Alien Storm

Crash

Presentation 90%

Graphics 88%

Sound 85%

Playability 89%

Addictivity 90%

Overall 89%

Mark Caswell 90%

Nick Roberts 88%

Help! help! The aliens have landed! 'That's alright!' says Mark Caswell, 'I'll just nip over to the burger café and get some help!' He's obviously, stark, staring bonkers. Oh, well… US Gold £10.99/£15.99 Look. I'm not bonkers at all. For many years people have claimed to see strange lights in the sky and to have met little green men. Most thought them mad or senile, but there's a band of serious UFO watchers who've anticipated the invasion plans that are to materialise. They set up the Burger Cafe as a cover with three of their best operatives to watch the skies. And - behold! - the aliens arrive! So, it's just as well Gordon, Karla and Scooter (the heroic Alien Busters) are ready to thwart the plans of the bug-eyed monsters who want to take over the planet. That's where the game begins. The aliens are carrying out raids on Earth from a huge mothership, hidden from radar by alien technology, and what's more, the aliens are disguising themselves as everyday objects: they appear as potted plants, telephone boxes, dustbins and other unlikely objects. THE GAME ITSELF! Alien Storm is a one or two player game and starts with a choice of a character to play. Each carries two guns: a really, reeeeeally huge intimidating jobbie to blow away big targets (that also makes a really great noise), plus a standard gun for small annoying aliens who sidle up and try to bite your leg off. Agility is the characters'strong point: they leap and roll, avoiding the bug eyed beasties niftily. Offense tactics (guns aside) include clubbing the aliens over the bonce and blasting them with smart bombs. STYLISH FUN The game has three game-styles which pop up from level-to-level. Style number one is a bit Golden Axe-ish (ie, fight the creepies on the current screen and then move onto another location and do away with a few more). Set on the streets, all is pretty quiet until something wanders along that wouldn't look out of place in the worst anchovy pizza-induced nightmare. Adversaries appear alone, and sometimes in groups, but most are camouflaged as everyday objects and leap out on you as you pass. A press of the fire button soon whips you into action, although whether you fire the really huge or the not-so-huge gun is chosen by the computer, as is smashing the living daylights out of the scum with your rifle butt. Your energy level rapidly depletes: energy capsules can be collected when certain adversaries bite the dust, but you often die quicker than capsules are collected (ain't that always the way?). Destroy all the aliens on that bit and onwards you progress. THE RUNNING VERY FAST BIT A change of gameplay follows: we call it the 'running very fast bit' 'cos that's what it's all about. The screen scrolls horizontally from left to right, and the computer controls the firing of your unfeasably large weapon. All you have to do is move your character up and down the screen to shoot the bug eyed swines. Simple, fun and (in a strange sort of way) quite relaxing. A third play variation occurs every couple of levels, and sees our heroes battling it out with the aliens in a shop. The view is through the characters' eyes, and in true Op Wolf style a floating cursor allows you to aim your weapon. Monsters attack you from behind well-stocked shelves: create complete havoc and splatter them across the counters. It's a super section and refreshingly different from the other game styles. IT'S ALL RATHER VIOLENT, THEN? Indeed it is! The game is amazingly close to its coin-op parent: fast, violent and, most important of all, playable (thank heavens). Aliens certainly come in some weird and wonderful shapes, and are very often amusing in their disguises. As with all games with two player mode, Alien Storm is at its best when a mate joins in: it certainly needs two of you to get past some of the horrors you meet up with. It's a wonderful conversion, spiffy in fact. So, pick up that huge gun (it's sitting there in the corner) and prepare to go wild (I did!). MARK 90%

Karla and Gordon on their way to face the bug eyed monsters in Alien Storm.

Oh look! It's the Eurovision Song Contest judging panel. Hah! Your song's a dud, matey and (Right) no alien is going to get that last box of Weetabix!

Oh no - pizza nightmare!

The 'running very fast' bit (obviously) has you pegging it along with all the speed of Nick chasing the chip van (ie, very fast!).

You can't tell head from tail on this creature (then again, maybe it has neither).

EEK, IT'S A LOAD OF ALIENS! (NO, IT'S THE PROGRAMMERS) The folks behind Alien Storm are Manchester based Tiertex. The programmers prefer to remain anonymous (shy lot), but they have previously worked on Italy 1990, Dynasty Wars, UN Squadron for US Gold. The team's favourite game section is the 3D shoot-'em-up because 'it's great fun to destroy the backgrounds', although this was by far the trickiest section of the three to program, 'because it's a four-level overlay parallax scroller with sprites needing to walk between all levels' (whatever that means). The game is a simultaneous two-player affair, but it could have been players! However, that would have resulted, due to memory restrictions, in the characters all looking the same (boring, not to say confusing!). Aliens come in 16 different types, and the number of animations ranges from three for the blobby ones to 12 for the tentacled beasts. Ah, who cares? As long as the bloomin' thing's playable - which it is! Hurrah!

