Fire 'n Ice

Your SinclairYour Sinclair Megagame

Life Expectancy 90%

Graphics 92%

Addictiveness 95%

Instant Appeal 95%

Overall 93%

(128K TR-DOS disk image) Wizard Druidle is at it again, trying to melt away Coolmint Island and its peaceful inhabitants. Something's got to be done to stop him, of course - you can't just let whole islands melt away like that. The person on whose shoulders the problem is to be dropped is novice wizard Dana, especially empowered with Ice Magic by the Queen of the Winter Fairies. Quite why the Queen can't be arsed to deal with Druidle herself and chooses to delegate such an important job to a newbie isn't made clear, but we can all guess at the quasi-democratic machinery underpinning those sorts of decisions. Ahem. Fire and Ice is a simply superb piece of Spectrum software - a brilliantly presented, very addictive puzzle game in the Boulderdash ballpark. Eighty-nine levels. Excellent music. Great graphics, including some very effective interlacing effects. But there is a catch. Fire and Ice is a TR-DOS game, which means it runs from a 640Kb 3.5in floppy disk connected to your Spectrum via a Beta Disk Interface - a British product that didn't sell very well over here, but that was rapidly incorporated into Russian Spectrum clones such as the Scorpion and the Pentagon. Since it's unlikely you've got any of these lying around, the upshot of all this is that you're going to have to get hold of an emulator supporting TR-DOS if you want to experience this game. It is worth it though. You'll be astonished at what it's possible to achieve with a disk system and amazed that we Brits stuck instead with good old cassette tapes whilst our Soviet friends laughed themselves sick. Ahhh, the good old days...

Coolmint Island at the mercy of Druidle. Does the Queen care? Apparently not

Zap ice blocks with your magic wand. Push free-standing blocks onto flames