Escape

Sinclair User

Gilbert Factor 8/10

The first of the 3D maze games. The player runs around a maze trying to pick up an axe in order to escape while being pursued by up to five dinosaurs. Level five of the game is the most difficult as a pterodactyl is brought to life and flaps alarmingly around the pathways in search of its quarry. Escape was one of the first Spectrum games to be produced but still retains its excellence two years later. It is a legend among Spectrum owners who remember that far back and is still a favourite with author Malcolm Evans. Position 25/50

Crash

Producer: New Generation, 16K £4.95 Perhaps the most beautiful looking game yet for the Spectrum. Escape pits you against a 3D maze seen from slightly above so the horizontal pathways are obscured by the hedges. Somewhere in there is the key to the exit. As you enter a monster shoots in and homes in on you inexorably. Get the key and he speeds up. Get out and you're back with a maze and two monsters. Five levels and a 'no win' situation. It's depressing! One of the most panicky games we've seen. Joystick: Kempsoft II. Recommended.

Read it at Crash - The Online Edition

Crash

Producer: New Generation, 16K £4.95 Perhaps the most beautiful looking game yet for the Spectrum. Escape pits you against a 3D maze seen from slightly above so the horizontal pathways are obscured by the hedges. Somewhere in there is the key to the exit. As you enter a monster shoots in and homes in on you inexorably. Get the key and he speeds up. Get out and you're back with a maze and two monsters. Five levels and a 'no win' situation. It's depressing! One of the most panicky games we've seen. Joystick: Kempsoft II. Recommended.

Crash

Producer: New Generation, 16K £4.95 Perhaps the most beautiful looking game yet for the Spectrum. Escape pits you against a 3D maze seen from slightly above so the horizontal pathways are obscured by the hedges. Somewhere in there is the key to the exit. As you enter a monster shoots in and homes in on you inexorably. Get the key and he speeds up. Get out and you're back with a maze and two monsters. Five levels and a 'no win' situation. It's depressing! One of the most panicky games we've seen. Joystick: Kempsoft II. Recommended.

