if you photocopy an entry form so you can enter the same competition dozens of times.
LM

CASE FOR THE DEFENCE

Dear Lloyd
In the wake of Ultimate’s recent criticism I thought I would add a few point for the defence. Often the games have been criticised for being alike with different graphics. Taking this approach then surely Mikro-Gen should be in the firing line for their never ending supply of dashing Wally games. ‘Ah’, I hear the prosecution say ‘this was a sequel and required a similar plot and the same graphics’. This is so but also the Sabreman saga was a line of sequels, a point which is frequently overlooked. In addition why were Gargoyle not criticised for their games (Tir Na Nog, Dun Darach, and lately Marsport) when these too could be construed to be the same game with a different scenario and graphics.

Branching from this I would like to ask the prosecution why, when Ultimate copy a game idea that was theirs in the first place, other software houses like Ocean (Batman), Gargoyle (Sweevo’s), Firebird (Cylu), and Mastertronic (Molecule Man), receive nothing but praise and not a hint of criticism. The crime of copying an idea which many believe is overplayed, is surely more serious than simply using your own idea.

I do happen to think that Ultimate have come to the end of the road with Sabreman, but they were more entitled to repeatedly capitalise from the 3D set up than other software houses.
Peter Whelerton

It seems the debate is set to continue. Maybe it’s time we had a change of topic, and stopped arguing the case for and against Ultimate until we’ve all seen their next game. And no, I don’t know what the wizards from Ashby de la Zouche have planned...
LM

PRICE PROBLEMS

Dear Lloyd
After reading the letter by Sean Powne in the July edition of your magazine complaining about Smith’s, over pricing their games, I have seen the £1.99 game Snodgits by Creative Sparks priced at £9.95! I don’t know what Smiths are trying to pull but if they don’t stop doing it they will lose customers to rival stores.
Graham Leech

I’ve had quite a few letters recently about strange prices appearing on games in the major chain stores — most of them pointing out that games have been overpriced rather than underpriced. I get the impression that people are more likely to write in if they see a game overpriced and tend to buy an underpriced game double quick and not put pen to paper about it.

Large and reputable stores simply can’t afford to deliberately overprice products. Mistakes do happen. Why didn’t you approach the departmental manager and point out the error as well as write to me Graham?
LM

128K PLEA

Dear Lloyd
I was recently reading through my old issues of CRASH and noticed in a reply to a letter in the May issue you said that insufficient Spectrum 128s are sold, then there will not be the sales incentive for software houses.

Now in my opinion someone will not buy a computer unless there is a reasonable amount of software available for that machine. In which case the software houses are waiting for an increase in sales of the 128 before they start writing games for it and prospective 128 buyers are waiting for software to be released before they buy one. The result is that the 128, which is a perfectly good machine will eventually be withdrawn from the shelves.

What the 128 needs is for someone to start producing decent amounts of software for it. ‘Ah’, I hear you say, ‘but they won’t do that until there are sufficient sales.’ In reply to that I would like to take you back four years to the release of a computer which we all now know and love, the 48K Spectrum. Was there any software for it? Very little! But people wrote games for it and marketed them and effectively increased demand for the 48K. Now here’s a plea to any software house reading this, stop worrying about whether or not a game written for the 128 will make your company a fortune and try to be a bit more pioneering like the early games programmers.

If nothing else it will increase demand, providing that if the game is original and not just an enlarged 48K game. The 128 is a good machine and should not be killed off by businessmen who are worried about their profits. Where are the people who helped make the 48K Spectrum what it is today?
Timothy Reed

You are quite right, Tim, it’s very much a ‘Chicken and Egg’ situation as far as the 128K machine goes. Maybe the launch of the Spectrum Plus Two will make a difference and achieve enough sales to chivvy software houses into writing programs for the larger machine.

There is one difference about the situation now, as compared to the launch of the 48K (or indeed the 16K machine). In those days, people writing software for the Spectrum didn’t have a massive user base of 48K machines to rely on, and had to take the plunge. Today many of the people who helped make the 48K machine what it is are still busy writing for it, producing games for a certain market. Understandably they are a bit reluctant to abandon a solid market temporarily while they write for the 128 machine — and don’t forget more effort and time has to go into a game which takes advantage of the larger memory and increased facilities of the Spectrum’s big brother.
LM

ARMCHAIR SPORTSPERSON

Dear Crash
I have always liked sports simulations. I find them compelling and I think their lasting appeal is much longer than the usual run of the mill games. I still often play such games as Match Day, Match Point, and Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, years after they first came out.

Why then are such classics as Match Day so underrated? Has the CRASH reviewing team got something against sports games? Why is it that Match Day wasn’t smashed? It was and indeed still is the best soccer game around. Match Point is another example of CRASH’S apparent knock-the-sports-simulations policy.

Even the fantastic Ping Pong, one of my most recent software acquisitions, was only just Smashed with 90%. Is the reason for CRASH not liking sports simulations that they think they are gimicky and unoriginal in their concept? If this is true then surely CRASH fell for the biggest gimmick of all in World Series Baseball. All the pretty graphics and jingly tunes that were surely the main factors if not the only factors, in winning it the highest acclaim in the pages of CRASH, somewhat hide the fact that the game hasn’t got as much lasting appeal as the two Matches (Point and Day), both of which weren’t Smashed.

When I first got Barry McGuigan’s Boxing I thought it was a refreshing change to have a game that had so much depth built into the humble beat ’em up. Having to use strategy and forward planning as well as skill and reflexes, I thought made the perfect blend. Was it a CRASH Smash? Not likely!

Now after all that you probably think that I only play sports simulations and that I am totally biased for them. This is untrue however because in my opinion Elite is the best game ever to be made and Quazatron is at the moment my favourite game.

So finally, a plea, please, please, please give sports simulations the credit they deserve as I cannot see why such utter rubbish as Zoids (which only people at CRASH seem to like) can be rated 10% above the all time Football Classic Match Day.
Timothy Wormleighton

We certainly haven’t got anything against sports simulations Timothy. Indeed, most of the corpulent members of the CRASH team get no closer to a sports field than their Spectrum screens! But reviewers’ (and readers’) tastes do differ widely and we can’t keep everyone happy all of the time...

As far as Match Day goes we’ve already apologised — take a look at the editorial pages for a bit of interesting news applicable to Match Day fans. We’re hosting a Match Day challenge soon, and are inviting readers to pit their on screen footballing skills against the game’s programmers!
LM

TRAITOROUS INTENT!

Dear Lloyd
All Spectrum owners, take a deep breath, count to 3 and read on. Now prepare yourself for a bout of blasphemous burble. I too have been a Spectrum owner for 3 long years: releases such as Lords of Midnight, Shadowfire, Lords of Time, Fairlight and Starquake have left me breathless to say the least. However I have noticed that recently 3D games have flooded the market (Fairlight being the best) and I have become very bored... Yawn!...

In the last few months there have been two games worthy of a mention. Zoids and Quazatron (more 3D) otherwise the Spectrum has been left in the dust. C64 owners have been treated to Uridium, The Eidolon, Silent Service and LCP. Not one iota of similarity between any of them. So I’ve decided to hang out my Spectrum and join the immortal ranks of the ZZAP! following and buy myself a wonderful Commodore 64...

I have waited too long for the software industry to waken up and rise to new heights on the Spectrum, and as for Pentagram, drop dead Ultimate!
N Potter

Goodbye Mr Potter, it was nice knowing you... See you in ZZAP! I’m not sure how many readers will agree with your views, however...
LM

NAMEDROPPING

Dear Lloyd
One day, I sneaked into CRASH Towers, the first thing I noticed was a sweet stall where someone was ROBIN CANDY. I then entered the reviewing room and noticed CAMERON POUNDing the keyboard. Someone was watching him, obviously ROGER KEEN to have a go himself. I then saw GRAEME KIDDing around, with NICK WILD as a tiger. A fight broke out and someone gave DICK a SHINER. (Is CRASH Towers really this chaotic?)

I could see that OLIVER’S FREYed temper was running out. Somehow, order was restored, mainly due to the efforts of a delectable young woman. ‘I’m CAROL KIN see, I keep the peace’. A strange fellow suddenly introduced himself. ‘I’m DEREK-I BREW, stir, and boil the CRASH cooking pot.’

Two other fellows were playing Exploding Fist. ‘GOODWIN, SIMON’ said poor Lloyd after his man had been dropped. ‘JON BATES his opponents even quicker,’ grinned Lloyd, and I was eventually thrown out of the building by DAVID (WESTERN exit).

I couldn’t fit your second name into the story Lloyd — your name is hard enough to say, never mind fitting it into the story! And I know Robin has gone now, but I thought I’d put him in anyway, out of respect. What’s happened to him anyway? Are his ‘PASTURES NEW’ really a field at the bottom of his garden?
Jer Nallist

You think MY name is hard to fit into a story Jer! ‘WeLL OY’D better better weigh in, MAN, GRAMs make all the difference when you are on a diet’ said Auntie Aggie...

Well, it’s the best I can do!
LM

And that just about wraps it all up for another wintry summer’s day of FORUM compiling. Keep your letters coming in to me at the usual address. If there’s enough correspondence, I might have to spend all September back at base reading through your epistles...

This month, BRENDON KAVANAGH takes a look at another game run by KJC, appeals for details of your experiences as a criminal of the future, and reveals that a souped up version of VORCON WARS is now available. All this, while playing IT’S A CRIME!

The offer of a free It’s A Crime! startup made in the July issue by KJC Games has attracted an impressive response from all of you budding PBMers. So many CRASH readers wrote in that a new game of It’s A Crime! was launched last month to accommodate you all!

I’ve joined in the mayhem on the streets of New York, and so far have managed to win control of a couple more blocks and gain half a dozen new recruits to my gang in the process...

Please write in and let me know how you are getting on battling it out amongst the mobsters.

SUPER VORCON WARS

In July’s PBM MAILBOX I described a popular PBM game called Vorcon Wars. John Nicholson, creator of the aforementioned game, has recently launched a more complicated version which involves infectious diseases destroying food supplies, multi-commander player positions, more aggressive native Vorcons and other such wonders. John, demonstrating an impressive spurt of originality and imagination, has named this game Super Vorcon Wars. SVW is not a game released to replace Vorcon Wars, it is intended to let players who want to do more than they can in the original game do so — just because the game is called Super Vorcon Wars it doesn’t mean that it’s any better...

SVW costs £1.50 per turn to play. I shall discuss the game more thoroughly in a later issue.

CAPITOL

Capitol is an American PBM game, moderated on computer in the UK by KJC Games, the people who moderate It’s A Crime.

This is a game of interstellar empire building which is very strategic and diplomatic in play. There are 32 players per game who represent, as teams of four individual game positions, eight unique races. At the start of the game, each player is given a world and a few starships with which to begin exploring the two dimensions in which play takes place. The player must conquer new worlds to expand the empire’s industrial and political base, and new starships for fighting, exploration, and carrying cargo can be crudely designed and built once extra resources have been annexed.

Bases may be established on other worlds which confer commercial, economic, and political benefits (and, perhaps, disadvantages). These bases must be maintained and supplied to keep them operational.

GOALS

There are two goals for the players of Capitol to achieve. The first is to construct and develop the most powerful base of your race; the player who owns the most powerful base being the race Emperor (until deposed!).

The second is to work with the other players of the same race to annihilate the ‘aliens’ — in other words, get rid of the other players. As you can see, the political aspect of Capitol is an interesting one where groups of competing players must also ally to destroy the other races before they themselves are destroyed! There’s a lot of scope for stabbing people in the back in this game.

TURNAROUND

Capitol is an open-ended game and players may submit turns as often as they like up to a maximum of once per week (a ten day limit game exists for European players). KJC Games is a well run organisation which runs its games in quite a professional manner. According to the rulebook, games generally last for between nine and eighteen months — who knows, within a year you could be the conqueror of a whole galaxy!

HINTS ON PLAY

Capitol involves a lot of diplomacy, especially between players of the same race (even though you are all struggling to be Emperor you must also remember how important it is to work together against the other races!). This means that quite a bit of real world communication is needed to do well in Capitol. For convenience (and to save money on stamps and large telephone bills; two sad facts of life for the overactive diplomat) it may be an idea for a group of four friends to join all at once and agree to co-operate as a race (this means that on startup you must all choose to play as the same race). You all play as individuals as normal: it just makes interplayer communications easier and more enjoyable!

START UP

The impressive Capitol Rules Package (containing all sorts of goodies) costs £2, excluding startup. £6 pays for the Rules package, game set up, and your first two turns. Turn costs thereafter can vary slightly, but usually each turn costs £1.75.

THE FLAGSHIP FACTORS

DIPLOMACY

5

COMPLEXITY

2

GM QUALITY

8

DEPTH

8

INTERACTION

7

VALUE

8

Last month being traditional holiday time, this columnist had a holiday! To make up for this loss, there are goodies aplenty dished up for your ear and eye in this slightly enlarged section including a bolt-on keyboard synth for the 128, a amplifier for any Spectrum and the re-vamp of Wham the Music Box for the 128.

MORE MUSICAL INTERLUDES

ECHO MUSICAL SYNTHESIZER

Producer: HCCS
Price £59.95

Some while ago, we asked HCCS for a review. After a reasonable time had elapsed, both the Editor and I ran up several quids worth of phone bill trying to wheedle a review copy for me to tinker with. Finally, the synth system turned up, but on arrival at Chateau Bates it was found not to work. More phone calls, a very helpful service department, a second interface, still no sound. Eventually it was discovered that the keyboard had a loose connector. Plug in and away we go.

Meanwhile something in the back of what passes for my brain rang a bell and I went scampering through my old leaflets and files. Sure enough a few years back there was, for the BBC computer, the very same keyboard and amplifier with a rather decent music package with tons of voices, effects, chords and percussion. I rubbed my tiny hands with glee. However, I quickly discovered that the Spectrum 128 version was quite different. In fact the software is re-written and much simplified.

On loading up the screen displays a miserly 8 preset voices. Now whilst the sound chip in the 128 is not exactly the bee’s knees, the presets didn’t really do justice to it. The voices had the right shape to them but there was a rapid series of clicks that accompanied each sound, caused by the software being organised in such a way that each tiny increment of volume and/or pitch created a very audible click. And as there are plenty of increments for each sound this quickly becomes very tiresome.

The preset display allows you to crank the pitch up and down either in fractions of a tone or complete octaves. Pressing the space key gets you into the sound editing page which consists of a static graph and allows easy access to the various peripherals of the sound: attack; sustain; decay and release. Unfortunately, you can’t hear the changes that you have made without flipping back to the other screen display page, which makes sound editing a somewhat tedious process. It would have been most useful if the graph had reshaped itself so that you had a visual guide to the shape of the sound. In other words apart from informing you about the constituent parts of a sound shape (termed an envelope) the graph serves no active purpose.

The sounds you have created can be dumped onto tape and loaded back at later dates. More omissions — you can’t give your new sounds a name, so if you have created lots of sounds you have no point of reference. Mind you, the system can only store eight sounds at a time, so shuffling through a tape to find that wonderful sound you made at 4am in the morning could take some time.

It comes with a decent full-size, three octave keyboard plus interface: the software is available on both cassette and Microdrive. I can’t tell you much about the interface, as both the units I had were prototypes and not in their final form. No doubt, the production version will arrive in an anonymous small black box that plugs into the expansion port. The company who originally developed this for the BBC and Commodore machines went the way of many other software houses — into corporate oblivion — and the remaining stock has been taken over by HCCS. The software for the 128 has been derived from the original by a development company who are headed by one of the original design team, and it is this software that lets the package down.

I feel that the software offers too few facilities and should give you noise-free envelopes for sounds! The market is full of far superior software controls for the same chip and with 128K of memory to go at, there is really no excuse for omitting such obvious provisions as sequencing, note display, song files, access to the noise channel, chord playing, and maybe some additional filtering in the add-on hardware. Not to mention using the MIDI out port present on the 128. Although the system includes a keyboard, I feel it very non-competitive in today’s market. One gets a trifle niggled when companies suggest that users could develop their own software for expensive products like this... It is one thing to make minor adjustments to a product by way of fine-tuning for personal need, but it is another matter altogether to launch a very basic product at a price which is far from basic and then expect the paying public to re-design it for you. And why is the vastly inferior Spectrum 128 version more expensive than the superior versions for other micros?

ECHOSOUND SPEAKER/AMPLIFIER

Producer: HCCS
Price £39.95

This was previously marketed by its original developers at £49.95 and at 5p off £40, it now represents a better bargain. Basically it is a twin-cone speaker well matched to a reasonable monophonic amplifier with tone and volume controls. Sound quality is very acceptable and it is a handy little add-on to have about. It takes a mini-jack input so you can use the data recorder lead to connect the mic socket on the Spectrum to the Echosound.

The unit itself is mains powered, and I was pleased to note that it is also internally fused for extra safety should you fail to wire it up properly or drop it in the fish tank. The unit is quite compact, about 24cm x 18cm x 12cm and finished in best MFI placky wood. Unless you have a hi-fi equipped with suitable plugs handy to your micro it makes for a convenience item that is neither cheap nor expensive but of good quality. And you could use it to amplify anything else you have about. HCCS plan to market the speaker/amplifier unit along with the synthesizer as one package for £84.90, including a free keyboard tutor for good measure.

THE MUSIC BOX (48K & 128K)

Producer: Melbourne House
Author: Mark Alexander
Price: £9.95

After the success of Wham, The Music Box, Mark Alexander has vastly improved the sound capabilities, taking full advantage of the sound chip on board the 128. The original version for the 48K machine uses the Beep command split by a routine to create a duophonic effect and has some options for adding percussive noise. Note entry is achieved via the bottom two rows of keys which, in combination with an octave key, gives you a range of about five octaves per voice.

