Mad Martha

Crash

Producer: Mikrogen, 48K £6.95 To prove how much fun a BASIC written adventure can be try this little domestic ditty. As hen-pecked husband, Henry, steal your wife's money. Creep out of the house without waking baby or tripping over the wailing moggy, and have a night out on the town at the casino an other similarly unsavoury places. The problem is that your wife, dear Martha, is an escapee from Friday the 13th Part Six 4D, a homicidal maniac with an axe! Good vocabulary and an invariable program that that resembles a word maze. Getting things in absolutely the correct order is the name of the game here. But if you are too clever there are very tricky little arcade sequences included. To purists these may be upsetting, but they do liven up the adventure. If you have tried Mad Martha and enjoyed it then try.

Read it at Crash - The Online Edition

Crash

Producer: Mikrogen, 48K £6.95 To prove how much fun a BASIC written adventure can be try this little domestic ditty. As hen-pecked husband, Henry, steal your wife's money. Creep out of the house without waking baby or tripping over the wailing moggy, and have a night out on the town at the casino an other similarly unsavoury places. The problem is that your wife, dear Martha, is an escapee from Friday the 13th Part Six 4D, a homicidal maniac with an axe! Good vocabulary and an invariable program that that resembles a word maze. Getting things in absolutely the correct order is the name of the game here. But if you are too clever there are very tricky little arcade sequences included. To purists these may be upsetting, but they do liven up the adventure. If you have tried Mad Martha and enjoyed it then try.

Crash

Producer: Mikrogen, 48K £6.95 To prove how much fun a BASIC written adventure can be try this little domestic ditty. As hen-pecked husband, Henry, steal your wife's money. Creep out of the house without waking baby or tripping over the wailing moggy, and have a night out on the town at the casino an other similarly unsavoury places. The problem is that your wife, dear Martha, is an escapee from Friday the 13th Part Six 4D, a homicidal maniac with an axe! Good vocabulary and an invariable program that that resembles a word maze. Getting things in absolutely the correct order is the name of the game here. But if you are too clever there are very tricky little arcade sequences included. To purists these may be upsetting, but they do liven up the adventure. If you have tried Mad Martha and enjoyed it then try.

C&VG (Computer & Video Games)

Keith Campbell

FRUSTRATED ON THE THRONE! My main criteria for an enjoyable game are that it must have an interesting plot, and be "user friendly". Mad Martha has been sitting on my software shelf for some weeks, waiting to take its place in the memory of my Spectrum. Its theme intrigued me - taking the role of a henpecked husband who dares not put a foot wrong, but secretly plots to get hold of his wife's money to have a good night out on the town, seemed a safe and satisfying revenge fantasy. Loading the game proved troublesome - I kept getting I/O errors. The cassette label didn't indicate how many copies it contained, so I listened to the lilting melody of the data signals until I reached a spot where I thought another copy might start. I was lucky. It loaded, and at last I was into the game. It began in a bedroom complete with bed and potty, these being drawn on the screen. Examining the potty revealed a key just below the rim. Risking whatever else might be in the potty, I thrust in my hand and took the key. Further examination of the potty revealed there was a key inside, just below the rim. Examination of the bed revealed there was a key inside, just below the rim...! I tried doing useful things with the potty, but was not rewarded. I tried opening the window without success. I opened the door, and found myself in a corridor, from where I entered a bathroom, complete with "throne" and toilet roll. Neither of these objects reacted when I tried to use them, nor could I have a bath. I concluded that I was extremely clean and must be in need of a laxative. By now I was severely frustrated with all these pictorial details to hand and no way to use them, as they went unrecognised by the program. I was also getting impatient with the 6-second response time. Inadvertently entering the baby's room, I woke the little brat, and expected Mad Martha to attack. She certainly did! She killed me on two or three occasions, and each time the program cleared from memory. It did the same each time I typed "quit". Reloading was tiresome, especially with my duff copy. I thus formed the opinion that Mad Martha was positively "user hostile". A pity, since the original idea held promise but was wasted by irksome features of the program and insufficient development of the plot. I left my 13-year-old daughter Veronica playing it, and for a while afterwards heard groans every time she had to reload. "Wouldn't it be awful", she said, "if you had saved up your pocket money and found you had bought a game like this?" Before long, she was playing something else, Mad Martha unsolved and back on the software shelf - probably the best place for it! Reviewer: Keith Campbell