Personal Computer News

John Lettice

SPECTRUM SPECIAL John Lettice takes his Spectrum from the Spanish Main to the familiar monster mazes. Plunder (£6), Cases Computer Simulations, [redacted] Baron (£5.95), Temptation Software, [redacted] Escape (£4.95), New Generation Software, [redacted] The Detective (£5.50), Arcade Software, [redacted] Home Runner (£4.95), Britannia Software, [redacted] The Spectrum has now passed its first anniversary, and the current batch of games being released shows that age cannot wither it nor custom stale its infinite variety - in some cases at least. PLUNDER First off the slipway is an everyday story of seafaring folk. In Plunder, your objective is to stop the Spanish Armada sailing by pillaging the convoys of gold Spain is shipping to finance it. You sail your ship - a nice little user-defined graphic - around a very impressive high-resolution map of the Atlantic Ocean, seeking out galleons (can be nasty), troopships (you can deal with these, but boarding might not be such a smart idea), merchant vessels (sitting ducks) and finally the warships (run for your life). While you're doing this, the sea takes its toll of crew and hull, and naturally the odd cannonball can make mischief. So you use some of your winnings - they're probably tainted with the curse of Montezuma anyway - to hire new crew, make repairs, and perhaps do a little trading and/or drug running. Yes, that's right, you can buy one of Central America's less savoury products in Haiti and sell it at a profit at Marseilles. I didn't run into Gene Hackman, but he and other cops might still prefer it if you stuck to grain and diamonds. One nice point about Plunder is that it's actually fairly realistic. Broadly speaking, you can take on the ships a thieving buccaneer/national hero of the time would be able to, with approximately the logical consequences (although merchant seamen seem to be a lot less ready to run up the white flag than I'd expect). And I won't swear to it, but the warships really do seem to follow you around, hunt the Graf Spee style. All in all, it's a particularly neat and inventive execution of what is becoming a fairly common idea. BARON Baron is another offering in the honourable tradition of Candyfloss. Here your goal is to manage a small fiefdom, fighting off the villains and beating up the villeins. You can play it solo, but the game is really geared to several - up to four - players. All players start off with the same amount of land, peasants and cash, and your goal is to manage these resources. You can play the game the peaceful way, tending your crops and amassing land legitimately by purchase, or you can hire mercenaries and pillage your neighbours. It's certainly refreshing to see a computer game that'll take more than one player, but there are problems with this one. The instructions are a little ropey for example, you can increase your supply of peasants by feeding more than you've got, but you aren't told this. There was one annoying bug on the review copy. At one point the program asked if you wanted to hire mercenaries. You answer 'y' or 'n'... and then it asks you if you want to hire mercenaries, up to a dozen times. It defies belief that a manufacturer could send out a game with a louse-up like this in it, but there it is. If it wasn't for this boredom-inducing bug, the game would be relatively entertaining for several players. The one-player version is a fairly pointless exercise. ESCAPE I could forgive this one a lot. It's a new twist on maze games, where you're stuck in a Hampton Court style environment, being pursued by various prehistoric monsters. Your aim is to find an axe, then use it to break down a door and get out of the maze. But the real killer is the way the dinosaur comes after you, using the Spectrum's excessively quiet speaker to produce a 'pad pad pad' noise as it runs. I never did get out of the maze, but I plead that I was too busy laughing at the dinosaur. If you can control yourself, it has potential to be a fast and entertaining maze game. THE DETECTIVE More humour here. Load up the Detective and you're presented with a natty title page, across which you see a row of bullet holes creep. Start on the game and you see a small figure in the centre of the screen; cursor left or right and the figure saunters, slowly but purposefully, in the relevant direction. If you press the fire button the figure stops, whips out two guns and blazes away at the sky, the reason for this being that there are things falling out of the sky at you. Yes, you've guessed it, someone's thought of yet another twist on Space Invaders. According to the instructions, you've got to get through Dagger Alley (all 25 screens of it), then crack a safe. The mob's 'out to get ya' (according to this 'broad' you met), and they're trying it in all sorts of weird ways. The first screen seems to have them dropping giant-sized ring-pulls on you, while in the second they seem to be lampshades. In addition to this, rows of car tyres form up above your head and then fall on you, and if the dog comes by you lose all your points. It's not particularly fast to start with, but it's tricky, and highly entertaining. HOME RUNNER Put together an Olympic runner, a set of monsters and some scaffolding, and Home Runner is what you come up with. You hop, skip and jump your way up a number of levels, avoiding monsters and the holes that appear in the floor every now and then, until you get to home, at the top level. I didn't find the monsters made my pulse race.

ZX Computing

Geoff Cheshire

At the time when the software market for the ZX 81 was really beginning to take off, one of the tapes which gained the most critical acclaim (and is still a best seller) was the 3-D Monster Maze from J.K Greye software. It may be a different company this year but the author is the same. Escape, from New Generation Software, is based upon the aforementioned Monster Maze, but this time the required hardware is a ZX Spectrum (16K). Once again, there is a monster involved; once again, the player is trying to escape from the monster; once again, there is just one way out. This, however, is where the similarity with the former game ends. When the tape has loaded the instructions appear on the screen along with a preliminary warning about the dangers which the player is about to face. The computer then asks you to select a level of difficulty from the scale one to five. Upon pressing a number the game starts. Lo and behold, you are presented with a slightly angular aerial view of the maze with a high resolution version of your good self in the bottom right-hand corner, raring to be manoeuvered away by the usual cursor direction keys. In the top left-hand corner is the maze exit. All you've got to do is get from the bottom right-hand corner to the top left. Simple, isn't it? You're right - it isn't that simple. To get out of the exit you need the axe which is hidden somewhere within the maze. And then, of course, there is the added danger of the tyrannosaurus rex who can be aided, according to whether or not you attempt difficulty levels two to five, by either one, two, three or four of his beastly companions who include a flying pterodactyl in their ugly band. This is not, as it may sound, a jump on the Pacman' bandwagon but rather an original and absorbing game which can become extremely difficult and frustrating. Escape, priced at £5.95, is available from New Generation Software, [redacted].