Your Sinclair

Life Expectancy 72%

Instant Appeal 78%

Graphics 87%

Addictiveness 70%

Overall 75%

Andy Ide 75%

US Gold £10.99 cass Reviewer: Andy Ide I wish all these aliens would go away. One minute you think you've got rid of them all, and then you turn your head and a whole new bunch have just teleported into a cornfield from Zebra Gloopglox 90 or wherever. It's just not cricket. And they're ruddy rude as well - take the blokes in Alien Storm. Some even have the audacity to disguise themselves as dustbins(!) and pounce on you when you're walking by! Of course, you can splat them with your ziagron laser blaster, but they still make a disgusting mess all over your Nikes and leave a pongy smell behind. (Personally, I blame cutbacks in airport immigration staff.) Still, if a job's got to be done it's, er, got to be done, so let's take a closer inspection at the game they're all calling "Alien Storm actually" and see what we think. HEY, GOOD-LOOKING! And as coin-op conversions go it's pretty top-notch stuff. This isn't to say that it's particularly playable - just that it's politely faithful to the original. The Sega machine was a bit of a star, but that was due more to fancy sprites and graphics than any outstanding playability, and the Tiertex game is the same. The six levels are split into different bits, but all of them contain a horizontally-flipping walk-along-the-road sequence where you've got to blap loads of uglies and pick up energy pods. You do this by using a sort of backpack firehose thing that sends out lots of deadly electricity (which, along with the name of our heroes - the Alien Busters - is as flagrant a rip-off of the mighty Ghostbusters as I've ever come across). Other sequences include an Op Wolf shooter in a supermarket (more originality), and some really, really fast scrolling along another road, where you've got to, well, kill a few more aliens. And, as I said, it all looks jolly scrumptious. The sprites are crisp and fluid, and the fast scrolling zips along like lightning. The crosshairs bit comes a cropper - everything's so detailed you can't see what's coming at you, but you get used to it in time. Which means it's a real pity the gameplay's so flat. Despite what I said, killing aliens can be fun (especially when they look like vegetable omelettes and spooky snails like they do here). But when all you've got to do is dodge them on a pavement and then pound away absent-mindedly at the fire button it can get a bit trying. Alien Storm isn't easy - but who wants to play a game that's difficult when there's no skill involved. It's a shame. You kind of wish they'd given the spanky graphics to MERCS instead (which was a good game, but with pretty crap design).

Mmm. Now where've we seen this type of game before? This Op Wolf bit crops up in the second half of Level Two.

Save your energy, mate. There's another bus in five minutes.

THE CHANGING FACE OF AN ALIEN FROM SPACE 1. Meet Boris, one of the illegal immigrants you'll bump into on the street. Shoot him once, and nothing much happens. Shoot him again, and lots of spooky weird things start going down... 2. He loses all his fleshy bits (including his trunk) and turns into a skull, and then quickly turns back into... 3. This again - but shoot him a couple more times, and he ends up like... 4. A spooky spider! Eurgh! (A pretty impressive shrink job, I'm sure you'll agree.) But wait, because here comes his piece de resistance... 5. An energy cannister, for you to pick up and keep, and make you fit and well and healthy again. Hurrah! (So, maybe these alien blokies aren't so bad after all.)

Read it at Your Sinclair Rock'n'Roll Years

Sinclair UserSinclair User Silver

Graphics 89%

Sound 70%

Playability 78%

Lastability 80%

Overall 87%

Garth Sumpter

Matt Regan

Steve Keen 87%

Label: US Gold Memory: 48K/128K Price: £11.99 Tape, £16.99 Disk Reviewer: Steve Keen After a white hot preview in the July issue U.S. Gold are at last sorting out the little niggles in this, their latest release. After seeing the test copies the Crew could not wait to get their suckers on the finished product and as predicted in ish. 113 monster mashing has never been so much fun! The beast busting takes place on Earth as the marauding aliens have come down from their orbiting mother ship to colonize our planet after using their own as a toxic waste bin. However the Earthlings still have one hope, the Alien Busters, three self-appointed UFO look-outs who staff an alien combat force based in the local Burger Cafe. Structurally the game is good news for Speccy owners as it's format is almost identical to the coin-op. You can choose between the three rebels Gordon, Carlo and Scooter. Each repel the scum suckers in their own special way and all have their own weapons and animation. For instance Scooter, the robot, has a bazooka in his leg and his wrists incorporate a machine gun. Which weapon is used is decided by how close you are to the enemy. Prototype type plasma rifles and neutron bombs come as standard, the bombs are particularly useful as they clear the whole screen, but they must be used with caution as they seriously deplete your energy supply and if this is reduced to zero you'll be using your gun butt or bare hands! A life meter monitors your health and extra top-ups are available through out the six levels. Blood thirsty gamesters are well catered for as each of these are separated by stages and are inhabited with hordes of varying slime. Ranging from giant ant-like creatures to undulating Maryland Cookies the man eaters pursue you through cities, houses, shops and mother ship over arcade beat 'em up levels to Op. Wolf style sections. Some of the blighters even hide out in normal objects such as oil drums and spring out on you as they approach! All this is great fun, frying uglies and watching their tentacles flay around in fright, but the real adrenaline grabber lays in the simultaneous two player option. Although you can only use the same players in 48k mode, all you 128k smug mugs can choose between the three main sprites to maximize the genocide. Alien Storm mixes fab animation and graphics with futuristic blast 'em up arcade mayhem and the lack of on screen colour adds to the atmosphere rather than detracting from it. The main sprites are a little "stiff" and sound is unfortunately sparse, but there's loads of fun to be found in the program. Just alien bustin' fab!

A particularly nasty blob, or is it a poll tax collector? Either way - shoot to kill!

Aagh! It's coin-op frenzy. Dig those graphics.

Cookies, cookies everywhere but not a crumb to eat (Sorry Keates man!)

Down, deeper and down. But not out!

Jogging down to the papershop for a pint of mild can be dangerous.

These guys are definitely not a barrel full of laughs.

Your local supermarket never looked quite like this.

When conditions are right in certain flat parts of the world a lightning bolt can be over 20 miles in length! The record rain fall during a storrm in Cilaos in 1952 was 73.62 iinches in 24 hrs. That is nearly four feet deep and equal to 7554 tonnes of rain per acre. Being of infinite size the universe is immense by it's own comparison. The farthest visible object in space by the naked eye is the Great Galaxy in Andromeda about 13,600,000,000,000,000,000 miles away.