Your Computer

Meirion Jones

FROM DEEP-SPACE ADVENTURES TO WORLDLY BOARD-GAMES IN MEIRION JONES' SURVEY Less than a year ago the appearance of Scrabble on disc for the Apple caused consternation among micro owners. The program defeated three-quarters of the humans who challenged it to a dual of words. At least Scrabblers could comfort themselves with the knowledge that they had been beaten by a £750 disc-based system. Now Psion has taken even that consolation away by launching an improved version of the game with a bigger dictionary and better graphics which will run on a £150 system - the 48K Spectrum and a cassette recorder. This illustrates the rate at which Spectrum software is improving. The latest releases include clever implementations of board- games like monopoly and arcade favourites such as Scramble, long and complicated Adventures with names like Knight's Quest and combinations of arcade and Adventure like Pixel's Trader. While serious and educational material software is still thin on the ground, programs like Hewson's Countries of the World show how much useful information can be packed into the Spectrum. MORE ORIGINALITY Unfortunately the standard is not uniformly high. Sometimes imagination is lacking. Bridge software still insists on marketing what it calls "an exciting game for two to six players". Yes, you guessed, it is boring old Hangman. At other times graphics are weak. Micromega sells a version of Roulette which features a roulette wheel which looks more like a flying saucer on an off day. There is still too high a percentage of unloadable tapes and of tapes which you wished had been unloadable. Davic Games Tape 1, for instance, features a game which has Tooth Monsters instead of ghosts, which is probably the dullest-ever version of Pac-Man. The Tooth Monsters themselves are about as threatening as a pair of jelly babies. If you want real tooth monsters try Imagine's excellent Molar Maul. This is a real nerve-tingler from the moment that an enormous set of gleaming teeth appears on the screen like something out of jaws. Armed only with a toothbrush and toothpaste you have to defend these dentures from swarms of evil bacteria. These germs go by the name of Dentorium Kamikazium which allows Imagine to talk about "the DK Menace" - a triple pun partly at the expense of Imagine's Ipswich-based rivals DK'tronics. Imagine's punsters are at work again on the cover of Arcadia where we are told we are fighting against the "deadly menace of the Atarian empire". Perhaps this explains why Sinclair owners have shown such enthusiasm for Arcadia because the game itself is just a lacklustre version of Galaxians. Much better is Imagine's Schizoids. If, like me, you have always wanted to be a bulldozer, Schizoids is the game for you. You are a bulldozer in outer space and your job is to push tumbling cubes and pyramids into a nearby black hole without falling in yourself. Perhaps this nearby anomaly in the space-time continuum affects the wavelength of light. At any rate the game itself is only in black and white. Pixel is another company which cannot resist veiled messages. Trader is part space Adventure and part arcade game. The Adventure, trading commodities between different worlds, is more convincing than the crude skill tests such as finding the right orbit when approaching a planet. Trader may well be bought as much for its attractive packaging - which includes a survival guide for the would-be Trader - as for the game itself. After buying supplies for your first trip you set out for the planet Psi where the inhabitants - yes, Psions - who look like a cross between Clive Sinclair's beard and a muppet ask you tiresome questions such as "What is the formula for carbon monoxide?" or "What is your first name?". Entering "Clive" as an answer elicits the response "What a strange name". So, for that matter, does any other reply. If disaster should strike, a caption will appear saying "Is this the end...?" The answer is "No" because Trader is a trilogy so there are another two complete parts to load from the tape. There are many more traditional text Adventures of the "Go south, open door, take gold" variety but the narrowness of the replies they will accept is often irritating. DOWN THE MINES Mikrogen's Mines of Saturn starts with a cheery "Have fun" and then proceeds to ask questions like "Tunnels lead N, S, E and W - what will you do?" Attempts to answer "N" or "go N" or even "go n" will not wash. It must be "go North" or nothing. At least Phipps' Knight's Quest has a 120-word vocabulary to help you on your damsel-ridden way to a castle in the air. Everest by Richard Shepherd Software is more of a strategy game than a straight Adventure. You have to take enough food and rope to climb the mountain and cope with every hazard. I enjoyed the climb but I never reached the summit - partly because the Sherpas are not what they used to be. When Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Everest for the first time he managed to find a Sherpa called Tensing. The time when you visit a Nepalese hill village to recruit porters you are asked to choose between Sherpas with names like Keith, Brian, Ron, Tim and Paul. Presumably they are ex-hippies, lost on the road to Katmandu. Things obviously still are what they used to be down at Mikrogen. If Andy Capp sends you into fits of laughter Mad Martha might just raise a smile. It is the same old story, boy meets girl, well, hen-pecked husband meets axe-happy wife - all very predictable. Mikrogen also sells arcade games like Cosmic Raiders - a competent impersonation of Defender with a long-range screen and grabbers. Melbourne House's variation on the same theme is called Penetrator. The display looks more like the arcade version of Scramble. A training facility to help you build up specific game skills is a good idea. C-Tech's Rocket Raider is yet another competent variant on similar lines. Artic offers a suicidally fast asteroids game called Cosmic Debris. Still in the arcades, both Elfin Software and Quicksilva produce robot battles which are of the Pac-Man-meets-Tanks variety. Elfin's Tobor has the more exciting opening titles but loses on points to Quicksilva's QS Frenzy whose exotic science-fiction plot seems to offer a better justification for the game. Speaking of Tanks, DK'tronics 3D Tanx was one of my favourite programs in the whole batch. You can track you gun barrel from side to side and adjust the elevation as you lob your shells at four lines of moving tanks which can fire back at you. Although the opposing tanks at first appear to be crawling across a structure that looks more like Brighton's West Pier than a battleground, this is one of my four games you might catch me paying to play in an arcade. JOIN THE PROFESSIONALS Artic's Combat Zone is another ambitious attempt at a Tank game. Your target and the landscape - a few pyramids on an invisible plane - look like refugees from Psion's Vu-3D program. They are