Note values are limited to quavers only, but you can join them together to form longer notes — rests are inserted from the ENTER key. As you enter notes on the second channel you automatically hear the first track along with it, which means that bum notes in a harmony are instantly recognised. Tempo is variable and editing is absurdly simple — just advance through the tune step by step till you hear the offending note, select the channel and overwrite. There is also a looping facility for each channel so that sequences can be set up or repeats of the whole piece can be arranged.

So how does the 128 version improve on this? Plenty, is the answer. The opening turn for the screen display is ‘Peter Gunn’ in a cleverly designed arrangement that shows off the three channels of sound plus percussion. Each channel can be set to produce a different sound by some rather clever software that allows you to design your own sound envelope. Note entry and editing is very much the same as in the 48K version and the display shows you where you are in the piece as the notes scroll past a fixed point.

Each channel has a window display showing you which sound envelope number it is using complete with a graph of that envelope. It also registers the note number counted from the beginning of the piece. A larger window flashes up the special effects or commands you have specified as they occur during the piece. The effects, assignable to each channel individually, are as follows:

a) altering the envelope volume which will help you to get joined notes sound smoother, getting rid of the rather annoying pulse present in the 48K version.

b) altering the individual levels of the channels so that a good sound balance is possible.

c) an additional looping facility.

d) the ability to make any channel slide up and down in pitch. This can produce very spectacular effects.

The display has a volume meter like a VU meter on a hi-fi. A piano keyboard running across the bottom of the screen shows you where your notes are being played or entered, with a different colour used on the display for each channel. The colour of the screen border can be altered to suit.

From the main menu, apart from the usual load and save options, there are help pages and sections dedicated to defining the sound envelopes. The latter are noise free and produce some pretty good sounds. The envelope editing cleverly uses a set of bar graphs that shape the sound via the arrow keys, each alteration being plotted in an adjoining window. It comes with eight preset sound envelopes so that you are not completely at sea. When transferred to the main display each sound graph is reproduced in miniature in the channel window.

There are also nine preset drum noises that can be varied far more than on the 48K version: a wider choice of frequencies and volumes is available via the envelope editing procedure. Any percussion effect has to be put onto one of the three channels but you can switch from percussion to notes within each channel, and with careful planning the loss of one channel for an instant is not noticeable.

Your homespun masterpieces can be saved to RAM disc as well as cassette. Like the 48K version it has a compiler which produces a machine code routine which lets you put tunes into programs of your own creation.

The accompanying documentation and instructions are all fairly accurate, although the key reference guide needs amending for the 128. For example the ‘step back one note’ command only worked when SYMBOL SHIFT was held down. CAPS LOCK and P independently allows you to step through the tune event by event (note by note as they occur). But it does list a ‘get you started’ tune for you to enter, as well as six pre-programmed tunes that put The Music Box through its paces very successfully, even if some of the tunes are a wee bit inaccurate.

If improvements are to be made, I would like to see some sort of advanced editing whereby defined sections of the tune could be filed away and re-ordered into a song format. Self-created envelopes could also be stored in this way to allow access to the sound parameters more quickly: an envelope file as it were.

If you were only going to buy one music program, then buy The Music Box for the 128. It’s a definite winner, and will take a lot of beating.

This month Simon Goodwin investigates Spectrum 128 sounds, joystick repairs and mains interference. He also reviews two packages intended to turn all and sundry into programmers and games designers!

BACK TO BASICS

There must have been hundreds of books published that promise to teach ‘anyone’ to write BASIC programs. Even discounting the ones by Tim Hartnell and Ian Sinclair.

It is now fashionable to publish book and cassette combinations — where the cassette is little more than a consolation prize for the unlucky purchaser, when he or she discovers that the book is impenetrable to anyone lacking a degree in maths, a dictionary of computing and the ability to team entirely by inference.

Despite this dismal pedigree, and a typically cliched title, Jim Maitland’s Basically Speaking package is a good effort, and may well teach a few Mums, Dads and (notoriously ignorant) Computer Science teachers what programming is all about.

BASIC ASSUMPTIONS

The package starts out from the assumption that the reader is interested, but probably non-technical; perhaps a bit overawed by computers, not given to much reading, and not necessarily equipped with ‘O’ level Maths. Many books claim to use a similar starting point, but they don’t maintain it for long...

The last paragraph comes from the covering letter which came with the CRASH copy of Basically Speaking. Jim Maitland has certainly done his homework, as indeed one might expect of a Physics teacher with two teenage computerholic sons. Just to make sure that I spotted all his hard work, he includes a careful critique of other ‘beginner’s BASIC’ books, and an analysis of his response — he’s definitely taking no chances with reviewers!

For £8.95 you get the usual black plastic binder holding a 100-page paperback book and a data cassette. The text has been produced with a daisywheel printer; the layout is neat and there are plenty of diagrams and gaps to keep things looking interesting. Some rather twee cartoons pop up every so often — sometimes these add to the text but they’re often more embarrassing than illuminating.

General interest books written by teachers often fall down because they patronise their audience. To some extent Basically Speaking falls into this trap. The author alms to write for young and old, but sometimes he unnecessarily divides his audience. Overall, though, the text is carried by its conversational style and relaxed humour.

The book starts with a brief, friendly introduction, containing two ‘Golden Rules':

1. Don’t wonder what would happen if... Try it out. Experiment! Be bold. Pressing wrong keys won’t harm the computer.

2. If it refuses to respond, no matter what you do, just switch off and start again.

Armed with this excellent advice — which trades much of the mystique of computers for fascination — the reader is gently introduced to the computer keyboard.

There are different versions of the book for Spectrum and Spectrum Plus users. The publishers think that the beginner has enough to cope with initially without having to wade through footnotes and brackets to find out which phrase or statement applies to that particular machine. It is a shame — especially given the large market that this book should find in shops — that the two editions are not distinguished by pictures of the target machine on the cover. Retailers need all the help they can get.

CURRICULUM

The course consists of twelve units, covering most areas of ZX BASIC: arithmetic, decisions, loops, strings, arrays, sound and so on. Each unit consists of a few pages from the book, and a couple of short programs on tape. The text is strewn with simple but ingenious exercises, with solutions provided.

The book ends with an appendix about keyboard fingering, a brief glossary and an index. The programs on the tape are simple and tend to crash if you type gibberish into them, but they’re easy to list and understand.

The course does not go into any detail about graphics, and it certainly doesn’t teach programming as a profession or as an engineering discipline — the coverage is practical, with virtually no theory. But — within its brief — Basically Speaking is accurate, friendly and fun.

ANY GAME YOU LIKE

Argus Software’s Arcade Creator is a package aimed at a very different market — people who definitely DON’T want to learn to program, but who still want to invent games. Arcade Creator is a package in the tradition of Quicksilva’s Games Designer and Hurg from Melbourne House. The aim is to distil the elements of a game design away from the underlying program — so that you can produce original games simply by designing the graphics and selecting from pre-set play options.

Quicksilva’s package was easy to use but very limited — it came with eight demo games, with each one packed into 1K of memory. Hurg was more flexible, but not much. Both had the flaw that you had to load the main package before you could load a game of your own. Arcade Creator removes that restriction, but brings its own disadvantages.

For £14.95 you get yet another black video box with two cassettes and a ten-page typeset manual rattling around inside. The documentation is rudimentary; just a tour of the tape contents from Tape 1 Side 1 to Tape 2 Side 2, with commentaries on the process of game design en route.

The text is readable and restrictions are clearly stated, usually with a helpful explanation. I found the ‘2’ key listed in place of ‘Z’ at one point, and could not find the game control keys listed anywhere, but both of these faults were easy to correct by experiment.

The first thing I do when judging any kind of design program is look at the examples provided. In this case I just got a ten-screen game, by the name of Nutty Gnome. This is a bad advertisement for the package, and certainly too poor a game to be published separately by any established budget house. It takes me back to early 1983, with its inaccurate collision detection and flickering, blocky graphics, including square-edged trees.

Arcade Creator forces you to build up backgrounds from user-defined characters; you can only use a total of 84 characters in all twenty possible screens, so background graphics have to be simple or horrid. If you abandon graphics altogether you can design a game with up to 40 ‘screens’ or, strictly, attack waves. Don’t bother if you’ve already got a copy of Arcadia.

...AS LONG AS IT’S

The package lets you design two types of game: simple platform games (without lifts, belts or ladders, and with a fixed jump distance) or ‘chase and shoot’ games where a character moves around the screen shooting baddies and barriers, and collecting treasure, weapons, keys, glasses or whatever. Many commercial games have been designed around these formats, but they’re getting dated and ‘hit’ programs tended to add features to the bare bones, like the ropes in Jet Set Willy or the moving platforms in Chuckie Egg.

In either case you must start by designing the sound effects, sprites (moving graphics) and user-defined characters which will be used to build up background pictures.

Sprites are designed on a 16x16 pixel grid — about average for Spectrum arcade games and significantly better than the 12x12 of Quicksilva’s Games Designer. Sprites are drawn by colouring points on a grid; the complete pattern can be ‘rotated’ in 90 degree steps, ‘reflected’ to face the other side of the screen, or ‘inverted’ by swapping coloured and empty points. You can design up to 21 sprites, each of which can have up to four steps of animation. As the game is played the sprite cycles quickly through the steps, so that it looks alive.

User-defined graphics are drawn in a similar way, but on an 8x8 grid. The graphics are stored in four groups, each holding 21 patterns.

The sound generator is easy to use and versatile — you can get just about any noise that can be made up from a single fluctuating tone, including sirens, buzzes, bleeps and ‘white noise’ explosion effects. The program stores up to eight different effects, and any six of these can be associated with events during the game — collisions, level changes, and so on.

The graphics are frozen while sound effects are produced — as on most early Spectrum games — but this doesn’t matter much if you keep the noises short. There’s no continuous music during play, but a jingle is played before the game starts — there are three pre-set possibilities.

The screen designer is very limited. Your pictures must be built up from small user-defined graphics, rather than lines and shapes drawn freehand. The results look like a Lego building site.

After designing that lot you must save it all on tape and load a second program, which leads you through a set of questions about the game, such as its name, the number of screens, and the game type. A decreasing bonus score can be pre-set, with an option to stop play if the countdown reaches zero.

Then you assign sprites to be players, enemies, missiles, treasure and so on, setting their initial positions, movement (if any, in eight directions at twelve possible speeds), and the effect of collisions with other sprites and the background. You set the initial direction of movement, but the rest of the path depends upon what gets in the way.

When you’ve positioned and programmed every sprite on every screen you can load a third program to produce a separate game file which can be loaded on its own.

... BEEN DONE BEFORE

This is very clever, and neatly done, but it’s not the way that real games are designed. You develop real games interactively — you position the graphics and play for a while, then you adjust the background to make things easier or more difficult, fiddle with the speeds, add and remove sprites, and generally build things up piecemeal.

Even the most brilliant and experienced game designers use this ad hoc approach to get things absolutely spot-on. It is even more important for beginners to be able to experiment; yet it’s virtually impossible to work that way with Arcade Creator, because you have to save and re-load everything, end troll through the question and answer sequence, every time you make a change.

All three sections of the package should really be built into one program. The second two parts are largely programmed in BASIC, so it should be possible to make them much more concise by re-writing them in machine code. Arcade Creator runs on the Spectrum 128 but does not appear to make use of the extra RAM. Nor is there any support for disks or Microdrives.

If you’re interested in games you may be able to while away a few evenings playing with Arcade Creator. But if you really want to design and test your own games it’s no alternative to ‘real’ programming. Arcade Creator lets you fiddle with pre-set games, but it doesn’t give you the freedom to design anything really original.

BE ADVENTUROUS

F YOU TAKE a careful look at the review section this month you will notice every game except Mandragore, a D&D style game written in France, uses The Quill as a means of converting the adventure writer’s ideas into code. The Quill is a superb utility for adventure enthusiasts to create their own adventures, and has been used to create some highly commercial games (Hampstead for example), but I think its use by almost every adventure concern will, in time, devalue both the look and feel of the adventure.

Adventuring before The Quill was a far different story. The lack of constraints on format and programming led to a wide range of contrasting styles and made the task of reviewing Spectrum adventures a pleasure; it was never certain what surprise the next postal package would bring. When reviewing the games it became clear there was a fundamental link between the format chosen, the programming techniques used to fulfil the game’s tasks, and how good the game fared in the review. With The Quill, no options are allowed on format and programming which leads to cloned adventures sharing fundamental failings, such as in the field of vocabulary. All Quilled games share the same commands and the room for clever manipulation of text is all too evidently lacking.

The Graphic Adventure Creator has no sooner arrived than it, like The Quill, is hailed as an adventuring breakthrough. I would agree with the view that this new program is indeed a superior utility, but it will only create a limited number of topnotch games. This will be due to the lack of inventiveness on behalf of the writer, the same lack of endeavour which caused them to seek the crutch of a utility in the first place. Level 9 have shown with their chart success that own-code adventures are highly respected and it is my guess that many adventure-writing aspirants would be better to seek the services of a moderately competent programmer than plump for the overstated utility.

THE BOGGIT

CRL, £7.95

The name behind Delta 4 is one Fergus McNeil. He brought you Robin of Sherlock and Bored of the Rings and now he’s waylaying us with his latest offering — The Boggit, Bored Too (two, that is). Regulars to the column will remember how I enjoyed both of Fergus’s earlier offerings but wondered how universally funny the jokes actually were. In The Boggit, the comic genius’s talent has been trained, focused and profitably directed towards the one theme — taking The Hobbit computer game to the cleaners (although the thought of cleansing isn’t quite the right analogy here)!

Everyone who has played The Hobbit will find something to laugh at here, and even Tolkien illiterates will realise something funny’s going on as Bimbo struggles with supposed friend and foe alike to try and emulate the exploits of Bilbo in the original. This game is awarded a SMASH not just because it is amusing at the expense of a game and a theme familiar to everyone but due to its standing as an adventure — the game reads well, plays well, and the presentation is slick and polished to a tee.

A comfortable tunnel-like hall is Bimbo’s home and there’s the familiar round green door set in the middle of a very familiar picture not unlike the first frame of The Hobbit (remember how Delta 4 mimicked Robin of Sherwood pictures in their last spoof)? OPEN CHEST and ‘Bimbo.. couldn’t quite see inside.’ Any adventurer worth his salt will recognise a prompt to action here and so it is that the intrepid explorer clears the first hurdle, but only after dodging the very real threat posed by some glamorous milk choccies accompanied by a card and delivered at great risk. Typically the chocs are explosive and are delivered by none other than that conniving rascal Grandalf: ‘Suddenly, there was a resounding crash, and Grandalf tarzaned in through the window, collapsing elegantly on the floor beside Bimbo. He hastily fumbled about in his robes for something, then placed a box of chocolates and a card carefully on the carpet before scrambling out through the now broken window’. Much longer passages than this pop up throughout the adventure and because they are so well-written add immensely to the fun and atmosphere of the game.

Assuming players can suss the combination lock on the green door and side-step the exploding chocolates they might like to explore the Boggit-hole with the super EXAMINE command. As an example of how full this adventure is let’s take the toilet area which one might have assumed to be a bit of a backwater (no rude joke intended). Using this command we learn how the toilet looks a bit dubious, how the sink contains some ancient mouthwash stains, the medicine cabinet to be securely welded shut, and the floor tiles to be a bit wet but otherwise uninteresting. This is an aspect of adventuring I enjoy very much — the idea that there are many nooks and crannies to explore which may or may not have some direct bearing on the outcome of the adventure. Using the toilet gives rise to the following gem: ‘Bimbo tries to make use of the toilet. Suddenly, a huge, bottle-shaped monster reared up out of the bowl and bit him horribly! ‘See you soon’ it gurgled unpleasantly and sank out of sight.’ Before I leave this area of the adventure, a tip to those reading: if you are having difficulty with the combination and can’t get out of this bit, type HELP and take the advice literally.

After meeting up with the dwarves, Bimbo is thrust into the middle of a TV quiz show, compered by Grandalf, which poses the question, ‘Bimbo Faggins, we have here a 14th share of Thorny’s dwarvish treasure. How much do you think it’s worth?’ The prize for getting this question right is not a breakfast tea service but an extended camping holiday which sounds remarkably like one of those nasty adventure quests with dragons and the ilk. But first Bimbo must get through his hangover from drinking too much dwarvish ale, and Grandalf and Thorny the Dwarf must settle their differences after an argument and fight over Grandalf’s tricking Thorny’s dad, Drain, out of a key and map leaving the old demented dwarf incarcerated in the necromancers’ mental hospital. This imposing building can be found along with many other such sillies on the inside cover of the inlay.

No opportunity has been missed to poke fun at the Tolkien map. Old ford lies opposite a picture of a new Ford uncannily like a Ford Sierra, a new forest trunk road goes nowhere but almost reaches the municipal golf course, and even Ludlow gets a mention along with the likes of Weeble World and The Great River Anadin.

I’ll leave you with the first verse of the dwarves’ song ringing in your ears.

We’re dwarfs, we’re dwarfs, all doomed to die
We’ll probably finish in the dragon’s pie
So we’ll take ’ol Bimbo Faggins, a real cement head
Hopefully ’ol Daug will eat him instead
Sing: Hog the gold! Pass the buck!
Split Bimbo’s share between us.

COMMENTS

Difficulty: very playable but still some tricky bits
Graphics: a few, very average, but pleasant
Presentation: neat redesigned character set, good
Input facility: verb/noun
Response: fast Quill response
General rating: good, witty stuff

Atmosphere

92%

Vocabulary

86%

Logic

83%

Addictive quality

84%

Overall

90%

MANDRAGORE

Producer: Infogrames
Price: £9.95

You know, when you’ve spent some time in the reviewing business you begin to sense good or bad things about a game the moment you load up, or in some cases, even earlier as you start to plough your way through the instructions. As a rule, if the instructions are overly complex or garbled then the game will turn out to be difficult to play and, more annoyingly, not worth playing in any case.