Your Computer

Simon Beesley

SPECTRUM SOFTWARE Simon Beesley brave attacks by trolls, bombardment by meteoroids, alien invasions and even English literature to bring you up to date with Spectrum software. The quality of Spectrum software has improved since our last survey but originality remains in short supply. Most of the programs looked at are games programs and the bulk of these are modelled on the arcade classics, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, Defender and Asteroids. Perhaps this is because the games-buying public is only interested in games that fall into a recognisable category. Some of the programs are written entirely in Basic. This need not count against them unless the program displays moving graphics. The Spectrum's keyboard is not very suitable for fast-moving games although Quicksilva and Softek offer a joystick option on some games. Sinclair has released a large range of programs written for them by ICL and Psion. By and large the ICL programs compare badly with those from Psion and have a rather amateurish look to them. Each of the tapes in the ICL games series, Games 1 to 4, contains four short Basic programs with titles such as Galactic Invasion, Skittles and Train Race. These are the sort of programs a reader might like to key in from a listing in a magazine. They are fairly simple and afford a limited entertainment for a short period. In view of their variety each package represents reasonable value although they are perhaps more suitable for young people. ICL has also produced five titles in a Fun to Learn series covering Music, History, English Literature, Geography and Inventions. They present a variety of quizzes on their respective subjects. Players can compete against each other in a race in which correct answers send them further along the track. It is difficult to know who these programs are aimed at. One soon runs through the stock of questions and the same names appear in different types of question. Some of the information presented is too obscure or eccentric to make the programs suitable for schools. In the English Literature quiz, for example, Ian Fleming rubs shoulders with Shakespeare and little-known seventeenth century playwrights. Psion's collection of programs is far more satisfactory. Hungry Horace is loosely related to Pac-Man but has a number of original features. Horace has to eat the flowers in a park while avoiding the park guards. Sinclair gives a fair description of Horace as a subtle and amusing cartoon-style game. Psion's 48K chess program was written in conjunction with Microgen. It plays a remarkably strong game even at the lower levels. As an averagely competent player I found it quite hard to beat at level two, although its play seemed to come adrift under pressure. The program's response time is quick and the pieces are quite easily distinguished. Space Raiders and Planetoids are Psion's versions of the arcade games Invaders and Asteroids. Anyone who still has an appetite for these games will find the Psion products more than adequate. With Vu-Calc, Psion has scaled down a Visi Calc-type program to the dimensions of the home micro. These programs, which are commonly used on business micros, are usually described as providing a financial spreadsheet. They enable the user to lay out financial data in rows and columns and enter formulae to run calculations on parts or all of the table. Vu-Calc supplies a range of commands for entering data, text or formulae and performing calculations. Basic programs which have been compiled by Softek's compiler, Super C, run - typically - 10 times faster. The compiler sits at the top of memory above RAMtop and is unaffected by a New command. It leaves room for a Basic program of up to 8K and a further 10K for data. The present version cannot cope with decimals, arrays or string variables. These limitations need not be too constricting. Strings, at least, can be stored in the data areas as ASCII codes and accessed through Peeks. At £14.95 this is good value; particularly since it enables people to write commercially respectable programs without having to master machine code. However Softek insists that anyone planning to sell programs created with the compiler should negotiate for the rights. Softek claims that trace elements have been included to detect code written with Super C. The arcade game Asteroids crops up on almost every micro. Softek's version Meteoroids is one of the fastest for the Spectrum with good colour and sound. Softime supplies the Spectrum with a digital clock and alarm at the top of the screen which remains there while other programs are loaded and running. The last program in Softek's list is Zolan Adventure, a standard text adventure game which has the merit of fitting into 16K. Quicksilva gave Time Gate considerable advance publicity claiming it would make as great an impact on the computer games' world as had Atari's Star Raiders. As it turns out the game closely resembles Star Raiders. Given that the Atari is a rather more sophisticated computer it is not surprising that the Spectrum version of the game does not match the original. Time Gate presents a view from the cockpit of a spaceship. An instrument panel below contains a long-range scanner and a variety of other indicators giving information on the ship's position and damage incurred. Your mission is to clear 18 galactic sectors of enemy craft. The business of locating and firing on enemy ships is not as interesting as attending to all the other procedures. The controls are not as responsive as on the Atari. Nonetheless this is an elaborate game with excellent graphics - certainly one of the best so far for the Spectrum. In an impressive piece of synthesised speech Quicksilva's chess program announces itself at the beginning with 'this is the Chess Player'. Rather startlingly the packaging relates how the Chess Player, an Evil Being, has called for a challenger from Earth. The planet's survival hangs on your game - and you thought you were just going to have a quiet game of chess. In the event the program plays quite a strong game with the option of six levels of play. The board is clearly displayed and the pieces are well designed. Psion's chess program, however, is probably the better player. Meteor Storm, another version of Asteroids, also announces