very simple three-dimensional shapes but they change position smoothly and realistically as if you were walking past them in some world inside your Spectrum. You and your opponents fire fragments of cubist paintings at each other but the abstraction is not so important as the fact that you are playing the first real Spectrum game in three dimensions - Vu-3D itself is a Psion program which allows you to build up three dimensional objects on the screen and then rotate them, or float them towards you and back again. In effect it is a crude version of the mainframe programs which create the effects for films like Tron. ET makes an appearance too in an Abbex Adventure with voices called ETX. Unfortunately after loading pages of instructions about how I should phone home ending with the advice that I should treat any MI5 man who appeared as an enemy, the tape self-destructed. This left me with an unnerving impression of "the strength of Britain's security services. The secret police are certainly important in DK'tronics strategy game called Dictator. The setting is a banana republic. The instructions ominously point out that "your rule is measured in months". You have to balance political factions, army, secret police, peasants, landowners, guerillas and superpowers if you are to survive. Breaking into embassies would doubtless be all in a day's work for a dictator. So for all prospective saviours of the nation, Sinclair's Embassy Assault will come in useful. It is very much like those maze games which present your view. standing in the maze. Instead of trying to avoid a minotaur, this time you are looking for secret codes and the like. All this is enough to send you back into the arcades but Jet Pac's creators have moved from the arcades into home computing. Ultimate Play the Game's Jet Pac puts you into the position of an astronaut who has to build a rocket from the pieces he can find sitting on clouds around the screen. The scenario is not entirely convincing but it makes for a good game. The same cannot be said of the simulations by CCS. CCS's representations of the oil business, Dallas, running a printers, Print Room, and of international aviation, Airline, may be realistic but they are not very exciting. Although these were originally designed as training for middle management, livelier presentation would not necessarily have made them less useful. Hewson's simulations of air-traffic control, Heathrow, and the Nightflite flight simulator are more convincing. Board-games seem to transfer particularly well to the Spectrum. Psion's Scrabble has already been recommended. With its four levels of play and 11,000-word dictionary it can offer almost as tough opposition as you could want. There are also two different approaches to that old favourite Monopoly. Automonopoli offers a continuous display of the part of the board around your current position. This display moves smoothly when the dice are thrown. Do Not Pass Go from Workforce has a less interesting display but at least shows the whole board all the time. Automonopoli allows you to personalise the program with the names of players and both programs give the option of being either a board for humans to play on or of letting the computer join in as a player. In each case the computer becomes a soft opponent once you have reached the stage of building houses and hotels. If you have ever wandered into a rundown dockland hotel or pub and been confronted by the sort of balding drunk who says he used to sail the seven seas and boasts that he can name the capital of any country you care to choose, I can reveal his secret. At home he has a Spectrum with Hewson's Countries of the World up and running on it. At the touch of a button it will remind you that N'djamena is the capital of Chad or that Yaounde is the capital of Cameroon. In the corner of the pub someone with probably be playing a video game not unlike Firebirds. Softek's Firebirds is a Galaxians-type game distinguished by good croaking noises from the birds. Still on the subject of sound effects Workforce's Jaws Revenge is very noisy and fun. The graphics are great. You are a shark and you are after the divers and- boats which are after you. Mined Out from Quicksilva is a very strange version of Mines. It is subtitled "Rescue Bill the worm from certain old age" and if you find a way through the first minefield you then have to rescue damsels in distress. Someone at Quicksilva has been playing too many Adventure games and it is beginning to show. The last words on the cassette packet read "the image fades to soft focus which is replaced by waves falling on a rocky shore, except in Bill's dream there are no waves or soft focus..." It is certainly time that software cassettes carried a government health warning. Company: Abbex Game: ETX Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.95 Company: Artic Game: 3D Combat Zone Memory: 48K Price: £5.95 Company: Artic Game: Cosmic Debris Memory: 48K Price: £4.95 Company: Automata Game: Automonopoli Memory: 16/48K Price: £6 Company: Bridge Game: Lynchmob Memory: 16K Price: £6.50 Company: CCS Software Game: Dallas Memory: 48K Price: £6 Company: C-Tech Game: Rocket Raider Memory: 16K Price: £6.50 Company: DK'Tronics Game: 3D Tanx Memory: 16/48K Price: £4.95 Company: DK'Tronics Game: Dictator Memory: 48K Price: £4.95 Company: Elfin Game: Tobor Memory: 48K Price: £7.95 Company: Hewson Game: Heathrow Memory: 16/48K Price: £7.95 Company: Hewson Game: Countries of the World Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.95 Company: Imagine Game: Molar Maul Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.50 Company: Imagine Game: Arcadia Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.50 Company: Imagine Game: Schizoids Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.50 Company: Melbourne House Game: Penetrator Memory: 48K Price: £6.95 Company: Micromega Game: Roulette Memory: 16/48K Price: £4.95 Company: Mikrogen Game: Cosmic Raiders Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.95 Company: Mikrogen Game: Mines of Saturn Memory: 48K Price: £5.95 Company: Mikrogen Game: Mad Martha Memory: 48K Price: £6.95 Company: Phipps Game: Knight's Quest Memory: 48K Price: £5.95 Company: Psion Game: Scrabble Memory: 48K Price: £15.95 Company: Psion Game: Vu-3D Memory: 48K Price: £9.95 Company: Quicksilva Game: Frenzy Memory: 16/48K Price: £4.95 Company: Quicksilva Game: Trader Memory: 16/48K Price: £9.95 Company: Quicksilva Game: Mined Out Memory: 48K Price: £4.95 Company: Richard Shepherd Game: Everest Ascent Memory: 48K Price: £6.50 Company: Sinclair Research Game: Embassy Assault Memory: 16/48K Price: £4.95 Company: Softek Game: Firebirds Memory: 16K Price: £5.95 Company: Ultimate Play The Game Game: Jet Pac Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.50 Company: Workforce Game: Do Not Pass Go Memory: 48K Price: £6.95 Company: Workforce Game: Jaws Revenge Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.95