Mandragore is one of those games where the overly involved instructions are a sign of confusion over where the game begins and where it is going, if anywhere. Perhaps some of the fault lies in the translation as Infogrames are a French outfit (hence the ‘chateaux’ in the instructions) but this can only be part of the excuse as the instructions are readable. It’s just that they are constructed in a way as to make reading them at least three times a must before any proper attempt can be made at the game.

The player’s attempts to come to terms with the game’s complexities are further frustrated by the mixing of Commodore, Amstrad, Apple and MSX instructions (including disc information) with those for the little old Spectrum. Throw in one or two other major irritations like characters that disappear on screen because they have parts that are the same colour as the background (surely unforgivable) and an ending to the game which is so messy that the first indication is that on checking your characters they would all appear to have expired, and you have a game that goes out of its way to annoy and perplex rather than engage and entertain.

That said, I somehow mustered the patience to get somewhere with this one and discovered an adventure heavily based upon Dungeons and Dragons. The structure of the game is novel, what with its main game code on one cassette and data relating to each one of ten chateaux on another. When the data pertaining to a chateaux is needed, signalled by a prompt on the screen, this data is then loaded from its position on the other cassette.

Syrela’s Adventure is the first of three options offered at the start, the other two being Your Adventure, where you form your own team via a questionnaire which appears on screen, and Old Adventure which is the option to allow a saved game to be resumed (restarting a game left off in a chateaux involves reloading the castle you were in at the end of the previous game). Syrela’s Adventure is recommended for the novice, as here a previously selected team of four characters is offered already ascribed names, races, occupations, gender and characteristics. These last are the familiar D&D labels or pseudonyms Constitution, Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, Dexterity and Appearance. D&D aficionados will quickly equate this game’s Knowledge with D&D’s Intelligence, and similarly, Appearance with Charisma. These are given values between 5 and 20 and never exceed 80 in total. In addition, each team member begins with 50 life points, 20 food points, 50 money points and no experience. The Level, which starts at one, is an indication of the maturity where a higher level signifies a more invincible character who is better able to undertake hazardous and difficult deeds.

The choice of race shows the greatest deviation from D&D with the non-standard Mi-Orc and Obbit along with the more familiar Dwarf, Elf and Human. Occupations are more in line with D&D terminology with Warrior, Ranger (Strength must be above 15), Wizard (Intelligence above 15), Cleric (high Wisdom), and Thief (high Dexterity needed). Minstrel is thrown in for good measure and this occupation involves an Appearance above that magic figure of fifteen. The Strength of a Ranger, the Dexterity of a Thief, and the Intelligence of a Wizard can have a great bearing on a game we are told, but I defy anyone to keep awake long enough to find out if this is true.

Games play centres around the screen map which is the localised version of a full map in the middle of the instruction booklet. Crude character block scrolling is the order of the day and the graphics depicting the monotonous stretches of plains, forests, hills, swamps and mountains are uninspiring to say the least. Your team is represented by a solitary figure who resolutely stays in the centre of the map as all scrolls about him. This Map Mode, as the instructions call it, is used primarily to move from one chateaux or village to the other.

Before long the next mode, Wandering Monsters, is called upon as you bump into your assailants while innocently hiking around the map. The trouble with this mode are the pictures of the monsters which are teletext resolution and often so poor it’s impossible to say what exactly is attacking you (‘is it a bird? is it a fish?’ kind of thing). Destroying the monster you can return to map mode or you can skip the whole boring thing, return directly to map mode and forfeit 10 life points for each character.

The villages and chateaux form the third major mode with the villages providing an opportunity to buy (or steal) weapons, torches and food or to sell things found in the course of expeditions inside the chateaux. The ten chateaux contain about 30 rooms and dungeons each concealing a mystery to be solved and monster traps to avoid.

The way in which the game makes use of abbreviations and one touch entry is clever but marred by the fact that the instructions do not distinguish between CAPS SHIFT and SYMBOL SHIFT. Where the instructions say that SHIFT 0 brings up the name, experience points and life points tally of each character onto the right flank of the screen it is here referring to SYMBOL SHIFT. Where they refer to SHIFT and cursor arrows they mean the CAPS SHIFT. To be honest, if you were to struggle through the instructions to this stage as I did, this state of affairs would not surprise you as most of the early part of getting to know this game consists of pressing keys at random, so confusing are the instructions! But to give credit where credit is due the input system, once mastered, is quite fun.

Pressing 1-4 brings down a character name, pressing the first two letters of a verb (from a kindly supplied list) brings this down next to it while pressing A-D from the status list down the right flank of the screen completes your input. (A-D normally consist of one monster and one or more objects). There is one major proviso in using the verbs from the lists supplied: certain verbs are occupation specific — for instance, only a Cleric can CURE and a Wizard TELEPORT — while other verbs are location specific so you must be in a village in order to STEAL, BUY or BARTER. For these reasons early inputs seem to more often than not end with the word ‘Impossible’ as the program’s only retort. When the input system is finally sussed things can still be tricky, like when trying to buy equipment in the villages when everything seems priced well above the starting 50 monies of each character.

Mandragore is an adventure which clearly has had a lot of hard work put into its inception. Like any D&D clone it has a depth and complexity way beyond the normal microcomputer game. The garbled and hotch-potch instructions are infuriating — the last thing an already complex game needs is an introduction. However, I think that once the player gets over this hurdle the game proves to have a great deal to offer and those interested in role-playing games on the Spectrum should certainly take the time to get to know and enjoy this one.

COMMENTS

Difficulty: poor instructions necessitate a slow start
Graphics: poor
Presentation: average
Input facility: novel and highly effective
Response: fast
General Rating: Good attempt at true D&D type game.

Atmosphere

70%

Vocabulary

88%

Logic

85%

Addictive Quality

78%

Overall

79%

THE VERY BIG CAVE ADVENTURE

Producer: CRL Group PLC
Author: St. Bride's School, Ian Ellery
Price: £7.95

Right, you’ve seen this one in the shops and you now want to know how good it is. Well, it is Quilled, it’s from the St Brides team who have turned out some average to good but hardly commercial adventures. It reaches you in the shops courtesy of CRL, a company which has little history in mainstream adventuring, but, I am pleased to say, they are now releasing some imaginative stuff.

Well, all in all it’s pretty good, what with its humorous treatise of Colossal Cavern, the mainframe yarn that was the inspiration of many an early Spectrum adventure, and its quickly drawn graphics and powerful EXAMINE command. Considering its size (it comes in two parts) its price could be justified, but I consider it to be a shade on the expensive side.

You must excuse me if I seem to plod through this review. Like an editorial which went west recently, the first version of the Big Cave review similarly went astray somewhere between the Far North and the Middlemass of Ludlow. Exactly as forecast by a certain well known law, my backup copy flew out of the window when I moved house (which itself is another equally well-known sub law which states that when moving house anything you value is either lost or broken whereas the junk mysteriously survives — usually at ankle or knee height in dark corridors).

Now, where was I, oh yes, the small brick building of the Crowther and Woods original. NORTH takes you to a secret hiding place (apparently on the Spectrum version only) curiously marked by a large and conspicuously flashing sign. Here are the first examples of the superb EXAMINE command where EXAM FOOD elicits ‘It’s a school dinner’ (described as ‘tasty’ in the inventory!) while EXAM BOTTLE gives ‘Green. Originally one of ten.’ Travelling west takes the mickey out of all illogically mapped adventures whereby you find yourself on top of a small hill. ‘Well, not that small. I notice you are out of breath and perspiring freely so I hope you will not fuss when I tell you that that this hill plays no particular part in the adventure and I have no idea why it’s here. Contrary to the laws of geography going north will take you back to the road. Don’t say I never tell you anything’. This witty and chatty style runs throughout the adventure and really is genuinely amusing.

To the east, the door of the small brick building is closed and something prevents it from opening. Examining the door reveals the problem. ‘You see a brass mechanism attached to the door bearing the legend: VACANT. There is an aperture at the top of the mechanism approximately the thickness and diameter of one penny’. This carefully weighted style of writing nicely deposits the joke in your lap, a strength of the game I particularly enjoyed.

To the south of the start location, in a gully in the forest, you chance upon a Gully-Bull which, true to its name, is highly gullible and lets you steal the old penny there right from under its nose. Back to the wellie house and you discover the spring is not the watery kind but the springy kind — springing you out of the place should you touch it. Taking on the bull again you read ‘And you can see a rampaging bull with the distinct air of a bull who does not mean to be caught out a second time’.

Not all the adventure is directly concerned with Colossal Cavern. It’s true that much of what’s here is familiar, even if it has been given a new twist. The wellie-house is the original well house with its watery spring, the python of Big Cave being the snake of the original, and in this adventure the Ming vase is not dropped on the cushion as you might expect; instead dropping it anywhere else does the trick. Other themes running through this humorous trip are the caped crusaders of Gotham City, Alice in Wonderland, and lesser interludes like text-powered space invaders and a horror section. Certainly the Big Cave Adventure offers a great deal; it’s not only a super spoof but a polished and well orchestrated adventure in its own right.

COMMENTS

Difficulty: flows along nicely
Graphics: mostly attractive
Presentation: neat
Input facility: verb/noun
Response: Quill
General Rating: Good jaunt.

Atmosphere

80%

Vocabulary

85%

Logic

83%

Addictive Quality

81%

Overall

82%

HALF A PAGE OF SCRIBBLED LINES

Yet another unduly shrunken episode in the unending saga of Frontline starts here folks. With the limitations on page space, I’m afraid that there is no room for the Forum. However, after a tremendous response to Peter Shields’ letter last month (the one that suggested Rosetta and I go and join the four million), the benign and ever jolly Graeme has promised to allocate some extra letters space next issue. Keep your fingers crossed.

This is of course that time of year when effort is directed towards putting last minute touches to software in time for The Show, panic sets in and software houses set up shop in Olympia at the PCW Show. I’m looking forward to this year’s event. More and more, software developers are considering the way the American software market is progressing and introducing more strategic overtones to their games. No doubt the time will come when it will be very difficult to ‘pigeon-hole’ a game. Until that day, it should be interesting to watch the face of software gradually change. Go along and enjoy yourselves.

MISSION OMEGA

Producer: Mind Games
Price: £9.95

Latest in the Argus Press Software Mind Games range is Mission Omega, an arcade strategy game with some interesting aspects. The plot goes like this. You are Captain Allen of the Windwraith, a mining vessel of the United States of Europe. Your ship has just survived a perilous mining mission, but fate is set to deal another blow. An unknown object with the mass of a small moon has entered the solar system with a velocity just less than the speed of light itself and a trajectory taking it ever closer to Earth. Attempts to contact it have failed and, out of fear, Earth’s politicians have decided it must be deactivated. Windwraith is the only ship capable of reaching it in time.

In fact you have one hour real time. After forty five minutes, the object (codenamed Omega) launches a missile towards Earth. Fifteen minutes later, it reaches its destination. Inside that hour, Omega’s four reactors must be shut down and you must escape, thereby making the artefact safe.

The fully icon driven game centres on the exploration of the vessel hurtling towards Earth. You need to construct several robots in order to start exploring, and up to eight may be built, each with a base, weapon, sensor and power pack. The number and type of robots are limited by the amount of resources carried by the mining craft. Several types of each of the four robotic components are available, making the actual choice of machines quite varied.

Robot bases may be anti-gravity, tracked, legged or sphere (rather like a Terrahawks Zeroid). Weapons include small and large lasers, particle beam weapons and missiles. Sensors offer the choice of visual, audio or infra-red while power packs consist of two types of battery or a small nuclear reactor. The combinations may be limited by the fact that certain items need more power than others and each chassis can only support so many kilograms’ mass. The computer will not allow robots that do not conform to the restrictions of their components to be assembled. However, seeing as they have to be built in real time, there is little room for error.

Once your robots have been built and named, exploration may begin. This may take place in one of three ways. The first, and most obvious of these is by manual control of each robot one at a time. However, robots may be allowed to progress on automatic (though this is only possible for a short period of time) or may be programmed for a limited number of moves (and this was one option that did not seem to work). When a droid is under your control, its progress is displayed on an animated display to the left of the screen. To the right is a real time clock, status display for the droid, damage and energy displays, control options (manual, auto and programmed) and an icon to select the next droid for control. At the top of the screen the Quit and Map options are provided — the map only showing the part of Omega explored so far. At the base of the screen is a message window, used for communications with droids.

Robot power packs gradually run down and eventually leave droids immobile, but a drained pack recharges if the droid is left alone for a while. More importantly, Omega is equipped with its own defence droids which are inevitably encountered from time to time. When they are, it’s useful to have a droid with a powerful weapon and an accurate sensor unit!

In fact a series of keys are required to allow access to each of the reactors. Keys are relatively easy to find. Reactors have to be found, identified and deactivated. Even then there are a lot of unanswered questions. How does the teleport work? (I can use them but not necessarily control them.) What is the purpose of the switches set sporadically across the complex and do they have anything to do with the apparently invulnerable force fields? Is there anywhere where new sources of raw materials to build replacement droids can be found?

What Argus have managed to create here is an interesting, difficult but colourful and enjoyable hybrid game that should appeal equally to strategy and arcade fans. It isn’t the best of its kind by any means but the chances are, you won’t give up until it’s successfully completed. The worst part of the game is the instruction inlay. It’s a total waste of time. Apart from contradicting itself (at one point saying Omega has to be destroyed, then just deactivated), it doesn’t even mention which keys are needed to do what. There is also no warning about the fact that the game is not Interface 1 compatible. Apart from the dreadful instructions, and the rather steep price, the game really is worth taking a closer look at.

Now, I wonder how I’m going to disable those force fields...

Presentation

81%
Good screen layout and choice of colour.

Rules

36%
Once you figure them out, they’re fine. Shoddily left out of the package for some reason.

Playability

75%
Not easy, I admit. Looking after all these droids can be quite a headache.

Graphics

79%
Some good animation and a pleasing display.

Authenticity

N/A

Opponent

86%
Most formidable.

Value For Money

72%
At least a pound over the odds.

Overall

75%
A good challenge if you can spare the cash.

PLANETOPOLY

Producer: Celerysoft
Author: Jasper Sharp
Price: £2.00

This is a pure text game for two to four players from a company that goes by the extraordinary name of Celerysoft. The game is neatly but sparsely packaged with a monochrome inlay, instructions and a recipe for braised pigeon with celery... er yes, thankyou very much. Just what I needed. Really!

Ah, but the game — what of that? Well, as there was no solitaire option, I had to pit my wits against — you guessed it... me. And sure enough, twas a mighty challenge (brain the size of a planet and all that). After selecting the number of players, each player names his or her homeworld. Order of play then progresses sequentially, each player taking all the actions for a turn before the next.

There are various choices open to a player presented on a menu. Certain choices may lead to a second menu for elaboration. Initial choices allow a player to review status, access mining, trading, government or military options, check how much money has been spent (and where), and end the turn.

The status screen displays the planet’s name, cash reserve, population, a popularity factor and a strength factor. The mining screen gives you the initial option of carrying out a scientific analysis of the planet’s surface. This costs 20,000 credits (your bank balance always starts at the 50,000 credit mark) which is quite a chunk, but rewards are to be gained in later months once ores have been discovered and become serious mining propositions. Once mines are open (normally two minerals can be discovered on each planet), money may be spent on actually extracting them for sale on the trading screen.

Trading is the next section on the menu and like mining, selecting this option leads to a sub-menu. The most advisable thing to do first is to check on the sale prices for various minerals. It may be that mining certain ores will not be profitable, depending on the state of the market. After viewing prices, you may wish to sell some of the ores you have processed. If this is the case, yet another sub-menu opens up allowing you to sell any proportion of any ores to the Intergalactic Federation. Ores can never be sold to other players.

The government option is most peculiar. Typically, selection of this option prompts the arrival of another sub-menu but the options therein are not what you might expect. This is primarily a spending screen. Money can be invested in housing, transport or buying imports (the nature of these remains unspecified). The only other option on this screen is modification of the tax rate. This leads to yet another menuette displaying the current level of tax and population. Tax may be raised or lowered: obviously the taxation rate affects the amount you have to spend each year. However, to offset the advantages of a high tax rate, the rate is inversely proportional to the popularity level. A balance must be struck.

The military option gives you the choice of either spending money on defence or going to war with a neighbour. There is no choice for those who want to form alliances. Belligerent races may only engage each other on an individual level. This limits players’ choices. Only non-hindrance pacts are feasible.

Another option provides a summary of progress made by the player this turn, and details expenditure. At the bottom of the main menu screen lies another menu catering for loading and saving games, quitting the entire game or moving play on to the next month.

The character set is redefined and is the only presentation feature in the game. My real moan with Planetopoly is not that it lacks a one player version (although considering the simplicity of the game, one should have been included), but the lack of options available. Apparently, an improved version of the game has been prepared for PBM gaming. I can see no logical reason for not adding some of these details to this game. It hardly packs out the memory.

As I’ve already stated, interest could have been increased by active allegiances. There is more to government spending than transport and housing. There could have been more atmospheric background in terms of this anonymous federation. Whatever, there isn’t enough in this game to keep me interested for more than a few games. Reasonable is about the best compliment I can give to this cassetteful of missed opportunities.

Presentation

39%
Very basic — thanks for the recipe though.

Rules

56%
Competent and adequately explained system.

Playability

78%
Very easy to get into. Could have been better idiot proofed (unwanted text input can crash the game).

Graphics

N/A

Authenticity

43%
Too simplistic to be anything more than a game of ‘guess the algorithm’.

Opponent

N/A

Value For Money

50%
Debatable. At least it’s cheap.

Overall

48%
The game is only flawed in as much as it could have offered so much more.

A BIT OF BLARNEY ABOUT BYTES

From Would-Be Test Pilot to Wally Programmer — resident CRASH Irishman Tony Flanagan has a few words with MIKRO-GEN’s man from the Old Country, Dave Perry.

