Kane

Your Sinclair

Graphics 3/10

Playability 3/10

Value For Money 2/10

Addictiveness 2/10

Overall 3/10

Luke C 3/10

Mastertronic £1.99 Reviewer: Luke C Hog dang it boys, it's cowboys and injuns ime in the good ol' Wild West! Your job, as Sheriff, is to make peace with the Indians. In the first stage, for some reason, you have to shoot birds, which you do using a targetting system designed by a squint eyed hillbilly. Line this up with a bird and you'll miss every time! if, by some remote chance, you hit three of the pesky things, you're rewarded with a peace token and you get the chance to go on to the next stage. This involves you galloping into town on your trusty steed, avoiding cactus bushes on your way. Once there, you have to shoot it out with the local desperadoes - not an easy task as you're back to the silly target system, and your foes are tiny and very hard to see as they pop in and out of buildings. Once you've wiped them all out, you have to gallop to the front of a speeding train to stop it - only then will the Indians agree to smoke the peace pipe! There are three levels, with the action speeding up the higher you go. The backgrounds are luridly coloured, making it hard to see what's going on, and there are some awful attribute problems. Added to which, it gets dreadfully repetitive! Anyone with any games playing experience will find this no challenge at all. Good for shooting practice only!

Read it at Your Sinclair Rock'n'Roll Years

Sinclair User

Overall 2/5

Graham Taylor 2/5

Label: Mastertronic Author: John Darnell, Simon Freeman Joystick: various Memory: 48K/128K Reviewer: Graham Taylor Kane is a wild west arcade game in four sections. Although mostly one to file under the 'dire' category, there is some oddly effective animation here and there. I like games where there is no serious attempt to impose a plot on what is obviously a plotless game. There are four sections, but apart from being wild west orientated there is no other link between them so you can regard them as separate. Game one is a duck shoot, apparently the Indians like them so bagging a few earns you extra lives. Position the cursor to sort out your fire angle and work out when to release your bow. Nice animated figure of the bowman - everything else stinks. Game two is running and jumping on your horse, dodge the rocks by timing your jumps, tedious but very nice horse animation. Game three is a shootout, you stand, poised in authentic wild west manner in the middle of town, and from shop fronts, roofs and behind buildings outlaws suddenly appear - shoot them before they shoot you. The animation is again quite effective, and I think this is probably the best part of the program. The last section is more horsey running and jumping, though this time your objective is to reach the front of a speeding train. Same comments as part two. Kane is nothing special, even in a budget range, but the occasional flashes of effort, as evidenced in the animation lift it a few notches above the run of the mill. I wouldn't actually recommend you go out and buy it though.

ZX ComputingZX Computing Globert

Overall Good

Mastertronic £1.99 'A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. And in this case what you've gotta do is mosey on down to the old Spectrum and make peace with them thar Injuns (well it makes a change from blowing their brains out doesn't it?). You're the Sheriff of the town of Kane, and in order to make peace with the locals you have four tasks to complete. The first is to shoot down some birds so that you can trade with the Indians for peace tokens. In this part of the game the screen shows a small cowboy figure at the bottom of the screen with mountains in the background and birds flying overhead. Using the keyboard or joystick you move a sight around the screen and attempt to shoot the birds down with your bow and arrow. You've got a limited supply of arrows, and with the birds being a moving target you've got to have a good sense of liming to get a decent amount of tokens. You need a token to move onto the next stage, and additional tokens give you extra lives in the later stages. Once you've demolished the local bird population you hop on your horse and ride across the prairie back to Kane. But along the way you've got to make sure that your old hoss doesn't go stumbling over any rocks or bushes or else you'll be out of the saddle and out of the game. Once you've made it back to town you still don't get to rest as all the bad guys around have decided to take a pot shot at you. They're all hidden in doorways and around corners of the town's buildings, but every now and then they if stick their heads up just long enough for you to get your sight on them and show who's boss. After cleaning up the town it's back onto the horse for a race against the train as you try to overtake and stop it. Again you've got to jump over all the bushes and rocks, but this time there are small trees thrown in as well and some of the obstacles are so close together that you'll need a terrific sense of timing to make it past them all. When I first saw Kane I thought that if looked pretty primitive - like a magazine listing in fact - but once I'd given it a couple of goes it turned out to be fairly good. It is very simple, but the difficulty of the tasks has been well pitched so that you can get started easily but still need to practice in order to get anywhere. Going through the same four stages in their fixed order all the time could get boring, but sensibly there's a practice mode which allows you to choose any stage of the game and one of three difficulty levels. This allows you to get a bit of practice on all the different parts of the game and then, when you think you're ready, you can try to tackle the whole thing in one go. new standards in games programming, and it if looks old fashioned that's because it is, but it's enough fun to while away the odd rainy afternoon with and will probably appeal to younger computer owners who don't require state-of-the-art megagames.

Crash

Use of Computer 46%

Graphics 50%

Playability 46%

Getting Started 59%

Addictive Qualities 47%

Value For Money 53%

Overall 54%

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Producer: Mastertronic Retail Price: £1.99 Author: John Darnell and Simon Freeman In the days of the wild and woolly West times were hard. If you happened to be the sheriff then times were doubly hard as people tended to have a healthy disrespect for anything or anyone in authority. In this game, Kane must try and make peace with the Indians and keep law and order in his town. Kane needs a steady hand, a sure eye and a fast gun. What with runaway trains, ghost town ambushes and the perils of the prairie, he really has his work cut out for him. The game is divided up into four sections, each of which must be completed before you can progress to the next one. There is a practice mode, where you can flip through all the screens before playing the game for real. Section one involves shooting birds with a bow and arrow the feathered ones are traded with the Indians for lives in the later stages. Kane starts with ten - arrows and loses one for every bird that is missed. Every time he hits a bird, the number of arrows in his pouch stays the same. The birds are shot by lining them up in the mobile sights before pressing fire. Points are scored for every bird impaled. Section Two is a ride across the prairie. With his trusty steed beneath him, the sheriff must jump the obstacles which present themselves in his path. A misjudged leap results in the horse throwing Kane and a life is lost. If the treacherous patch of prairie is negotiated then Kane arrives in a deserted ghost town. But is it really deserted? Some mean outlaws start taking pot shots at you. You reach for your gun and start blasting. Ten baddies in the town must be shot. The number of men killed is shown in red on the left hand side of the screen, while the number of mean critters left shooting at you is shown on the right. Kane has six bullets in his gun and must run to the right of the screen to get more bullets. Baddies pop up from the saloon, the bank and the general store and need to be shot before they disappear or shoot you instead. Once all ten baddies have been sent to Boot Hill, you can progress to the Train Journey in section four. A train is out of control and only you can stop it and save the helpless passengers. Kane has to negotiate another nasty piece of prairie, strangely similar to section two, jumping over all the obstacles on his trusty nag. The train must be caught up with and stopped within a certain time limit and once the passengers are safe, the first level of the game is complete. There are three levels to the game, each increasing in difficulty and speed. Have you the guts and determination to clean up the Wild West or will you end up on Boot Hill instead? COMMENTS Control keys: Q up, A down, N left, M right, Z fire/jump Joystick: Kempston, Cursor, Interface 2 Keyboard play: Average Use of colour: good, lots used Graphics: not amazingly good Sound: spot effects Skill levels: three Screens: four

Kane rides like the wind die to all those cowboy beans - he must stop the train and jump the desert vegetation that gets in the way.