Mines of Saturn + Return to Earth

Crash

Producer: Mikrogen, 16K £5.95 Includes part two - Return to Earth. You're making a routine orbit of Saturn when a radiation storm forces you to crash land on one of the moons. Luckily you come down near an abandoned mining base. Now you must set off in search of Di-Lithium crystals to refuel your standard ship. 'Return to Earth' gets you back in space and landing on an abandoned and damaged space station, looking for a means of communicating with Earth. Both adventures are very standard, with not many locations and irritating random elements over which you have no control. The games lack atmosphere and will not accept abbreviations making you type everything out. Tedious.

ZX Computing

Documentation 2.5/5

Addictive Quality 2/5

Use of Graphics 0/5

Programming Achievement 2.5/5

Value 2.5/5

James Walsh

PRICE: £5.95 MEMORY REQUIRED: 16K There has always been a heavy presence of adventure games on the ZX81 and Spectrum market, though recently the standard of the best has improved fantastically with the launch of The Hobbit. For this reason, it is very important that if you want to market an adventure, that it must be very good to stand any chance of success. It is also important to use some if not all machine code and a 48K machine to make the possible permutations large enough to make the game interesting. The plots in both Mines of Saturn and Return to Earth are very predictable. Neither of them use any graphics at all in the games themselves which seems a pity considering that you are dealing with a computer with excellent potential. They are both for 16K machines though only take up 7K out of the 9K available. The vocabulary is very small, as is the number of possibilities. It is very easy to get killed as you have no way at all to fight back. The sentence interpretation routine is very poor and slow - another thing that you should not get on the Spectrum. If you lose then it is necessary to type GOTO 1 to re-start, surely a 'Do you want another game?' routine would not have strained the programmer too much. Basically, the quality of this game does not even come up to that of the better ZX81 adventures. Definitely not one that I could recommend.