Mr Perry performs a fine balancing act for Cameron Pound’s camera lens outside Ludlow Castle. Looks like Wally Week reckons he’s the only superstar who should be in the picture

It’s not every day you have lunch with a six foot-eight ex-basketball player who used to want to be a test pilot. Being on the diminutive side myself (well just a little, groan, groan), it’s not easy craning one’s neck for any civilised length of time. Still, the lurid tales which seemed to slip so easily off the tongue of the programmer in question, were some compensation. As for the lunch, the smoked chicken was fine, though I do wish, in retrospect, that I’d checked the lamb kebab with a geiger counter. Being a creature of the hirsute kind, now my beard glows in the dark and my hair picks up Radio Shropshire. It’s not easy being a freak!

Dave Perry is one of Mikro-Gen’s four programmers. The others are Chris Hinsley, Raffaele Cecco and Mick Jones — a new member is set to join them shortly. They’re a wild bunch by all accounts — very much into busty page three girlies, vodka and Coke, and keeping roving reporter John Minson company at computer shows, as he downs an infinite number of Bloody Marys. It was Chris Hinsley, of course, who wrote the highly successful Pyjamarama, followed by Everyone’s a Wally and Battle of the Planets.

An Irishman born and bred, nineteen year-old Dave Perry is endowed with all the native charm that one would expect of a man with pure Celtic blood flowing through his veins (me, partisan?) In his gentle Irish brogue, he related how he began programming while still at school. In the sixth form, he managed to write a number of programs for Tim Hartnell of Interface Publications and his work was published in several books. This led to a book consisting of Dave’s programs only — Astounding Arcade Games — which sold 13,000 copies.

His connection with Mikro-Gen began when he sent them Drakmaze, which they accepted. The deal fell through, however, and there was a temporary hiatus in his links with the company. Of course, the story doesn’t end there. On one of his frequent trips to London he met Mike Meek, Mikro-Gen’S MD, at one of the computer shows. Mike was attempting to set up a programming team and Dave, because of his previous experience and the links he had already forged with the company, seemed an obvious choice.

It was an opportunity he could not turn down, though it would mean having to ‘chuck in’ school, as he put it. ‘Everyone was telling me not to do it,’ said Dave, but it was something he felt he had to try. So, he packed his joystick and sundry other computery items and moved to Virginia Water, near Bracknell.

Dave’s first task was to write a test program which was never actually completed: ‘It was coming along very well but Chris needed help with Pyjamarama so I dived in with that. We’d just been given a prototype Amstrad, so I wrote the Amstrad version.’ The press launch for Pyjamarama (which cost Mikro-Gen a mere thirteen smackers a minute) didn’t go according to plan. As Dave explained: ‘it turned out that on the way Chris was sick on the tube and had to go home. He missed the whole thing. The Press was there in force, waiting for the guy who had written the game, so I took his place and they interviewed me instead.’

The success of Pyjamarama was followed by more Wally successes: Everyone’s a Wally, written by Chris, and Dave’s Herbert’s Dummy Run. Suddenly, in Dave’s words, ‘Everyone was jumping up and down demanding more Wally games.’ In response, Dave came up with Three Weeks in Paradise which received outstanding reviews and was his first solo CRASH Smash!

Programmers, Dave told me, tend to be a little pampered. This is because they are the creative nucleus around which everything else revolves. This doesn’t mean to say that they have an easy time — they work long hours and their commitment has to be total. ‘When I first came over here,’ Dave explained, ‘I worked very hard indeed. I was in work at half-eight and worked through to twelve-thirty at night. I did this for months, seven days a week.’ (Phew! Nearly as much as the CRASH team!). Now the hours — nine to seven — are more civilised.

Dave’s latest game marks a total departure from what he had done previously. Stainless Steel, an arcade game, took him five months to write. The player is given a bird’s-eye-view of the action — simple enough it would seem — but from a programming perspective this did cause Dave some headaches: ‘the problem with this game was drawing things from above. I’ll never do another game from above. I’ve always done things from the side and always will in the future.’

In collaboration with Chris, Dave is now working on a new game. Does working in partnership create any problems, I wondered? ‘This is the first time we’ve ever worked together,’ said Dave, ‘but one can foresee some difficulties. Two people can’t do the same thing as there’s only one keyboard and one programmer at a time, so if someone comes in and changes something when you’re not there it can get confusing.’

So what’s this new game all about? Vaguely, it concerns ‘bendy cylindrical rubber-like doobries’ that look not unlike Liquorice Allsorts: ‘we still haven’t thought of a name,’ said Dave. The idea is to stop yourself being horribly gormandized by frostie monsters. By this time the lamb kebab was beginning to take its toll on my delicate digestive system. The thought of animate liquorice Allsorts certainly wasn’t helping things.

Conversation turned to the subject of when Dave expected to make his first million, and thirty was tossed around as good an age as any. But how did the doubters back home react to him now? ‘Everyone’s really proud of me,’ said Dave. ‘At school, the headmaster just loves me. Somehow, he managed to get the Government to invest half a million in the computer department.’ Dave is clearly something of a local celebrity down Belfast way. The local papers have done features on him, and he’s even been interviewed by the BBC World Service.

With time quickly running out, there were just a few moments to catch Dave’s daguerreotype (the wonders of Newsfield Technology!) before he began his six hour trek back to civilisation. As he disappeared into the Ludlow sunset, I whispered bon voyage!... and bon appetit! (funny lingo for an old bogtrotter). Then I went to check my beard in the mirror... and where was that music coming from?

Last month Pete Tamblyn, freelance game designer and regular contributor to WHITE DWARF, explained what role-playing is in terms of more familiar gaming styles such as adventure gamebooks and computer adventures. Now he looks at how role-playing games have been converted to run on computers, with particular reference to the Spectrum, of course...

ROLE PLAYING ON COMPUTER

Despite the seemingly logical progression from gamebooks through computer adventures to role-playing that I outlined last issue, role-playing actually came first. The other two forms are the result of attempts to adapt role-playing to different media. The original Adventure and other pioneering computer games were written for mainframes and circulated largely through professional programming circles. But way back in 1981 those of us old enough (and, pre-Spectrum, rich enough) to be using micros for games were dazzled by the appearance of the original on which Swords & Sorcery is based.

The game is called Wizardry. NOT the same game as the similarly named product you can now get for the Commodore. In fact it is only available on business micros, but it is still selling well, having successfully made the transition from Apple II to IBM PC to Macintosh. In a world where most computer games only last a few months, a five-year lifespan must in itself be something of a record.

In appearance Wizardry is very similar to S&S. It has the same perspective view down the tunnels, the same static view of creatures you meet, in fact almost an identical screen layout. It doesn’t have the top-down view of the map, but being disc-based it can afford to have completely separate screens for things like messing around with what you are carrying and wearing. In addition it allows you a party of up to six characters, and you can take them out of the dungeon to buy new equipment, get healed and gain experience. You can even rescue the bodies of dead characters and pay the local temple to have them resurrected. Since Wizardry first appeared a number of other games building on the idea have been produced, but they have all been American, disc-based and have made very little impact over here.

I’ve been waiting a long time for something like Wizardry to appear on the Spectrum, and I suspect that the fact that Wizardry is so good is in part responsible for my extreme disappointment in Swords & Sorcery. In fact it is a reasonable copy, improving on the original in some places, but there are are a number of very irritating things about it: the sound effects, the garish screen (which is almost unreadable on my small TV), the awful strip menu system, and the ridiculous number of orders you have to issue in order to take the treasure from a chest all combine to put me off the game. If a human GamesMaster didn’t allow you to eat your sandwiches until you’d specifically told him that you were taking them out of your pack first, you would probably hit him! S&S insists on such ridiculous detail. More importantly, S&S doesn’t allow you to come out of the dungeon and seems to have a very high kill rate. I found it very difficult to role-play, whereas in Wizardry I become so fond of good characters that I waste a fortune trying to get them resurrected when I do make a mistake.

One very brave thing that PSS did with S&S is to try to implement a means of communicating with the non-player creatures. Unfortunately this doesn’t work very well. To start with, much of the conversation that the computer generates is infantile: the authors seem to have thought that the game would only ever be played by five-year-olds. Also, because the system isn’t clever enough to indulge in meaningful conversation, you find yourself thinking “what does it mean in game terms when a character says that”.

My judgement of S&S, then, is that it is an attempt to put role-playing on a computer, but that it fails because there are so many facets of the game which irritate, are destructive of atmosphere, and forcibly remind you that you are only playing a game. I much prefer Heavy on the Magick. That looks better, has a much better user-interface, and is entertaining thanks to the traditional Gargoyle humour. Of course it is still very much a traditional Gargoyle logic puzzle once you get into it, and it still doesn’t allow you to come out of the dungeon to rest and recuperate. It’s much more fun to play!

I spoke to Greg Follis of Gargoyle and the world of Graumerphy to see what he thought of role-playing on computers. It seems that HotM was indeed designed to implement as many features of Dungeons & Dragons (the first role-playing game) as possible, but this was carefully balanced against the requirement for good graphics and a playable game. As they had to leave something out, they tried as much as possible to get the atmosphere of D&D rather than reproduce the mechanics of the game. That certainly seems to be the right approach. Another interesting fact is that, before HotM was written, Gargoyle went through the exercise of creating a complete world in which to set the game. Although in HotM itself Axil never gets out of the dungeon there is, in fact, a whole world there waiting for him. Gargoyle hope to publish a book about Graumerphy sometime in the future.

That presents a number of intriguing possibilities. To start with, information from the book could be used as clues in later releases using the HotM system. This would give a lot more identification with the game world. One of the major problems with adventures is that you often can’t convey enough information in the game to be able to base the entire game on internal material: you have to bring in puzzles that are not an integral part of the plot. With a whole book to draw on things get much easier. (Melbourne House did something of the sort with Lord of the Rings as did games such as the Midnight series and Runestone which provided lots of background material in the instruction booklet). Also, with all that background, Gargoyle could produce a role-playing game set in Graumerphy and allow you to carry characters across from the multi-player role-playing scenarios to the solo scenarios on the computer. Whether they will actually do such a thing is another matter, but the possibility is there.

A more recent contender in the field is the French game, Mandragore. This is a far more ambitious program, being much larger than S&S or HotM (on the Spectrum it comes as two tapes). Like S&S it tries hard to implement the mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons. Up to four characters are allowed, and they are able to adventure through a ‘wilderness’ (that’s an old D&D term for ‘outdoors’) as well as explore a number of dungeons (sorry, ‘chateaux’). Having several named characters does improve the atmosphere somewhat although, unlike Wizardry, each party is separate; you can’t have a pool of characters and pick the four you want. The game also includes villages at which you can buy (or steal) equipment. Nevertheless I was still disappointed by relatively trivial irritations.

The main problem is that the game’s designer, having got this nice fantasy world set up, can’t think of anything to do with it other than set silly brain teasers. At least in a Level 9 game the problems, if not an obvious part of the plot, don’t seem too out of place. In Mandragore each Chateau has its own abstract puzzle. I’m sure the problems are very ingenious, but why should people playing the parts of a barbarian warrior and beautiful priestess want to spend their time solving mathematical conundrums?

What we have seen so far, then, is that computer games can make a reasonable stab at reproducing the atmosphere of role-playing, but as yet have fallen rather short. The main problems are lack of memory, the inability of the computer to hold a conversation with the player, and designers who try to write ‘role-playing’ games without seeming to have much understanding of what role-playing is all about.

With the advent of more powerful machines and disc drives (256K Spectrum?) we can hope for considerable improvements: bigger games, more text and pictures, and multi-player facilities. In the meantime, game designers should bear in mind that, if they want to produce role-playing games, they should go for atmosphere — good stories and/or good graphics — rather than worry about complicated mechanics.

I haven’t said anything so far about computer-moderated play-by-mail games or British Telecom’s Multi-User Dungeon. Obviously such games, being run on far more powerful computers, come much closer to the ideal. However, they can prove extremely expensive, and you are obliged to play with anyone else that the game company happens to admit to the game. Personally such things don’t appeal, but you’ll be able to make up your own minds by following Brendon Kavanagh’s new column.

What I will mention, however, is Mike Singleton’s new game, Dark Sceptre. When I spoke to Mike he was quite adamant that role-playing didn’t interest him and that what he tried to write was strategy games in a fantasy setting. Nevertheless (and bearing in mind that the game wasn’t finished when I wrote this so I haven’t actually seen it working) Dark Sceptre does seem to have a lot of promise.

Firstly Mike has tackled the interaction problem by offering a play-by-mail (and Microdrive) version of the game. Whereas the solo game has one team of characters controlled by you and seven controlled by the computer, in the PBM version each team will be a separate player. There is also a nice feature from the story-telling point of view: when you get your Microdrive cartridge back at the end of a turn you can set the game up and see that turn’s events played out on the screen. You’ll even be able to get the computer to make a guess at how the story continues, based on what it knows of your intentions and those of other players’ intentions. Finally, Mike assures me that each character in the game has personality traits (aggressiveness, greed, and so on) which can affect the game play and can be changed by events in the game. Considering that Mike didn’t set out to produce a computerised rolegame, it is ironic that he may well have come closest yet to succeeding.

Finally, what about this question as to whether role-playing games are Adventures or Strategy Games, and therefore whether they belong in Derek’s column or Sean’s? Personally I think the argument is silly. Games which require brain instead of a steady joystick hand get poor enough treatment from magazines as it is without making matters worse by fighting amongst themselves, but there is a division, and it is one that exists within role-playing itself.

The people who invented role-playing, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, are keen wargamers. So are many of the people who now run role-playing companies: Bryan Ansell of Games Workshop, for example. And, of course, there are many wargamers who also role-play. Some of these people prefer to ignore the actual role-playing element entirely and treat the whole thing as a wargame with an incredibly complex set of rules. At the opposite extreme some role-players advocate doing away with rules altogether, relying instead on the GamesMaster’s judgement. Most people fall somewhere in the middle, and depending on which side of the mid point they fall they will tend to see role-playing as closer to either Adventures or Strategy Games.

There is no simple categorisation...

THE GRAPHIC ADVENTURE CREATOR

Producer: Incentive

Over a year’s development work has gone into Incentive’s adventure-writing utility, The Graphic Adventure Creator, and it has already appeared for the Amstrad, earning a very favourable response. The Spectrum adventure-writing utility market is still dominated by The Quill — can GAC step in as the new king? Sean Masterson takes a close look, and rustles up a couple of comments from the CRASH crew...

The Graphic Adventure Creator is a sophisticated adventure writing package that arrives on a single cassette. Adventures written with the package include multiple commands in a single input, advanced graphics, full word recognition and a host of other features intended to make this the state-of-the-art adventure writing utility.

The packaging is very neat. GAC comes in a large format cassette holder complete with a glossy manual. The printing isn’t remarkable but the manual explains every detail of the utility with care and precision — sometimes with accompanying graphics where it is thought they may help. Loading is achieved easily thanks to use of fast loading techniques and the user is presented with a title/credit screen followed by a menu page. GAC itself leaves approximately 23K free for your adventure once it resides in memory, but larger adventures could be created with multiple loading techniques — this should mean that the adventure can be as big as the author desires. Complete adventures run independently of the utility.

To give you an idea of just what this package is capable of, Incentive include a couple of mini adventures with the package. One is a pure text offering, the other uses graphics. If the full solution to an example adventure is known, the entire game may be played in one input. The result is like a short story, punctuated with a series of commands and it forms an impressive demonstration of GAC’s power. There is also a Quickstart file which loads a group of common verbs, conditions and other details to allow rapid creation of small games or time to be saved when commencing larger works.

As the graphics capability is the most obviously powerful aspect of the utility, let’s begin with a look at the graphics creation routines... As with any utility of this type, the more complex the graphics, the less memory is available for the rest of the adventure. While this might suggest the need for simplistic graphics, Incentive have made sure that the adventure writer has the opportunity to make up complex images should they be required. Block or line graphics may be implemented with ease, and a host of devices have been included to make the process as painless as possible.

Four pure colours may be used in an illustration, though these may be stippled in any combination to give the effect of up to ten colours and textures on screen. Bright and flash options are also provided.

The top two thirds of the graphic creation screen is surrounded by the frame in which the image is created. Below this, the pen and paper symbol are permanently displayed along with the border colour. The pen rests on the paper during the drawing process for clarity during picture creation. Unfortunately the options menu is not displayed (as it is on the Amstrad version of GAC) which means serious study of the manual is required until the commands become second nature. This is my only gripe.

The drawing routines supplied cater for all needs. Ellipses, Dots, Boxes, Fill and Shade, slow and fast drawing, picture merging, and picture or stage deletion are all included along with a picture scan that allows analysis and alteration of any stage in the creation. An attribute grid showing possible problems due to the Spectrum’s colour limitations is also available as a screen overlay.

The merging facility is very important from a memory saving angle. If a picture is drawn and then has a frame decoration added (previously drawn as a separate picture), only three bytes are used. This cuts down tremendously on memory used if repetitive pictures are used.

Most of the features work smoothly but the exception to this neatness is the Fill command. This isn’t perfect and an optimum position within the area to be filled needs to be found. Even then, in an awkward shape, a gap may be left. This can be rectified by implementing Fill a second time from a better position and the final result will be no different from that achieved with a more capable command routine. However, the finished picture takes up more memory. This is arguably offset by the fact that this Fill command takes up very little memory itself and is particularly fast. On the final picture, it makes no real difference anyway.

The ability to look back or delete back either a single step or a whole picture makes correction and modification of pictures very simple indeed. The effect of open or closed doors is just one example of how these features cater for the kind of conditions often required of graphics in adventures. Because it is possible to change the ink during the course of a picture creation and then change it back again, when the whole picture is asked for in the adventure, a limited form of animation is possible. Things such as flashing lights, flowing water or other relatively small changes to detail to a picture can be attained with the minimum of effort.

