Hopper Copper

Crash

Overall 40%

Over the past few months, CRASH has tended to neglect the cheaper end of the software market - the ninety-niners - in favour of critical comment on all the full-price games. So in an effort to cover every single piece of software available for your Spectrum, CRASH has decided to introduce a new section, devoted entirely to budget software (games up to £5.00 in price); Budget Bureau. Each month, we'll pick out and feature our favourite cheapies, anything with 80%+ will receive a CRASH House Hit award! Each game still has its own overall rating (in brackets), so there shouldn't be a problem choosing the best games to buy. Only Blackbeard gets a House Hit this month. Read on, read on... £1.99 Code Masters' latest simulator attempts to bring the teeth-smashing sport of rugby to the Spectrum. International Rugby Simulator (68%) features a league of eight teams (any of them computer-controlled) competing for the championship. Matches are portrayed in Match Day-style 3-D. The player controls one player at a time: running, passing and kicking. Scrummages and line-outs are also featured for added realism. Graphics are simple stick-men but David Whittaker's title tune is good. Rugby is a difficult sport to simulate in a computer game, but this is a brave attempt which offers a fair amount of playability for rugger fans. After some deft promotion by Aussie superstars INXS and other style-merchants skateboarding seems 'in' again. Code Masters' Pro Skateboard Simulator (72%) has levels which alternate between attractive isometric 3-D skateparks and overhead-view cross-country courses. A number of flags must either be collected (skatepark), or passed through (cross-country), while avoiding obstacles. Once the odd control system is mastered, the game proves very playable, although very difficult on later stages. Also 'in' are 1950s styles, as Silverbird acknowledge with Video Classics (05% - oh dear). Simple bat and ball versions of tennis, football, and squash are featured alongside the more original Four Bat Blip and Asterbliperoids! All these games (load together) take up about 11k of memory - but it seems less. The minimalistic graphics are identical to early video game consoles, with the exception of some garish, chequered backgrounds. A serious contender for The World's Worst Games Collection. Keeping to the theme of complete unoriginality we also have another run-along-and-jump arcade adventure from Mastertronic. Called Hundra (33%), it's got a Viking heroine trying to rescue her father by finding three jewels. Although graphically fair, Hundra is a simplistic platform-style arcade adventure with no frills, and certainly no thrills. Dullness seems a positive virtue by comparison with Mastertronic's Motorbike Madness (20%), however. This has good isometric graphics, ten multiloaded courses and prize money for quick finishes. Unfortunately control is extraordinarily fiddly and every time you die you have to reload the course - even if it's only the first one. No wonder it's called Motorbike Madness. By contrast Lightning Simulator (21%) plays like the opposite of its title, with wireframe graphics moving more like treacle than lightning. Options allow flying skills to be practised before attempting a mission, and you can even take photos. The cassette inlay provides the minimum of instructions making for a confusing and disappointing game. Far more enjoyable is the latest Mastertronic shoot-'em-up, Star Farce (58%). This is a colourful, vertically-scrolling alien-blaster in the style of Lightforce. There's very little originality, but playability makes up for it. Worth a look, although the superior Lightforce is on budget too. Showing a more original approach is Silverbird's Hopper Copper (40%). Here a policeman rides around in a space hopper, catching villains by bouncing on them! A radar screen helps you find clumsily-drawn villains in a drab, monochromatic town. While novelty makes it fun for a while, the basic gameplay is very repetitive. Only marginally better is Tomcat (25%) from Players. A vertically-scrolling shoot-'em-up, Tomcat has good, monochromatic graphics - with the singular exception of bullets which are simply small circles. Spotting them is exceptionally difficult which, together with the unoriginal gameplay, makes for an extremely difficult game. £2.99 An even older bunch of games than Video Classics form the basis of Zeppelin's Las Vegas Casino (26%). You start off with £250 and must try to turn it into £50000 via four gambling games (all in one load again). The games are blackjack (just like Pontoon 21 here), baccarat (you choose whether to bet on player or dealer), roulette and craps (a dice game). The only game requiring real skill is blackjack, which is still pretty simple. In fact, without even matchsticks to play for, and human opponents to bluff, all these games soon become incredibly tedious. Highly recommended, in fact, as an antidote to the perils of gambling. Wot no simulators? Code Masters have just released two games at the new higher price of £2.99. Ninja Massacre (45%) is a no-nonsense Gauntlet clone. One or two players explore up to fifty levels of a monster-filled dungeon, searching for treasure and magic potions. Gameplay is okay and there's a nice in-game tune, but if you want a Gauntlet game, you'd be better off getting the rereleased original, available from Kixx at £2.99.