itself but rather indistinctly. There is not much to choose between this and Planetoids or Meteoroids. The major problem for software companies writing an Asteroids-type game must be in finding an alternative title. Spectres from Bug-Bvte gives a novel twist to the Pac-Man concept. Eddie the electrician has to rewire a haunted house. Instead of eating or picking up objects in his path he lays down light bulbs. Reaching one of the four power generators enables him to illuminate the house and drive off ghosts. The game has a highly individual flavour. The characters which glide around at a fairly leisurely pace, are engagingly different from the standard Pac-Man figures. This is one of the more original games yet to appear for the Spectrum. Gulpman from Campbell Systems is also based on Pac-Man but refreshingly breaks away from the standard format. It offers a choice of 15 different mazes and allows the speed of play to be set. At the highest levels your little man dashes around the maze at quite a pace. By contrast Jega's Specman, written in Basic, is dismally slow. Sometimes the ghosts seem to be stricken with paralysis and unwilling to take up the chase. Escape from New Generation Software is a variation on the maze theme which involves escaping from dinosaurs. The dinosaurs - brontosauri, pterodactyls and such like - pursue the player's character with considerable animation through the maze which is shown in bird's-eye view. Silversoft's games Orbiter and Ground Attack are probably the best Spectrum versions of the arcade games Defender and Scramble. Ground Attack requires the player to fly a plane through a series of caverns and avoid or destroy missile attacks from the ground. Scramble from Work Force is similar but marginally slower. Likewise Avenger - Abacus' version of Defender - is competent but not quite as accomplished as Silversoft's. MYSTERY MEETING A gold sundial worth £6,000 is the prize for the first person to solve all the clues in the adventure game Pimania. As in Kit Williams' book Masquerade, deciphering all the clues will lead the winner to a meeting at a specific time and place with representatives from the authors of the game, Automata Ltd. The other side of the program tape contains a disco single. Automata say that the clues are scattered in the music, the program and the graphics. Although we did not proceed very far with the quest the music and opening graphics seemed to bear out Automata's claim that the world of the Pi Man is totally bizarre. Melbourne House has based The Hobbit, on the novel by Tolkien. It helps to have read the book in finding your way about. The Hobbit is claimed to be an advance on other adventure games because it introduces other characters from the book who react to the player in the role of Bilbo with an independent life of their own. It also allows you - in a limited fashion to enter sentences rather than single words as commands. In practice these extra features do not amount to much and give the program greater scope for the sort of inconsistencies adventure programs are prone to. Thorin, for example, repeatedly enters the scene and tells you to hurry up. This is irritating because you were unaware that he had left and he seems to be totally devoid of constructive ideas. It is not a good idea, however, to kill him off since he sometimes proves too strong for your attack. Furthermore the manual suggests that you should stay on good terms with the other members of your party if you are to succeed in your quest. Many of the locations in the adventure are illustrated by some excellent graphics. We only managed to complete 7.5 percent of the game during which the text was accompanied by six different pictures. The graphics coupled with a more varied plot than usual make The Hobbit superior to any other adventure games available for the Spectrum. Both the assemblers tested, from ACS and PI software, require Z-80 mnemonics to be entered in Rem statements and both allow addresses to be replaced by labels. The ACS assembler, Ultraviolet, costs twice as much at £7.50 but offers several extra features. It allows multiple statement lines and provides five pseudo-instructions such as DEFS, which inserts a string of ASCII characters at the current assembly position. ACS also supplies a disassembler, infrared. Like the assembler this has two different versions for 16K or 48K machines. The program is easy to use and docs all you might expect from it. Company: SN Program Name: Games 1-4 Memory Required: 16K Price: £4.95 Company: SN Program Name: Hungry Horace Memory Required: 16K Price: £5.95 Company: SN Program Name: Fun to Learn Memory Required: 16K Price: £6.95 Company: SN Program Name: Chess Memory Required: 48K Price: £7.95 Company: SN Program Name: Vu-Calc Memory Required: 48K Price: £8.95 Company: SN Program Name: Space Raiders Memory Required: 16K Price: £4.95 Company: SN Program Name: Planetoids Memory Required: 16K Price: £4.95 Company: QS Program Name: The Chess Player Memory Required: 48K Price: £6.95 Company: QS Program Name: Time Gate Memory Required: 48K Price: £6.95 Company: QS Program Name: Meteor Storm Memory Required: 16K Price: £4.95 Company: SF Program Name: Super C Memory Required: 48K Price: £14.95 Company: SF Program Name: Meteoroids Memory Required: 16K Price: £4.95 Company: SF Program Name: Softime Memory Required: 16K Price: £3.95 Company: SF Program Name: Zolan Adventure Memory Required: 16K Price: £4.95 Company: SS Program Name: Orbiter Memory Required: 16K Price: £5.95 Company: SS Program Name: Ground Attack Memory Required: 16K Price: £5.95 Company: MH Program Name: The Hobbit Memory Required: 48K Price: £14.95 Company: AU Program Name: Pimania Memory Required: 48K Price: £10 Company: WF Program Name: Scramble Memory Required: 16K Price: £4.95 Company: AB Program Name: Avenger Memory Required: 16K Price: £4.95 Company: CS Program Name: Gulpman Memory Required: 16K Price: £5.95 Company: JS Program Name: Specman Memory Required: 16K Price: £5.95 Company: AC Program Name: Ultraviolet Memory Required: 16K Price: £7.50 Company: AC Program Name: Infrared Memory Required: 16K Price: £6.75 Company: PI Program Name: Assembler Memory Required: 16K Price: £3.75 Company: NG Program Name: Escape Memory Required: 16K Price: £4.95 Company: BB Program Name: Spectres Memory Required: 16K Price: £8