Up to 10,000 separate pictures can be held in a GAC game, though it’s extremely unlikely that more than a fraction of this number would actually be used. Because of the way pictures are tied to locations it’s possible to have small pictures created as inserts, displaying recently acquired objects for instance. The potential for experimentation is enormous.

As is the case with most other adventure writers, GAC allows up to 255 words to be defined as part of the adventuring vocabulary. As full word recognition is catered for in GAC, shortened versions of words (such as EXAM for EXAMINE) have to be created as synonyms by giving them the same numerical value in the vocabulary table. This does, however create the opportunity for more diversity and flexibility. One aspect of GAC which is slightly unusual is that unlike The Quill, words are stored alphabetically instead of numerically. This means the vocabulary has continuity, but synonyms are harder to locate while editing.

Up to 765 words can be used, 255 each of nouns, verbs and adverbs. The section ‘Adverbs’ actually includes prepositions, so the label is an arbitrary rather than a linguistic one! However, this allows for detailed analysis of each line of player input and consequently, greater flexibility in terms of acceptable player response.

The interpreter is the real gem in GAC. If you have ever wanted to create Level 9 style adventures but have been held back by the limitations of The Quill or lack of programming ability, then this is where GAC can solve your problems. Commands are not limited to verb/noun input or single command per sentence input. Instead, a whole series of commands may be entered so long as the adventure author has taken full advantage of the very sophisticated parser. Multiple commands may be punctuated by ‘AND’, ‘THEN’, ‘.’ or ‘,’ in any fashion the author requires.

‘IT’ recognition is also possible if IT is made object number 255. This way it always refers to the last noun mentioned. This allows commands such as GET THE LAMP THEN LIGHT IT to be used. As mentioned earlier, the best part about the parser is the fact that commands may be as long as the player likes. If an error is made part way through the command (such as trying to get an object that isn’t there), the rest of the command is ignored.

Another area where GAC excels is with the conditions. GAC uses High, Low and Local priority conditions to set up certain events under particular circumstances. GAC checks a High condition before the player has the opportunity to make an input. Checking whether a lamp is switched on can be made a High condition, which governs whether the player can see in a dark location.

Local conditions are those that only apply in a particular room or situation. If you left an airlock without a space suit for example and the author had taken full advantage of the condition facilities, GAC would check for a spacesuit and kill you before you could do anything else. Low priority conditions are checked in the same way as local ones except that they are not confined to individual rooms. They might check that you were carrying an object, simply to ensure a message continued to appear.

GAC has more flexibility than any other adventure writing utility I have seen because of the vast numbers of counters and markers it has. One obvious example of this flexibility is the ability to give objects weights and then allow a player to carry a maximum weight. This is far more desirable than just allowing a certain number of objects to be carried regardless of how massive or miniscule they may be.

Clever use of the 255 messages allowed — breaking them down into commonly used segments — saves memory and increases the apparent number of messages in the adventure. This technique is not exclusive to GAC but it is reassuring to see that such things are possible nevertheless.

Editing any part of a GAC adventure is simplicity itself. Everything is well explained in the excellently written manual and all the different parts of GAC are accessed from a main menu. The whole effort has been logically devised. One great advantage is that you can do anything from the main menu — loading separate programs to add graphics is now something of the past.

Though the package sells at a price that can hardly be called cheap, all things are relative. When you compare this to the competition both in terms of price and performance, it comes out way on top. Future, more powerful versions are planned (which may allow redefinable character sets) but this should not put you off getting hold of a copy as soon as possible, as any future version will be a while off yet.

GAC has already set a new standard on other micros. Incentive have learned from the odd shortcomings of earlier versions, and Spectrum owners benefit from modifications made in the light of Incentive’s earlier experience. The response to this product should be extraordinary.

CRITICISM

‘My first experience with GAC was a pleasure. Just a quick look at the manual allows you to immediately design a simple adventure, and after the little features of GAC are sorted out you could spends months designing the adventure of your dreams. The package is extremely flexible, and if you don’t feel like doing some of the work, like defining all your words, then GAC will help out.

The thing that makes GAC so attractive is that you don’t need to have any idea of programming at all. The only thing you need is an idea of how your adventure is to work. It is then just a simple case of telling the program how the locations are linked and then supplying messages and conditions — you can even have pictures to help the story along. I was amazed to see that Incentive have managed to include an art package in with the price. This contains some very complex features: like elastic ellipses, scanning through the drawing of the picture, and proper deleting of more than the last thing you drew.

The adventures that can be produced should rank among the cleverest on the market. If you’d always thought that you would play adventures if you could find the right one — then you have no excuse any more — write your own! GAC is the most powerful adventure creator on the Spectrum ever, an adventure processor rather than a cumbersome adventure assembler.’

‘When it comes to writing adventures without learning machine code, GAC and The Quill can both look foreboding to first time users. GAC’s advantage lies in the fact that an entire adventure may be created without the need for loading up different programs or buying add-ons to the basic package. The one thing you need to remember is that no matter how good the utility is, you will not create good games unless you have the imagination to write something exciting and fun, and have the desire to get the best from the program.

Playing an adventure written on GAC for the first time is quite an experience. Being able to input multiple commands (in fact, entire paragraphs) gives you a sense of freedom and power. When it comes to writing an adventure you don’t feel as if the limitations of the program will get in your way. The knowledge that after a while, you might come out with something like The Price of Magik makes you want to learn more about the system. Once you have built up a little enthusiasm, coming to grips with the package is easy. And it’s a lot more flexible and fulfilling than The Quill.

The graphic facilities are excellent but a bit more on-screen help would not have come amiss. At first, most of my time was spent flipping through the instruction manual trying to figure out how to actually draw a line on the screen. Fortunately the manual is well written. I can’t wait to see the first few commercial adventures written on GAC. The Quill is dead. Long live GAC!’

ACE

Producer: Cascade
Author: Paul Laidlaw
Price: £9.95

Eeek, an enemy fleet has invaded our sunny shores. The landing craft beach on the shingle and offload the tanks, troops and surface-to-air missile bases. Enemy fighters and helicopters cover the ground forces while the fleet anchors off the bay, waiting to discharge more troops or evacuate the land forces if things get too hot.

At the Allied base the radars start bleeping. The warning sirens begin to scream as the invasion becomes apparent. As you race towards your aircraft the gravity of the situation begins to dawn on you. Unless the enemy invaders are destroyed Great Britain will fall into foreign hands.

The Allied base possesses three AWAT combat aircraft. It’s up to you, as an AWAT pilot, to defend the southern coast of your homeland against the marauding invaders. The game begins with a series of options which must be selected before the craft can become airborne. The mission can be flown under summer or winter conditions. There are nine skill levels altogether, level one being a training mode. This is identical to a normal mission except that the enemy planes don’t fire back at you.

Once proficiency at the controls of the aircraft has been achieved, it’s time to arm the combat jet. There is a choice of equipment for multirole, air superiority, ground attack and naval attack capabilities. An unusual aspect of this flight simulation game is the two player option. A second player can join you in the jet fighter to take control of the weapons systems while you concentrate on avoiding the enemy’s missiles.

The inside of the cockpit contains all the regular controls you would expect to find. There’s also a rear camera so you can see if any of the baddies are creeping up from behind. If an enemy missile attack hits home, it’s usually the rear-view camera that is the first to go. Most of the missiles can be avoided by taking evasive action and giving the plane a bit of the old pitch and roll routine. The radar shows any planes outside your range of vision either above or below you.

The object of the game is to destroy all the enemy craft in order of numerical superiority, as certain craft carry more points than others. As soon as the land and air targets have been reduced to scrap metal you can concentrate on wiping out the enemy naval fleet which comes in to rescue survivors.

Once airborne you have access to the onboard map. This shows the exact positions of the enemy planes and ground forces as well as the Allied bases which you must make for if a landing for damage repairs is needed. Fuel is a major problem. Flying at very high altitudes uses up a lot of fuel, and when the tanks get a bit too empty, a message flashes up on the screen to point out that a refuelling session is called for. Refuelling has to be done in mid-air.

If things get too hot to handle, there is always the option to eject. Try and eject over Allied territory, won’t you? Skilled AWAT pilots are hard to find, and they’re not much use cooped up in POW camps!

CRITICISM

‘This game is excellent, and possibly the Spectrum’s best flight simulator. The scenario is a little unrealistic: apparently we have three Allied air bases, but only one fighter pilot... Still, the game is very good. The unresponsiveness that has dogged so many flight simulators is almost non-existent, and the graphics, of a similar sprite-like quality of those seen in Skyfox, are much smoother and more attractive. The high score table is very good, with a Save facility, and the facility to record dates. Unless you hate flight simulators, I’d recommend this game pretty highly.’

‘There’s no shortage of flight simulators on the Spectrum market — but unfortunately not too many of them are good. ACE is certainly a good try, but I didn’t feel it had enough there to keep me interested while playing — the screen tended to look too blank too much of the time. The controls are the same as your basic flight simulator and all placed on the most obvious keys. I felt the control of the plane was a bit too slack for any serious flying to take place. The idea of having a fuel plane to dock with is great, but to get there you would have to have a full tank of aviation fuel — which seems to ruin the whole plan.’

‘Usually I avoid flight sim’s like the plague because after wading through all the instructions the game itself is often awful. This, I’m afraid to say is no different from many of the others except that there are fewer instructions and you only need twenty fingers to play it. There are less than minimal sound effects which is probably a blessing as the endless engine drone would probably drive me up the wall. The graphics are about average for this type of game, very jerky and slow moving, although there are some nicely detailed enemy planes, tanks and the like. My first few goes on this one were quite good fun but after I became competent there didn’t really seem to be much point in playing it anymore.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: Q quit, M map, U undercarriage, W down, S up, E bank left, R bank right, X fire, ENTER select, CAPS/SHIFT decrease thrust, Z increase
Joystick: Kempston, Interface 2
Keyboard play: responsive
Use of colour: a bit uninspired at times
Graphics: average
Sound: quiet!
Skill levels: nine
Screens: scrolling display
General Rating: Above average for this type of game.

Use of Computer

78%

Graphics

80%

Playability

78%

Getting Started

81%

Addictive Qualities

77%

Value for Money

77%

Overall

81%

ATLANTIC CHALLENGER

Producer: Virgin
Author: Millside Software
Price: £7.95

On 29th June this year, Richard Branson and the Virgin Atlantic Challenge Team broke the record for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic by sea. Now there’s a game based on the trip, so you can have a go at setting a new record and even win the Blue Riband for yourself.

The game stars Richard Branson but in this case he’s going solo as there’s no crew to assist him. Richard must scamper around the ship whenever the onboard computer alerts him to a hazard in his path, a fault in the ship’s engines and so on. But before Mr Branson can even contemplate any potential problems during his voyage he must make sure that everything is ship shape so that he can begin his trip.

Scamper up to the cockpit and start the engines. Not too slow or your fuel will run out before you can rendezvous with the refuelling tanker, and not too fast or else Atlantic Challenger will break up. The voyage is split into three stages as the Challenger cannot carry enough fuel to get across the Atlantic in one go. The position of each refuelling tanker is shown in the radar room, along with the bearing and number of miles between you and the fuel. Once you have the bearing of the next tanker, you can scamper back up to the cockpit and set the Challenger on course. Once Atlantic Challenger is within 100 miles of the tanker, it shows up on the radar screen, and you drive by sight rather than autopilot. Aim the boat at the tanker and re-fuelling takes place automatically.

The screen shows a cut away section of the interior of Atlantic Challenger covering two screens. The rooms in the boat contain equipment which is used via a window system. To use a facility, stand Richard in front of it and press the fire button. This opens the window option onto the screen. When you’ve finished with say, the Telex machine, another press of fire returns control to the main game.

Mr Branson is a very busy man who makes a lot of money. Just because he’s battling across the Atlantic, doesn’t mean he can ignore his business empire. The telex machine continually informs him about various deals in progress, and you must decide whether or not to accept them. Huge amounts of money can either be won or lost this way.

Apart from the boat, Mr Branson must be refuelled — Richard must eat quite large amounts of food to keep his stamina up for the gruelling voyage. If you neglect to keep him fed, his performance begins to suffer and he can’t scamper around so quickly. To put some food in Mr Branson’s tummy, he must be positioned by the galley window: a press of fire delivers the grub.

In the map room the ideal course which Atlantic Challenger should be taking is shown, along with the three re-fuelling tankers. The engine room shows the stress factors, temperature and the speed in knots. If the engine gets overheated or any of the levels get too high then the boat breaks up and sinks.

Mr Branson can fail in his bid to break the Blue Riband record in several ways: he can starve to death, crash the boat or rupture the engines. If the boat sinks, its time to ‘Bring out the Branson’ — he always escapes intact and is rescued by a waiting helicopter.

CRITICISM

‘I can’t say I’m enthralled by this game. Quite frankly, it’s boring, and for the price, it can only be described as a rip-off. At first, the little caricature of R. Branson is quite good, but soon, going through all the same actions, steering the ship, receiving telexes, and all the rest of it gets tedious. Playability is fair to start with, but as it gets more and more repetitive, it loses that and also any addictiveness it might have had. Reasonable graphics, but the game isn’t worth a fraction of its price.’

‘Yawn! The Virgin Atlantic Challenge game is a real waste of time and your money. Just running around changing your bearing and speed, eating, and making the odd executive decision isn’t really my idea of fun. Graphically, this one is a bit on the poor side. Your character is a nicely detailed, jolly caricature of Richard Branson but your ship is very dull and undetailed; there are many attribute problems too. The sound is also pretty useless — there are very few spot effects and no tune or engine noise. Generally, I don’t recommend this one as it is highly over priced and unplayable.’

‘Lovely graphics on Atlantic Challenger but the game is very boring. At first Atlantic Challenger proves quite interesting; and waiting for the telex to give you the option to buy certain things is good fun but after a while you soon suss out what to buy. Everything else on the ship is very easy to use and requires no skill at all. The obstacles that appear in the way scarcely vary and are all very easy to avoid. The graphic of Richard Branson is very accurate and looks very jolly all the time — even if you starve him to death! VAC contains very little to keep anyone interested, and is far too expensive.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: I left, P right, 1 up, A down, SPACE to fire
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard play: no problems
Graphics: neat caricature, and some good details
Sound: none to speak of!
Skill levels: one
Screens: 3 main screens
General Rating: Not a terribly exciting or entertaining simulation.

Use of Computer

53%

Graphics

60%

Playability

55%

Getting Started

60%

Addictive Qualities

47%

Value for Money

45%

Overall

48%

DAN DARE

Producer: Virgin
Price: £9.95
Author: The Gang of Five

Dan Dare lives dangerously. Most of the time he has no choice — heroic deeds are forced upon him because he’s the bravest guy around. This time the nasty Mekon has decided to hold the world to ransom. Dan’s just about to receive the highest accolade of all — an appearance on ‘This is Your Life’ — when the TV waves are unceremoniously taken over by the ugly visage of the Mekon. Earth must either submit to him as commander of the universe or accept the dire consequences...

The Mekon has hollowed out an asteroid, the size of a small planet, and has set it on a collision course with Earth. If Earth agrees to the Mekon’s demands, the nasty asteroid will be detonated and the Earth rendered safe again. The only snag is that a green slimy alien will rule the world. Is the Mekon going to get his wicked way? Not if Dan Dare can help it!

Accompanied by his faithful friend Digby, Dan Dare sets off in his speedy spaceship, the Anastasia, and heads for the approaching asteroid. When they arrive on the Mekon’s space projectile, Dan leaves Digby to guard the ship and starts to explore the asteroid. He has a mere two hours at his disposal to save the world from alien domination.

Dan soon realises his task is going to be far more difficult than he first thought. For one thing the asteroid is inhabited by Treens, alien troopers guarding the Mekon’s blackmail vehicle. Should a Treen catch up with Dan, the hero loses energy and might well be taken prisoner. Treens can also knock him out which, like doing a bit of ‘porridge’, loses Dan valuable time. Laser bolts fired by the automatic defence systems (and the Treens) are also bad for Dan’s health and well-being. Fortunately Dan is not defenceless, and is equipped with a nifty laser gun which makes short shrift of any Treens that get in the way of a laser blast.

Dan finds himself in a subterranean world in which there are five levels. He has to find his way through a network of floors, travelling up and down in lifts, until he finds the self-destruct mechanism which will obliterate the asteroid before it has chance to collide with the Earth. To do this, however, five vital pieces of the mechanism have to be found and assembled in the control room — one part of the contraption has been hidden on each level. The lifts work sporadically, and indicator arrows reveal the directions of travel available.

Dan is a superfit fellow, capable of moving left and right, up and down, and he can jump over chasms and duck to avoid Treen laser bolts. To help him in his quest, a variety of objects lying around can be collected by jumping onto them, including bullets to boost his arsenal and pills to increase his energy.

As the game loads, the faces of the two protagonists — Dan Dare and the dreaded Mekon — are displayed on screen, and the action starts with the Anastasia speeding towards the asteroid. The game follows the flick screen format, with the status area below the action zone. The total score and the amount of time Dan has left in hours, minutes and seconds is displayed and two bars indicate the strength of Dan’s arsenal and his energy level.

During play, screen captions in the style of the original comic strips pop on screen from time to time to explain what has happened to Dan — when he’s knocked unconscious, for example. If Dan manages to thwart the Mekon’s plan, the Anastasia is shown speeding away from the asteroid just before it explodes and then the end sequence displays the explosion itself.

A Treen trooper tries to rush our hero who stands stoically in the chamber on the left, waiting until he sees the green of their eyes before loosing off a shot. The wall-mounted autocannon in the centre of the screen is taking a rest so that the Treen doesn’t get killed by the defence system as it advances

CRITICISM

“I must confess to not being an avid reader of the old Dan Dare comic strip, but of course like everyone else I’ve heard all about his dealings with the Mekon. This game defies all adjectives — to my mind, it’s one of the best on the Spectrum. If you thought Ultimate had hit new boundaries on the Spectrum, then take a look at this. The graphics are amazing: I wondered if it was really a Spectrum that was producing these amazingly colourful graphics. Dan is superbly animated and doesn’t slow down one iota when lots of baddies appear on the screen. I found that Dan Dare was extremely playable and a pleasure to play. You have to buy it to believe it.”