Your Sinclair

Overall 2/10

Ben Stone 2/10

Mike Dunn 2/10

BARGAIN BASEMENT Ben 'n' Skippy take a seat in the stalls to play their way through this month's cut-price offerings! With a bit of help from the usherette of course! HOPPER COPPER Silverbird £1.99 Reviewer: Ben Stone, Mike Dunn 'Ello, ello, 'ello, wot's goin' on ere then? Not a very good name game I'm afraid. 'Though Hopper Copper should've been fun. With all your police cars, nicked and a boingy space hopper being requisitioned to go in hot pursuit of burly criminals, youd've thought it'd be kind of fun bouncing around, chasing and bashing up horrible criminals. But after five minutes play, struggling against dull monochrome graphics, jerky scrolling, dodgy control and slow response, you'll probably find penal detention a touch more exciting. Steer well clear of this one sonny.

Sinclair User

Graphics 48%

Sound 35%

Playability 21%

Lastability 40%

Overall 41%

Label: Silverbird Author: Prune Software Price: £1.99 Memory: 48K/128K Joystick: various Mobilising the Police force has always been a bit of a problem. First of all, no-one had discovered the wheel, so the prehistoric bobby had to move around on foot, which made it ever so difficult to get to the scene of a crime fast enough to stop the dastardly robbers from scarpering on their getaway Tyrannosaurus. Then, when man discovered that there's more you can do with a horse than eat it, there were never enough to go around. Nowadays, the problem is that there just aren't enough cars for every flatfoot, so what alternative is left? Easy, the space-hopper. What's a space-hopper, the unfortunate few of you may ask. A space-hopper is a large balloon made of thick rubber, just ripe for sitting and bouncing on. I could never get the hand of the things and more often than not, I would bounce forward and the hopper wouldn't move, and then it would be 3 hours in surgery trying to put back that all important nose bone. The copper of the title is the first one to try out the new idea, and for him it seems to work rather well. In fact he can get up to some pretty hair-raising speeds, which is just as well as he's going to need all the speed he can get to catch the dastardly four armed robbers that continually commit crimes throughout your patch. Before I go on to describe the complexities of the game, I might as well tell you now that it isn't very good. In fact it's very bad. If I were you I'd stop reading now, as there's no point in going on and it makes my job a lot easier. Still with me? Oh well, don't say I didn't warn you. The game is viewed as a horizontal scroller with the option to move in and out of the screen onto different paths, in much the same way as Tir Na Nog and Dun Darach. At the top of the screen, you have your radar which tells you the positions of the other roads, if any, and the positions of the robbers (if any on your path), rather like the radar in Labyrinth. At the bottom of the screen is your Police radio, which gives you news of robberies as they happen, up to a total of four. On each level, each baddie will rob one shop. Your job is to bounce around there as soon as possible and apprehend each baddie by bouncing on them. The only problem I could find with this is that it's far too easy. More often than not, you can take out three of the robbers on one street without any hassle. Another problem is the aesthetic side of the game. It's not very nice. The graphics, though recognisable and some quite nicely animated, still don't come up to anything that might be described as 'different'. Sound is terrible with shrill beeps and screams at various points of the game, even on a 48K model, which you can't turn off! As for addictive qualities, this game looks at me, blinks stupidly and says, dur, wassat den? Any feelings of 'just one more go' weren't to be found anywhere. In fact, the feeling of 'I hope I die soon so that I don't have to play this shi'ite anymore' started creeping in. You've probably guessed that I don't like this game very much. I can't recommend it to anyone apart from people who don't have a Spectrum and people who came up to me at the PC show and asked me where the Newsfield stand was.