C&VG (Computer & Video Games)

AXE MAN MEETS THE MONSTERS Escape is the name of the game in a 3111 maze full of prehistoric monsters. In order to escape fromthe maze you must first find an axe that is hidden somewhere in the maze. You need this to get through the blue door to freedom. The monsters track you at half your speed until you find the axe. This heavy weapon slows you down considerably and you may need to drop it in order to make a quick get away before you get through the blue door. There are five different skill levels in this game - these change the number of monsters chasing you. It is also possible to alter the speed of the monsters. Escape runs on a 16K Sinclair Spectrum and is available from Bristol-based New Generation Software at £4.95.

Sinclair User

Gilbert Factor 8/10

AMAZING ESCAPES IN 3D You are trapped in a maze which looks slightly like Hampton Court maze. There are several hungry monsters on the prowl waiting for you to give them a quick snack to satisfy their meaner instincts. If you bump into one of the creatures from the prehistoric age while running around the maze your life will not be worth two flint axeheads. That is how a new game for the 16K Spectrum, Escape, begins. The most amazing thing about the game is the graphics. The screen shows a three-dimensional overview of a maze. You must control the little man at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen with the cursor control keys. The purpose is to wander around the maze to find and pick up an axe. Once you have found the axe you can break down the door of the maze and escape. To do that you must also keep out of the jaws of the monsters. The maze is generated randomly at the beginning of each game. The game was written by the author of the J K Greye 3D Monster Maze and is one of the best and most original games we have seen for the Spectrum so far. Escape is available from New Generation Software, [redacted].

Read it at Sinclair User Magazine Online