“At first sight Dan Dare didn’t really appeal to me as it didn’t seem that original, but after playing for a while it did start to grow on me. The game is fairly easy to play; running around the place shooting green nasties and retracing your steps at high speed isn’t exactly brain taxing, but it’s jolly good fun all the same. The graphics are good: all the characters move around smoothly and the backgrounds are very pretty. The sound when compared to the graphics is a major disappointment — only a couple of spot effects in the whole game. A very slick piece of programming, but I wonder if I’ll still be playing Dan Dare in a couple of weeks’ time...”

“Anyone out there, who didn’t read the old Eagle comics? I loved the comic strips, and I like the game too. The graphics are very good, but the colour is simply astounding — surely the best on the Spectrum yet? Dan passes in front of and behind the scenery without the slightest sign of attribute clash. The game is playable, addictive, and generally well worth the time, effort, and money of any self respecting Spectrum owner or Dan Dare fan.”

Dan has just taken one of the five sections of the detonation device to the control room — and the screen captions give an update on the action

Scampering along on the surface of the evil Mekon’s asteroid, Dan puts paid to a Treen

COMMENTS

Control keys: Q up, A down, P right, B, N, M, SYM SHIFT, SPACE to fire
Joystick: Kempston, Cursor
Keyboard play: no problems
Use of colour: very cleverly done, bright and attractive
Graphics: excellent
Sound: not enough, really
Skill levels: one
Screens: 125/130 (ish)
General rating: A game which lives up to the image of the cartoon character

Use of computer

93%

Graphics

95%

Playability

93%

Getting started

91%

Addictive qualities

91%

Value for money

90%

Overall

92%

DANGER MOUSE IN MAKING WHOOPEE!

Producer: Creative Sparks
Author: Phil Snell
Price: £1.99

Danger Mouse is taking a well-earned holiday down in Cheddar Gorge in the sunny West Country. It should be a nice quiet holiday as he’s on his own without the bespectacled and easily startled Penfold, but despite the beautiful countryside, DM is finding it hard to relax. Even the famous Cheddar Cheese Straws can’t put his mind at rest.

Eventually his worst fears are confirmed: a telegram from Colonel K tells him that Baron Greenback is up to his dastardly tricks again. Poor little Penfold has been kidnapped by the Baron’s henchmen. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The grotesque Greenback has come up with his worst plan ever for ultimate World Domination...

At his hideout in Chicago. the Baron and his minions are busy manufacturing thousands of Whoopee cushions. Strange. But there is method behind this madness. The plan is to put them on every seat in the United Nations. So at the next meeting there will be so many blushes and apologies in every language imaginable that during the ensuing chaos Greenback will be able to sneak in and take over the world.

Danger Mouse casts aside his packet of Cheese straws and sets off for Chicago. Quite apart from the Baron’s sinister whoopee cushion factory, a number of gas making factories and power stations must be shut down as they supply the Baron with power and materials for cushion factory. If DM manages to shut down enough of these factories, when he eventually gets through to the Whoopee cushion plant he’ll find it a lot easier to burst the cushions with the P.I.N (Pointed Imploding Needle) because there will be less of them.

The screen shows a three dimensional view of Danger Mouse in his car as he battles around the city looking for clues. The bottom half of the screen shows the layout of the city with DM’s position marked, along with obstacles such as the Troll with no Plaice to go, who only moves out of your way if you give him a fish. Gedditt? Useful objects can be found by visiting store rooms. Walking through the unmarked doors in the store rooms, DM must try and navigate his way to the blue exit at the top of the screen. When he gets to this stage, a useful object is offered to him.

When DM finds one of the baron’s factories he must avoid whatever is being manufactured there and get to the top of the screen to the exit door in much the same way as he did in the store rooms. Then it’s back into the car and off somewhere else.

While Danger Mouse is hunting around the city looking for clues, the Baron is making more and more cushions. When the number gets to 100 the game ends and Greenback has triumphed. The number of whoopee cushions trundling off the production line is shown at the bottom of the screen along with any bonus marks.

CRITICISM

‘Danger Mouse games could be really good as he is an extremely versatile character, unfortunately he doesn’t seem to have been used to his greatest effect or ability yet, and all the games in which he has starred have been a bit on the boring side. Controlling Danger Mouse’s car is at first very hard to get used to, so it is easy to get lost in the maze. The game plays quite slowly and once you’ve seen a few screens there is little variation, and boredom sets in. The graphics are colourful but there are a lot of attribute problems. The sound is fairly good with some nice spot effects in the game, and the Danger Mouse theme tune on the title screen. Not a bad piece of cheapo software — it would be nice if it was a little more compelling.’

‘For £1.99, this is a fair game. If it had been priced any higher, there’s no way that I would have said anything nice about it. The graphics are not particularly good, but they give the right impression. Playability wise, DM is good, but nothing special. Despite the different screens, it doesn’t hold much in the way of interesting action. For the price, worth a look, methinks.’

‘Yes, we all know that Danger Mouse is great: I love the TV series and all that stuff. The look of DMMW is very good, and a valid attempt is made at drawing a believable road. Danger Mouse turns the corners in the road in a very realistic fashion, and is drawn very accurately and animated beautifully, even down to the odd glance around while playing. After the appeal of the game had worn off, I couldn’t see much more than a basic maze game — which made me understand why it was only £1.99. The sound on the title screen is an extremely loud and accurate rendition of the DM theme tune, this and the DM character were the only pulling points of the game. I couldn’t find much else to validate the lashing out of nearly two hundred pennies.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: O left, P right, Q up, A reverse direction/down, 0 fire/jump, 1 status screen, 2 continue game, 5 abandon game
Joystick: Kempston, Cursor, Interface 2
Keyboard play: fine, but a bit tricky controlling the car
Use of colour: par for the budget course
Graphics: nothing remarkable
Sound: jolly tune, fair effects
Skill levels: one
Screens: scrolling maze
General Rating: A reasonable game, given the price.

Use of Computer

59%

Graphics

59%

Playability

56%

Getting Started

56%

Addictive Qualities

56%

Value for Money

58%

Overall

56%

DYNAMITE DAN II

Producer: Mirrorsoft
Price: £7.95
Author: Rod Bowkett

Dr Blitzen is back with a vengeance! He has set up his headquarters in a group of eight islands — The Islands of Arcanum — and once again, he has laid dastardly plans for world domination. His latest idea is to destroy the youth of the world by planting subliminal sound waves in pop records. Unaware of the deadly threat Dr Blitzen poses, teenagers listen to their favourite stars on vinyl, unaware of the threat they pose! As the pop fans listen their minds are gradually destroyed, and soon Dr Blitzen will be in control.

Luckily, Dynamite Dan is on hand to confront his old enemy and save the world. His main task is to locate Blitzen’s secret hideout, find the record pressing plant where the mind-sapping singles are made, and destroy it. All eight islands that make up Arcanum have to be explored before the password that gives access to the pressing plant can be assembled. A record and a jukebox has been placed on each island, and when the record has been found, playing it on the jukebox reveals part of the code. Then it’s time to refuel the airship and move on to the next island.

The first island is a maze-like network of pipes, ladders and iron girders, all brightly coloured. Dan climbs up and down the ladders or leaps off girders in the search for the record and the jukebox, which have to be found as quickly as possible. Yes, it’s a platform game in the mould of the original...

Of course, nothing is ever as easy as it sounds. As you make your way round each island there are hosts of nasties out to get in your way. Some are robotic, others monster-like, others spectral. Each of them moves in a different way and at a different speed. You must either jump over them or simply avoid them — whichever is easiest. They all sap energy on contact, and a bar at the bottom of the screen shows Dan’s energy level. Some nasties have a small dose of kleptomania and rob Dan of the useful objects that he has collected. White sprites steal bombs, while magenta nasties steal fuel which comes in magenta cans.

Then, of course, there’s the deadly Dr Blitzen himself who is is keen to zap Dan at every opportunity with his mesmeric psychon ray gun. A touch of this and you have difficulty controlling Dan — so beware! Dr Blitzen looks every bit the mad professor with long wispy hair and dark sun glasses to hide his eyes. He dashes about on his mini-hovercraft, blasting away with this MP ray gun.

Your score so far is shown at the foot of the screen, along with the objects Dan has collected on his travels. Look out for bowls of fruit, oversized cherries and grapes, and cups of tea — they all revitalise the energy bar when Dan walks over them. Bombs are scattered around the islands, and these can be used to blast your way through barriers, giving access to different parts of the landscape. A set of large red-rimmed goggles protect Dan from the mesmeric powers of the evil Blitzen’s ray gun, and cans of fuel must be collected to refuel the blimp so Dan can escape to another island. There are mystery objects on the islands, which disappear from the game when the blimp takes off... so find them before leaving! Each island contains a secret passageway, though access to it depends on having the appropriate object. Be careful, however, not to fall into the sea. You might not float!

Once you’ve collected the eight elements of the password and gained access to the pressing plant, it’s time to plant a bomb and beat a hasty retreat — Dan has three minutes to get back to the airship. But it’s a long journey and Dynamite has only one life. The future of pop music, never mind the mental health of mankind, is in your hands.

Stumping through the network of green girders and pipework that makes up the local landscape, Dan is carrying the red specs — they protect him from Dr Blitzen’s confusing ray gun

CRITICISM

“I really hated Dynamite Dan so I was a little dubious when I was given the sequel to review. Happily, this is a completely different game from its ‘parent’. The first thing that you notice are the brilliant sound effects and tunettes — the game is crammed with them. Playing the game is surprisingly easy, so you get a sense of achievement which spurs you on. The graphics are excellent; the characters are large and well animated and the backgrounds are colourful and full of detail. I really enjoyed playing Dynamite Dan II, as it is very playable and addictive. I strongly recommend it to everyone.”

“Hey, Dan is just soooo cool, he really is!; happily scampering around these meanie infested islands without flinching. This is a very worthy successor to the original game, and actually improves on a lot of the features. No longer do Dan’s lives disappear at a high rate of knots — this time an energy bar replaces the lives system and it can be topped up. A great game which will appeal to fans of the original and to newcomers alike.”

“DDII certainly is one of the most polished arcade adventures around at the moment. It contains nearly everything that you should expect to find in such a game, with colourful and neatly drawn graphics — and minimal colour clash. The game plays some nice tunes, not all of them sound very convincing, but the beeps are very cleverly arranged. Lots of thinking and planning out of routes is required. All the characters are very individual in their movements which results in a very addictive and playable game. DDII is fun to play — a great follow up, and superb value for money.”

Another view of the Islands of Arcanum — this time Dan has collected the Outboard Motor... can come in handy when he falls in the drink

Special Agent (Dynamite) Dan prepares to land on one of the Islands of Arcanum in his quest to foil the mind-sapping plot of Dr Blitzen

COMMENTS

Control keys: A, D, G, J, L left, S, F, H, K, ENTER right, W, R, Y, I down, Bottom Row up/jump
Joystick: Kempston, Cursor, Interface 2
Keyboard play: responsive
Use of colour: very bright and cheerful
Graphics: fun and detailed
Sound: excellent tunes and effects
Skill levels: one
Screens: 200
General rating: A very worthy successor to Dynamite Dan I!

Use of computer

93%

Graphics

93%

Playability

94%

Getting started

91%

Addictive qualities

93%

Value for money

92%

Overall

93%

GOLD RUN

Producer: Macsen Software
Price: £9.95

Gold Run is the successor to the game Blockbusters, both based on the popular TV quiz series for teenagers in which Sixth Forms and Technical Colleges compete against each other to win some very impressive prizes.

In the television programme, after a team has completed a round successfully, one member is invited to stand on the Hot Spot and take part in the Gold Run. In this section of the game a player has to complete a horizontal path across the set of hexagons by correctly answering a number of questions. In the grid are a number of five shapes each containing the initial letters of a phrase or popular string of words. The Player selects the initial letter of the hexagon which he or she wants to answer questions on, and the question then appears at the bottom of the screen. For example, the initial letters might be N.L and the question would follow: ‘Another name for the Aurora Borealis’ the answer should then be typed in — ‘Northern Lights’. If an answer is wrong the hexagon goes black, but if the question is answered correctly it goes yellow and the player can progress to the next hexagon in a logical route across the board.

Spelling and punctuation all count against you in the Spectrum version if you make a mistake, but generally, if a question is correct but mis-spelt then you do get a second chance to answer it. Although the questions tend to remain at the same level, the time limit in which you must complete the game goes down each time. On the first level this is 236 seconds, but at level nine it is only 38 seconds, so fast and accurate typing as well as a smart brain are necessary. After each game has been completed, the highest score so far compared with your own effort is shown. There is also the option to restart the game or continue in the series.

Unfortunately, there are no mega prizes to be won in this version of Gold Run, not a Blockbusters sweatshirt in sight, and no effervescent Bob Holness presenting!

CRITICISM

‘Macsen should start up their own TV company, I’m sure it would be cheaper than buying the rights to all the games that they publish. If you buy it to complement Blockbusters (which I presume you’re supposed to) I think you’ll be a bit disappointed. This is because it’s exactly the same as Blockbusters and even more boring. The sound is an improvement on Blockbusters but is still the same old repetitive tune. The game features some good touches, like the interrupt facility and spelling checker which gives you a second chance. But overall, the game is very poor and one of the worst Macsen games so far.’

‘Technically, Gold Run is rubbish. Funnily enough though, it has an element of playability in it, and when played in a group, it lasts a long time. The obvious problem is that questions crop up again and again, but Macsen have made a reasonable job of avoiding this, by providing a large dollop of questions. The big drawback is that an answer is not accepted if it is mis-spelt. Meanwhile, time is ticking away, and you’re not going to beat the record... argh! Gold Run isn’t a mega game, by any standard, and its high price acts in a strong way against it, but I reckon it’s not a bad game.’

‘This is the sort of game that I give to my hated cousins in Skegness because it is completely boring. I used to believe that gameshow computer games could be fun if you played them in a group but I’ve tried with this one and it isn’t. The sound effects are adequate but I feel that there should be more of them to give the game a bit more atmosphere. The game responds slowly to keyboard input so typing things in can feel like a punishment rather than entertainment. The game itself isn’t really presented well enough to represent a challenge so this game just about fails to please or impress me on all counts.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: any and all
Joystick: n/a
Keyboard play: slow
Use of colour: the same as the TV game
Graphics: ditto
Sound: adequate
Skill levels: nine
Screens: one
General Rating: Weak.

Use of Computer

40%

Graphics

17%

Playability

36%

Getting Started

38%

Addictive Qualities

33%

Value for Money

32%

Overall

35%

GRAPHIC ADVENTURE CREATOR

Producer: Incentive Software Ltd
Author: Brendan Kelly
Price: £22.95

A NEW WAY OF WRITING ADVENTURES.

Over a years development work has gone into INCENTIVE’s adventure-writing utility. The Graphic Adventure Creator, and it has already appeared for the Amstrad, earning a very favourable response. The Spectrum adventure-writing utility market is still dominated by The Quill — can GAC step in as the new king? Sean Masterson takes a close look, and rustles up a couple of comments from the Crash crew…

The Graphic Adventure Creator is a sophisticated adventure writing package that arrives on a single cassette. Adventures written with the package include multiple commands in a single input, advanced graphics, full word recognition and a host of other features intended to make this the state-of- the-art adventure writing utility.

The packaging is very neat. GAC comes in a large format cassette holder complete with a glossy manual. The printing isn’t remarkable but the manual explains every detail of the utility with care and precision sometimes with accompanying graphics where it is thought they may help. Loading is achieved easily thanks to use of fast loading techniques and the user is presented with a title/credit screen followed by a menu page. GAC itself leaves approximately 23K free for your adventure once it resides in memory, but larger adventures could be created with multiple loading techniques this should mean that the adventure can be as big as the author desires. Complete adventures run independently of the utility.

To give you an idea of just what this package is capable of, INCENTIVE include a couple of mini adventures with the package. One is a pure text offering, the other uses graphics. If the full solution to an example adventure is known, the entire game may be played in one input. The result is like a short story, punctuated with a series of commands and it forms an impressive demonstration of GAC’s power. There is also a Quickstart file which loads a group of common verbs, conditions and other details to allow rapid creation of small games or time to be saved when commencing larger works.

As the graphics capability is the most obviously powerful aspect of the utility, let’s begin with a look at the graphics creation routines... As with any utility of this type, the more complex the graphics, the less memory is available for the rest of the adventure. While this might suggest the need for simplistic graphics, INCENTIVE have made sure that the adventure writer has the opportunity to make up complex images should they be required. Block or line graphics may be implemented with ease, and a host of devices have been included to make the process as painless as possible.

Four pure colours may be used in an illustration, though these may be stippled in any combination to give the effect of up to ten colours and textures on screen. Bright and flash options are also provided.

The top two thirds of the graphic creation screen is surrounded by the frame in which the image is created. Below this, the pen and paper symbol are permanently displayed along with the border colour. The pen rests on the paper during the drawing process for clarity during picture creation. Unfortunately the options menu is not displayed (as it is on the Amstrad version of GAG) which means serious study of the manual is required until the commands become second nature. This is my only gripe.

The drawing routines supplied cater for all needs. Elipses, Dots, Boxes, Fill and Shade, slow and fast drawing, picture merging, and picture or stage deletion are all included along with a picture scan that allows analysis and alteration of any stage in the creation. An attribute grid showing possible problems due to the Spectrum’s colour limitations is also available as a screen overlay.

The merging facility is very important from a memory saving angle. If a picture is drawn and then has a frame decoration added (previously drawn as a separate picture), only three bytes are used. This cuts down tremendously on memory used if repetitive pictures are used.

Most of the features work smoothly but the exception to this neatness is the Fill command. This isn’t perfect and an optimum position within the area to be filled needs to be found. Even then, in an awkward shape, a gap may be left. This can be rectified by implementing Fill a second time from a better position and the final result will be no different from that achieved with a more capable command routine. However, the finished picture takes up more memory. This is arguably offset by the fact that this Fill command takes up very little memory itself and is particularly fast. On the final picture, it makes no real difference anyway.

The ability to look back or delete back either a single step or a whole picture makes correction and modification of pictures very simple indeed. The effect of open or closed doors is just one example of how these features cater for the kind of conditions often required of graphics in adventures. Because it is possible to change the ink during the course of a picture creation and then change it back again, when the whole picture is asked for in the adventure, a limited form of animation is possible. Things such as flashing lights, flowing water or other relatively small changes to detail to a picture can be attained with the minimum of effort.

Up to 10,000 separate pictures can be held in a GAC game, though it’s extremely unlikely that more than a fraction of this number would actually be used. Because of the way pictures are tied to locations it’s possible to have small pictures created as inserts, displaying recently acquired objects for instance. The potential for experimentation is enormous.

As is the case with most other adventure writers, GAC allows up to 255 words to be defined as part of the adventuring vocabulary. As full word recognition is catered for in GAC, shortened versions of words (such as EXAM for EXAMINE) have to be created as synonyms by giving them the same numerical value in the vocabulary table. This does, however create the opportunity for more diversity and flexibility. One aspect of GAC which is slightly unusual is that unlike The Quill, words are stored alphabetically instead of numerically. This means the vocabulary has continuity, but adverbs. The section ‘Adverbs’ actually includes prepositions, so the label is an arbitrary rather than a linguistic one! However, this allows for detailed analysis of each line of player input and consequently, greater flexibility in terms of acceptable player response.

The interpreter is the real gem in GAC. If you have ever wanted to create LEVEL 9 style adventures but have been held back by the limitations of The Quill or lack of programming ability, then this where GAC can solve your problems. Commands are not limited to verb/noun input or single command per sentence input. Instead, a whole series of commands may be entered so long as the adventure author has taken full advantage of the very sophisticated parser. Multiple commands may be punctuated by ‘AND’, ‘THEN’, ‘.’ or ‘,’ in any fashion the author requires.

‘IT’ recognition is also possible if IT is made object number 255. This way it always refers to the last noun mentioned. This allows commands such as GET THE LAMP THEN LIGHT IT to be used. As mentioned earlier, the best part about the parser is the fact that commands may be as long as the player likes. If an error is made part way through the command (such as trying to get an object that isn’t there), the rest of the command is ignored.

Another area where GAC excels is with the conditions. GAC uses High, Low and Local priority conditions to set up certain events under particular circumstances, GAC checks a High condition before the player has the opportunity to make an input. Checking whether a lamp is switched on can be made a High condition, which governs whether the player can see in a dark location.

Local conditions are those that only apply in a particular room or situation. If you left an airlock without a space suit for example and the author had taken full advantage of the condition facilities, GAC would check for a spacesuit and kill you before you could do anything else. Low priority conditions are checked in the same way as local ones except that they are not confined to individual rooms. They might check that you were carrying an object, simply to ensure a message continued to appear.

GAC has more flexibility than any other adventure writing utility I have seen because of the vast numbers of counters and markers it has. One obvious example of this flexibility is the ability to give objects and then allow a player to carry a maximum weight. This is far more desirable than just allowing a certain number of objects to be carried regardless of how massive or miniscule they may be.

Clever use of the 255 messages allowed — breaking them down into commonly use segments — saves memory and increases the apparent number of messages in the adventure. This technique is not exclusive to GAC but it is reassuring to see that such things are possible nevertheless.

Editing any part of a GAC adventure is simplicity itself. Everything is well explained in the excellently written manual and all the different parts of GAC are accessed from a main menu. The whole effort has been logically devised. One great advantage is that you can do anything from the main menu — loading separate programs to add graphics is now something of the past.

Though the package sells at a price that can hardly be called cheap, all things are relative. When you compare this to the competition, both in terms of price and performance, it comes out way on top. Future, more powerful versions are planned (which may allow redefinable character sets) but this should not put you off getting hold of a copy as soon as possible, as any future version will be a while off yet.

GAC has already set a new standard on other micros. INCENTIVE have learned from the odd shortcomings of earlier versions, and Spectrum owners benefit from modifications made in the light of INCENTIVE’S earlier experience. The response to this product should be extraordinary. Before rushing off part with your money, take a peek at the News Page in this issue, where there should be details of a money-saving offer!

CRITICISM

‘My first experience with GAC was a pleasure. Just a quick look at the manual allows you to immediately design a simple adventure, and after the little features of GAC are sorted out you could spends months designing the adventure of your dreams. The package is extremely flexible, and if you don’t feel like doing some of the work, like defining all your words, then GAC will help out. The thing that makes GAC so attractive is that you don’t need to have any idea of programming at all. The only thing you need is an Idea of what how your adventure is to work. It is then just a simple case of telling the program how the locations are linked aft then supplying messages and conditions — you can even have pictures to help the story along. I was amazed to see that INCENTIVE have managed to include an art package in with the price. This contains some very complex features: like elastic elipses, scanning through the drawing of the picture, and proper deleting of more than the last thing you drew. The adventures that can be produced should rank among the cleverest on the market. If you’d always thought that you would play adventures if you could find the right one-then you have no excuse any more — write your own!. GAC is the most powerful adventure creator on the Spectrum ever, an adventure processor rather than a cumbersome adventure assembler.’

‘When it comes to writing adventures without learning machine code, GAC and The Quill can both look foreboding to first time users. GAC’s advantage lies in the fact that an entire adventure may be created without the need for loading up different programs or buying add-ons to the basic package. The one thing need to remember is that no matter how good the utility is, you will not create good games unless you have the imagination to write something exciting and fun, and have the desire to get the best from the program. Playing an adventure written on GAC for the first time is quite an experience. Being able to input multiple commands (in fact, entire paragraphs). Gives you a sense of freedom and power. When it comes to writing an adventure you don’t feel as if the limitations of the program will get in your way. The knowledge that after a while, you might come out with something like The Price of Magik makes you want to learn more about the system. Once you have built up a little enthusiasm, coming to gee with the package is easy. And it’s a lot more flexible and fulfilling than The Quill. The graphic facilities are excellent but a bit more on-screen help would not have come amiss. At first, most of my time was spent flipping through the instruction manual trying to figure out how to actually draw a line on the screen. Fortunately the manual is well written. I can’t wait to see the first few commercial adventures written on GAC. The Quill is dead. Long live GAC!’

MERMAID MADNESS

Producer: Electric Dreams
Author: Richard Kay
Price: £9.99

Myrtle the Mermaid is in love, poor girl. To make matters worse the object of her infatuation, Gormless Gordon, is terrified of her. And who wouldn’t be? She’s a buxom wench to say the least. Gordon, on the other hand, is a bit of a beanpole who doesn’t know when he’s on to a good thing. Little does he realise that he hasn’t enough oxygen to stay below the surface of the water for too long. Only Myrtle can save him!

The game starts at the quayside with Myrtle in desperate pursuit. Gordon, replete with snorkel, flippers and all, plunges into the clear blue water and is immediately lost from sight. But Myrtle is determined not to let him escape and dives in after him, her two legs transmogrified into a fishy tail as soon as she hits the briny.

The water is deceptively inviting. Sticks of dynamite which have been ignited, threaten to explode at any moment. In addition, sharks, swordfish, piranhas, jellyfish and sundry other seaside nasties patrol the waters, taking great chunks out of Myrtle’s flesh whenever she bumps into them. Too many encounters and her only life is lost, leaving poor old Gordon doomed to die.

Fortunately, she can continually revitalize herself by quaffing the bottles of stout that lie scattered on the rocks below the surface. These, along with other items, are part of the cargo of a shipwreck impaled on the rocks. The amount of energy she has at any particular time is indicated by a stout bottle in the top right hand corner of the screen. As her energy is spent, the velvet black liquid in the bottle gets lower and lower.

Swimming past the shipwreck, Myrtle explores an underwater maze which appears to have no exit. Along the way, she comes across various items which she may find useful such as anchors, a tyre and a lamp. If she picks up the lamp, she can see her way through the murky caverns where her lovely Gordon might be lurking.

A pulsating heart, at the top of the screen, begins to pulsate all the more when she gets closer to him. Should she fail in her mission, then the heart, not surprisingly, breaks in two and crumble into dust. But if Myrtle does get close to her beloved, this does not always mean she can rescue him. At times, the rocks can form an effective barrier.

In her search, Myrtle discovers an underwater city, a la Atlantis, with its statues of strange Gods, the awesome remnants of a lost civilisation. But she cannot tarry there too long for the pointer on the meter, also at the top of the screen, is slowly moving. If it should reach the red zone, then all is lost. Fortunately, there are a number of air bottles scattered about which Myrtle can take to her loved one.

This game is a race against time with only Cupid and stout on your side. Can you avoid the numerous nasties and get to the luckless Gordon before his air supply runs out? Let’s hope you’re a good swimmer!

CRITICISM

‘The instructions for Mermaid Madness are fab: very witty and jolly, and informative, too. The game isn’t quite as good. The graphics are very big, and Myrtle’s boobs are a good example of the animation. Colour is a bit over-extravagant, because, though it makes the game more attractive, initially, the sprites soon start clashing, and that spoils the whole effect. The storyline is good and the game is fun to play; but though it’s addictive, I can’t help thinking that Soft Design could have done a little better with this one.’

‘Crikey! What a strange game we have here. The whole of the sea bottom is beautifully covered with lots of fishy nasties. The characters are all very large and well detailed — especially Myrtle, who is extremely well-adorned. Although the presentation is very good, I found that some characters suffered from a terrible flicker. Quite often I found that the whole game crashed if I turned up in the wrong part of the scenery when changing screens. Mermaid Madness is lots of fun, but unless you can make that breakthrough in the game then I’m afraid you may be disappointed.’

‘The only really appealing thing about this game is Mark Bytes’ intro on the cover of the game: everything else is trite. The gameplay is slow and boring and your energy goes very quickly so high scores are quite hard to get. The graphics are poor and there are many attribute problems which really start to get on your nerves. The characters are large, undetailed and garish in colour, and the backgrounds are uninteresting. The sound is also below average — there are some spot effects during the game and a trashy tune on the title screen. I can’t really recommend this one as it is, on the whole, poorly finished.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: A left, S right, FULL STOP down, SPACE collect or drop objects, drink bottles of stout
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard play: fairly responsive
Use of colour: colourful but attribute clashes and flicker
Graphics: large
Sound: below average
Skill levels: one
Screens: 30
General Rating: A colourful game with a jolly story but not very polished.

Use of Computer

62%

Graphics

68%

Playability

65%

Getting Started

65%

Addictive Qualities

66%

Value for Money

41%

Overall

66%

RUPERT AND THE ICE CASTLE

Producer: Bug-Byte Software Ltd
Price: £2.99

Rupert and his chums are getting some serious hassle from Jenny Frost, Jack’s sister. Not content with covering the countryside in an icy blanket, she has also kidnapped Rupert’s friends. Bingo, Edward Trunk, Algy and Badger Bill have all been frozen solid and are being held captive in the Ice Castle. Rupert must go to the Ice Castle to defrost them. The only way he can unfreeze his woodland chums is by giving them an ice pill.

Before setting out, Rupert can choose how many ice pills to take with him — up to eight are available — and select which of the three levels to attempt. Rupert has to climb the ramparts and jump onto icy ridges to try and return his friends to the land of the living.

Apart from the bitter cold inside the Ice Palace, Rupert also has to contend with the traps that Jenny Frost has set to try and trick him into becoming like his frozen friends. Contact with the nasties in the game — which include falling icicles, a helicopter and a car — robs Rupert one of his precious ice pills. Once all his pills have been used up, Rupert is turned into a block of ice.

The game is over when each level has been completed and all of Rupert’s friends have pottered back to Norwood for a hot cup of cocoa in front of a roaring fire.

CRITICISM

‘This is a very jolly game. The multi-coloured Rupert is nice, but it causes clashes which rather spoil the otherwise attractive graphics. The game is nicely packaged, and Bug Byte have made a good job of the game, though the instructions are a bit on the short side. Rupert and the Ice Castle is certainly nothing amazingly mega-brill, but it’s still a good game.’

‘Well this is certainly a step up from the last Rupert game. It is a lot more playable and addictive for a start and it’s much easier to get into. The graphics are, on the whole, good. The characters are well designed, move around smoothly and even look like the comic book characters. The backgrounds are very well detailed but the sound is a little disappointing. There are a few spot effects but no tune. Generally, I am quite impressed with this one as it has great addictive qualities and it is very compelling.’

‘I can remember seeing Rupert on television ages ago, and he certainly didn’t live in an Ice Palace then. He must be climbing the social ladder. The graphics are well coloured and detailed. Attribute clashes are kept to a minimum, usually with a single coloured background. Sound is very poor — I couldn’t hear any beeps anywhere — and the keyboard control is very unresponsive. I really didn’t like the game much, even though I’m Rupert’s biggest fan.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: O left, P right, A pick up, Z jump
Joystick: Kempston, Sinclair
Keyboard play: unresponsive
Use of colour: colourful but without attribute clashes
Graphics: finely detailed
Sound: a few spot effects
Skill levels: one
Screens: 12
General Rating: A pretty platform game.

Use of Computer

54%

Graphics

47%

Playability

47%

Getting Started

55%

Addictive Qualities

47%

Value for Money

54%

Overall

50%

SBUGETTI JUNCTION

Producer: Bug-Byte Software Ltd
Author: Muraya
Price: £2.50

Sbugetti junction is a game of skill and judgement starring a put-upon traffic policeman. Louigi Pepperoni is a trainee traffic cop on loan from sunny Italy to find out how the British manage to have less accidents on their roads than their hot-blooded companions in Rome. Although Louigi has had quite a bit of training, his performance is still a bit shaky. Now in Britain to further his training, he’s been turned loose on an unsuspecting public to direct the traffic in a busy street.

Louigi has to get large numbers of vehicles through certain junctions safely and without any unsightly pile-ups. If he manages to pass the tests set him, he can progress to the next junction and so on until he is a fully fledged traffic policeman who knows what he’s doing. Once Louigi has achieved this status he can return home to Italy and become reunited with his voluptuous wife, Fettucinee.

Louigi directs the traffic by way of a number of hand signals which you control by pressing the relevant keys. Each section of traffic has to be properly co-ordinated and each vehicle sent where it’s supposed to go. Miscalculation in this area causes large accidents and Louigi’s life may also be in danger from a mis-directed car. It’s not just the continentals who get hot under the collar and shout a lot when driving. According to Sbugetti Junction, the British can get quite stroppy too. If Louigi keeps the lines of cars waiting too long then he’ll be in for a bit of aggro...

The game is played against the clock. Louigi has five minutes in which to complete each junction. If the cars are kept waiting then they start to beep him, and if they beep Louigi too much for too long them the game-a is-a prematurely-a terminated, or as we say in English, it’s curtains for Louigi.

There are three levels to the game. Louigi can choose whether he wants to direct light, heavy, or if he’s feeling particularly ambitious, rush hour traffic. Louigi is actually over in Britain to learn about our traffic rules, but if you feel like doing a bit of traffic controlling au continent, then there’s a European option in the game where all the cars drive on the right hand side of the road.

Points are awarded for cars correctly navigated across the junctions with the current high Score shown below for you to try and beat. Please try to help Louigi control the traffic successfully so that he can return to the land of Pasta and motzerella, and be reunited with his estranged wife and his bambinos which he a-misses so-a much-a.

CRITICISM

‘Hmmm. I’m not at all impressed with this one. One game was enough to tell me that it won’t appeal to anyone. The graphics are shoddy and small, but some of them are nicely detailed. The use of colour is a little garish but there are only a few attribute problems. The game plays very slowly and it is hard to amass high scores on the lower levels so it gets very very monotonous after a short time. Controlling your man is not as easy as it could be — in fact for the first few goes it is almost impossible. After a while it does get a little easier, though, as does the whole game. Even with its cheapo price tag I wouldn’t recommend this game.’

‘Sbugetti Junction is great apart from one thing — the game. The loading screen is great and the inlay pictures look impressive, but the game is very boring and repetitive. I found that Sbugetti Junction consisted of two junctions; one easy and one impossible: this didn’t help matters at all. The graphics are very neatly and clearly drawn but, due to them being all the same colour and the traffic controller being very small, none of them seem to really catch the eye. I also had some suspicions about the legality of the hand signals that the traffic would obey. Sbugetti Junction is certainly original, but whether you would come back to the game after a few months is very unlikely.’

‘If you’ve always wanted to be a traffic cop, then I reckon Sbugetti Junction will completely revert you. If this is a real portrayal of a traffic policeman’s day, then I’m surprised that any still exist! This game is, in a word, boring. Even in the ‘rush hour’ mode, there is very little to keep the eyelids open, and even less to keep you playing. Despite reasonable graphics, a passable tune, and even an acceptable amount of playability, Sbugetti Junction is one game that I will certainly not be coming back to, because I know that within five minutes, I’ll have switched it off.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: redefinable
Joystick: Kempston, Cursor, Interface 2
Keyboard play: no problems
Use of colour: simple
Graphics: nothing wonderful
Sound: tune on title screen
Skill levels: three
Screens: two viewpoints — British and European
General Rating: An interesting idea, but an uncompelling game.

Use of Computer

48%

Graphics

41%

Playability

35%

Getting Started

44%

Addictive Qualities

30%

Value for Money

35%

Overall

34%

STAINLESS STEEL

Producer: Mikro-Gen
Price: £8.95
Author: Dave Perry

Ricky Steel is here! The new teenage super hero with the mechanical arm has finally arrived. Just in time, it seems, to save the world from the evil Dr Vardos and his merciless minions. First on foot and then in his combat vehicle Nightwind, Ricky weaves and dodges his way past the the enemy craft sent by the evil doctor as he heads towards the ultimate confrontation — with Vardos himself!

The action is seen from above and the play area scrolls up and down. The game contains four zones, each with its own set of hazards which become successively more treacherous. Enemy craft can approach from either in front or behind so Ricky has to be constantly alert — if his concentration wavers for a second, the android army commanded by Dr V is likely to send him to that scrapheap in the sky.

In the first zone Ricky has to leg it along the tarmac, avoiding helicopters which have the capacity to blast him to smithereens with their missiles. A collision with a chopper is also fatal. Fortunately, Rick can fire missiles too, and he also has a bomb shield to soften the effects of enemy attack. Trundling past traffic jams and road barriers while destroying android patrol ships which move across the road, the man with a steel arm has to make for the end of the zone and a reunion with his cherished motor.

In zone two, aboard Nightwind and flying through the air, Ricky’s task is a little harder. Bubbles of fuel need to be collected to keep the super-car in the air as the dynamic duo fight their way across a desert. Rockets come zooming back and forth trying to eradicate Ricky, but Nightwind is equipped with a powerful laser cannon, which evens the odds a little as Ricky dodges and weaves his way towards Dr Vardos and his hideout. All the enemy forces have to be wiped out before the zone is completed.

In the third zone, battle resumes over a watery channel. Nightwind is amphibious as well as capable of aerobatics and as he deals with the airborne threat, Ricky has to watch out for submarines which pop up from the water every so often. Plonking a bomb on the deck of a submarine requires sharp reactions and quick timing, but lots of points are there for the winning!

The final zone is populated by androids in the shape of lizards and salamanders as well as Dr Vardos’ other minions. Their aim is to thwart Ricky’s noble attempt to save the world by finding and eliminating the evil Dr Vardos.

Status displays flank the main action screen: on the left, Ricky’s energy and shield or arsenal strength is displayed below the score meter; on the right the zone number is displayed, together with the bonus points awarded, the number of androids that remain in the zone, and large red hearts indicate how many of Ricky’s four lives remain. If the enemy forces are not shot down fast enough, it’s possible to end up with a negative bonus score, so quick shooting is the order of the day... A radar screen below the main display reveals Ricky’s position in relation to the nasties in the current zone, and a message is flashed onto this screen when Ricky bites the dust.

Steel by name and steel by nature: it takes more than a few androids to despatch a teenage super hero. Mikro-Gen plan to produce further games starring Ricky, but first he has to beat Dr Vardos.

Having negotiated the mean streets in Zone Zero, ace lensperson Cameron Pound snaps the Steel Hero as he enters Nightwind...

CRITICISM

“Well, last month there was a crowd around the demo of this game, with everyone saying how brilliant it was. I think that compared with Equinox — Dave Perry’s last game — this is well worth a Smash. The first few levels are very, very hard but once you work out a method they start to get quite playable. The idea behind the game isn’t exactly original, but it is presented in a very nice way. Graphically it’s excellent! The scrolling is brilliant, as are the characters which are after you. I am generally very impressed as it is playable, pretty and compelling.”

“Stainless Steel contains excellent graphics and superb sound effects; the game is very simple but very addictive. There are some great sound effects, and it’s a shame you have to reload to hear more of the title tune — it’s great. As shoot ’em ups go, Stainless Steel is very addictive — mainly due to the large scanner at the bottom of the screen that tells you exactly how far away you are from the end of the section. The graphics are superb and quite original, with detailed backgrounds throughout the game. Shoot em up fanatics will go wild over SS to start with, but I’m afraid they may find it too annoying because when you die you go right back to the beginning. Attractive but infuriating.”

“Stainless Steel is a great shoot ’em up. It has got very good graphics, excellent sound, and on top of that, a lot of playability — it’s addictive, too. One thing that niggles me is the fact that when you die, the game takes you right back to the beginning of that level. Minor quibbles apart, Ricky Steel’s first game is an excellent blast-the-enemy production, and he stands a good chance of becoming a real super hero if this standard is kept up.”

Zone One and Nightwind zooms across the desert with an android missile up ahead and a helicopter about to fly off the bottom of the screen. One life left and n..n..nineteen enemy droids to eradicate. Cameron’s got his work cut out here..

COMMENTS

Control keys: redefinable: Up/Thrust, Down/Turn; Left, Right, Fire and Bomb/Shield
Joystick: Kempston, Cursor, Interface 2
Keyboard play: fine
Use of colour: monochromatic action
Graphics: very neatly done
Sound: tune on loading, plus good effects
Skill levels: one
Screens: four scrolling zones
General rating: A slick shoot ’em up without too much depth

Use of computer

90%

Graphics

92%

Playability

87%

Getting started

90%

Addictive qualities

88%

Value for money

88%

Overall

89%

SUMMER SANTA

Producer: Alpha-Omega Software
Author: John Hopper
Price: £1.99

Santa’s got it all a bit wrong this year. Off he goes to deliver the Christmas presents to all the boys and girls. Trudge, trudge trudge. Down all the chimneys, into the grates, to give the gifts to all good children, which is strange because it’s the middle of summer. And there isn’t a reindeer in sight!

Perhaps it’s something to do with the seasonal mix-up, but poor old Father Christmas is encountering all sorts of problems as he does his rounds. He must collect the presents from the fairy grotto and safely deliver the goodies without waking up the children. However, one of the houses he visits is rather odd to say the least. While the kiddies are tucked up snug in bed, the house comes to life. Everyday objects like coffee percolators and saucepans have taken on a life on their own and do their best to terrorise Santa. China wall ducks are suddenly animated and the wine cellar hosts all manner of nasty spooks who evidently have a predilection for homebrew.

Apart from these supernatural hassles, there’s the more traditional problem of trying not to wake the wee ones from their slumbers. As every boy and girl knows, if they wake up while Father Christmas is doing his yearly round then they won’t get any presents. Santa, therefore, has to creep around the house making sure the kiddies stay in the land of dreams. However, the grown-ups don’t go to bed so early on Christmas Eve and Daddy’s still pottering around in the living room, probably waiting for the yearly rehash of appalling black and white films to come on the television. Santa must sneak around him making sure he isn’t spotted.

To add to his difficulties, Santa isn’t terribly well organised this year. Without his trusty red nosed reindeers to help him, he can only carry one present at a time. So after each gift has been safely deposited in the correct stocking, he has to tramp back to the grotto to get the next one. Quite apart from that, the various sinister nasties in the house are far from harmless. If Santa brushes against these moving objects then he loses a life. He is kindly provided with five lives at the start of the game, but they are quickly lost as he tries to navigate the unfriendly welcome from the pet dogs on the roof and the rolling footballs in the bedroom.

There is one bonus in Santa’s favour. He gets to drink an awful lot of sherry that people have left out for him — the more he drinks the more points he gets. Father Christmas also gains points for every present safely delivered and a percentage of the game completed is shown at the bottom of the screen. There’s a demo mode to show the player the bare ropes of the game, which also provides an opportunity to have a sneak peak at some of the locations.

CRITICISM

‘Oh well, they can’t all be good, can they? They don’t have to be as bad as this though! Summer Santa? Even the title is stupid. The game is even worse! Awful, flickery, badly animated, clashing, un-proportioned graphics, a nerve-wracking, unrhythmic tune, and a total lack of playability and/or addictive qualities. This game is truly a new low in Spectrum software. I might have said buy it for a laugh, but it’s just not funny. Don’t look out for it.’

‘Another typical budget game. Funny name, stupid story line, lots of colour and an attempt at a tune — that just about explains Summer Santa. The graphics are too large and are made up of characters — which means you are controlling lots of character spaces and not the usual block of pixels — resulting in appalling error detection. The sound is a very feeble effort at trying to make a Christmas-like tune. Summer Santa was impossible to play seriously due to the possibility of ending up stuck in a wall every time you jumped. Alpha Omega seem to have excelled themselves in the art of a ‘typical’ budget game and, as a result, they’ve produced a load of trash.’

‘Well it’s the middle of summer (or so they tell us) and somebody’s released a game all about the best bit of winter. Depressing ain’t it? This is a piece of below average budget software that really doesn’t appeal to me. The graphics are poor, the characters are large but too richly coloured so there is lots of colour clash and a fair bit of flicker too. The sound is truly awful. There are a few poor spot effects during the game and a terrible tune which plays throughout the game. Fortunately, there’s a sound on/off option so it isn’t too torturous. On the whole, this game is not fun to play so I wouldn’t really recommend it.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: redefinable
Joystick: any
Keyboard play: average
Use of colour: poor
Graphics: uninspired
Sound: basic
Skill levels: one
Screens: lots
General Rating: Well below average, even for a budget game.

Use of Computer

35%

Graphics

28%

Playability

29%

Getting Started

40%

Addictive Qualities

23%

Value for Money

24%

Overall

31%

TUJAD

Producer: Ariolasoft
Author: Andrew Green, Jeff Philips
Price: £8.95

Something is wrong with Tujad, a sophisticated Control Computer. One of its circuits has blown, making it behave in a most anti-social manner. Instead of controlling the Security Systems in the complex, Tujad has turned them against everyone, making the place a virtual No Mans Land. The only hope left is to send in Gen 19, the most efficient Combat Droid ever created. Hopefully it will be able to repair the broken circuit in Tujad, as the other maintenance workers can’t get within a stone’s throw of the complex without attracting hoards of nasty security droids, all lusting after their blood.

This mission is slightly different for Gen 19 — it has to fight its own kind; fellow machines. In other circumstances, Gen 19 would find no problems in performing tasks set for it to complete, such is its programming. This time, however it’s machine versus machine and a whole army of security droids are at Tujad’s command. These droids are programmed to do only one thing — KILL INTRUDERS!

The only way that Tujad can be brought under control is by locating 50 new parts of the circuit and replacing the old ones. These can be found around the 100 rooms of the complex and Gen 19 collects circuit boards by simply walking into them. The circuits are then displayed automatically on the main circuit board so that the player can see how many sections have been found so far.

The biggest problem which Gen 19 has to overcome, predictably enough, is the problem posed by the Security Droids — the complex is absolutely crawling with them. At the beginning of the game Gen 19 has three lives, and these can be lost in two ways. Gen 19’s energy depreciates with every encounter with the security nasties in the building and when the energy meter reaches zero the hapless droid loses a life. Some of the larger security droids are instantly lethal. These kill Gen 19 with a single touch and can’t be destroyed with the conventional laser like the other droid minions.

Gen 19 has three weapons in its arsenal. Three missiles, three grenades, unlimited blasting on the laser and 3 alien destroyers are available. Obviously, this collection of weapons is not going to last very long when you’re up against some of the most sophisticated security droids ever invented. Luckily enough, Gen 19 can top up the weapons store by collecting replacement ammunition along the way.

To save undue wear on the old footplates as a result of legging it around, Gen 19 has been supplied with a hover platform which is very useful for travelling upwards or over any undesirables and makes the robot very manoeuvrable. When Gen 19 reaches solid ground, the floating platform automatically retracts and it’s back to traditional footwork. Lifts link pairs of locations in the complex, and represent handy shortcuts.

The status area shows how many of each type of weapon Gen 19 has left in his arsenal, and weapons are selected by flipping through the inventory. A robot figure indicates the number of lives Gen 19 has left, while a lightning bolt shows the amount of energy left in the battery pack. If this is looking particularly low, extra energy can be collected around the complex to give the heroic droid an extra lease of life in the battle against the Security droids and the schizophrenic Tujad.

CRITICISM

‘I must confess that I didn’t expect much from this, after seeing the Orpheus logo on the loading screen, which brought back nightmares of The Young Ones. Though not nearly as bad as That Game, Tujad isn’t the most thrilling game I’ve ever come across; for one thing, it’s too easy, with extra men and weapons liberally splashed all over the place. The graphics are prettily animated, but the whole quality of the sprites seems to lack polish. Owing to its easiness, I don’t think Tujad is particularly addictive, despite a reasonable level of playability. Not a bad game, but one let down a bit by its lack of originality, and its rather boring style.’

‘Tujad is a real improvement on the last game written by Orpheus and definitely worth a twiddle at. I found the game quite attractive at first, but after a few games it became apparent that there wasn’t much to it at all. Any competent arcade player would get far in the game with no trouble at all. The graphics and animation are well up to scratch and very attractive to look at. I found that the game was just a case of remembering where everything was: once mapped the game is too simple to last long in anyone’s tape recorder.’

‘There isn’t really anything here that I haven’t seen before. Even so, all its little qualities have been put together in such a way as to make the game, as a whole, very playable. The graphics are nicely done, the characters range from fairly large to small and the backgrounds interesting but some of the use of colour is a little suspect. The sound is awful — there is no tune and only two different effects. The game is fun to play for a short while but I can see it being much too easy to complete.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: Q-P up, A-L down, Z, X, C left, B, N, M, right, SPACE change weapons, ENTER pause, 1-0 fire
Joystick: Kempston, Cursor
Keyboard play: responsive
Use of colour: pretty
Graphics: neatly done
Sound: spot effects
Skill levels: one
Screens: 100-ish
General Rating: Not a bad game, but nothing spectacular.

Use of Computer

69%

Graphics

80%

Playability

79%

Getting Started

81%

Addictive Qualities

67%

Value for Money

64%

Overall

69%

XARQ

Producer: Electric Dreams
Author: Simon Dunstan and Nick Cook
Price: £9.99

The planet Xarqon consists entirely of seas and oceans with no natural land masses at all. Many years ago the United Planets Co-operative set up a project known as the Self Build Base. The object of this project was to build artificial land masses in the oceans of Xarqon in order to make the planet a profitable acquisition.

However, after thirty years of successful operation the land mass called Xarq has developed a serious fault. Why this has happened, no-one knows, but it has switched itself into automatic Cleansing Mode. Power in the Central Reactor is gradually being built up. As the levels get ominously high, the authorities realise the energy is being stored up in preparation for Planet Cleansing during which the whole of the surface of Xarqon will be burnt to a crisp and generally scoured to the core.

Naturally, the United Planets Co-operative is getting a bit panicky about this impending disaster, as over thirty years of construction and research hangs in the balance. If Xarq is successful in its spring cleaning campaign, the whole project will have to be started from scratch — if there is any planet left to play with. You have been selected to stop Xarq destroying itself. Armed with an impressive array of weapons you begin to journey towards Xarq on a Nik Nik Hi-Speed Hydraboat...

The object of your mission is not an easy one. You must penetrate the Xarq complex so that you can actually drive your Hydraboat inside. This is possible only by accurate blasting of the lock gates, which results in the flooding of the Zimmerman Trenches located around the Central Reactor and allows you to use your Hydraboat. Once the trenches have been flooded you can begin to plan how you are going to destroy the reactor and stop the destruction of the planet.

Xarq is fully committed to the Cleansing Mode and is a bit miffed that someone is trying to thwart its efforts. All Security Defence systems have been fully operated, and Xarq itself does all it can to thwart your mission. Your Hydraboat has been equipped with a simple but effective laser which is ideal for blasting some of the smaller problems in the game, but for some of the more persistent nasties you may need to use your guided missiles or the mortars. Depth charges have been supplied to help fend off marauding submarines which lurk in the murky depths waiting to attack from below. Submarines can be located by their distinctive bleeps on the sonar scanner.

A chart at the bottom of the screen keeps track of your status: damage to the hull, engines and protective shields is recorded on bar readouts, and the stock of weapons and fuel in the Hydraboat is also shown. The water depth bar is also handy. Naturally, your mission fails if status levels get too low.

The Hydraboat is capable of reaching great speeds and has been designed to be highly manoeuvrable. With one key you can select the direction in which you want to travel; then, by using the acceleration or deceleration key the desired speed can be achieved. Beacons are dotted around Xarq and can be recognised by their colour: blue and white beacons are pumping stations; green and black beacons are laser field generators while purple and black beacons reveal power fields, capable of generating currents of a million Tesla.

CRITICISM

‘What a daft name for a game! The game itself isn’t any more sensible. The first thing that entered my head when I saw it was Panzadrome. Playing doesn’t disperse the idea, either. I reckon this game is an aquatic, overpriced rip off of another enjoyable game. I can’t say I like this much at all. The graphics are pretty awful (if I remember rightly, that was Panzadrome’s main drawback), but the game isn’t playable, and therefore, unaddictive. Not one I’d recommend, not even to big fans of the game that it is an expensive and poor copy of.’

‘After reading the inlay for this game I was enthralled by the plot — on loading, however, my hopes were shattered. Xarq looks a little like RamJam’s Panzadrome but it plays much faster and is a lot more difficult to get into. The graphics are small but well detailed and the characters race around the screen very fast without jerking or flickering. The sound is fair: there is no tune but there are some reasonable spot effects during the game. The thing that I really don’t like about XARQ is that you have to play it very fast in order to dodge any missiles that maybe on your tail. This makes the game very unplayable and hard to follow.’

‘I immediately thought of Panzadrome when I saw Xarq, but such thoughts disappeared once I started playing. The graphics are very detailed and colour is used to its full effect in a mainly monochromatic play area. The explosions that take place when you’re hit are very life-like and extremely well animated with accompanying sound effects. I found Xarq had a nice exterior but was far too hard to play — which made me think I was missing out on a good game. Only graphically a Panzadrome rip-off, but the rest of it is very simple.’

COMMENTS

Control keys: Q accelerate, A decelerate, Z rotate left, X rotate right, C fire, P pause
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard play: too responsive!
Use of colour: adequate
Graphics: small and detailed
Sound: simplistic
Skill levels: one
Screens: lots, according to Electric Dreams!
General Rating: A supercharged Panzadrome that’s a bit too fast to be playable.

Use of Computer

61%

Graphics

66%

Playability

54%

Getting Started

59%

Addictive Qualities

60%

Value for Money

50%

Overall

59%