Personal Computer News

Lasting Appeal 4/5

Playability 4/5

Use Of Machine 4/5

Value For Money 5/5

Shirley Fawcett

NAME: Mad Martha SYSTEM: 48K Spectrum PRICE: £6.95 PUBLISHER: Mikrogen FORMAT: Cassette LANGUAGE: Basic OUTLETS: Mail Order MARTHA THE KILLER You've zapped aliens by the barrel-load, and you've munched dots till they're coating out of you're ears. You've worn your brain cells down to stumps trying to kill giants and go north and enter castles and find mysterious black boxes on concealed ledges in subterranean caverns. Maybe from time to time you've wondered why hardly anyone writes games that combine the two. Well, now somebody has, in the shape of this deeply sexist game. Mad Martha (men get chopped up in this one!). OBJECTIVES You are the weedy Henry Littlefellow, a puny specimen of manhood improbably married to a strapping great wife Martha. Martha likes nothing better than to go charging after you with an axe, given the slightest provocation: must be a founder member of the Society for Cutting Up Men (that's SCUM to you). But you plan to thumb your nose at her by stealing the week's housekeeping money and hitting the town to gamble and drink it away. You'll have to lay hands on the loot without alerting the lovely Martha, though, or you can wave this world goodbye. FIRST IMPRESSIONS The label hardly does justice to this completely dotty adventure. There's a rather washed-out looking picture of the mighty Martha, axe in hand, gaining on the sweating Henry. There's a brief set of loading instructions, an even briefer set of adventure commands, and that's it. There's no hint that you can save the game, though while loading the game it pauses to ask you if you want to load a new game. Then it's into a title screen which gives you the gist of the plot and tells you: 'If you escape with the lolly, you can explore the bright lights at your leisure... or peril! Hit a key to begin, the Spectrum plays a real Hollywood-style B movie theme tune, and the hunt is on... IN PLAY You're in the bedroom, complete with blue bed, purple door and a chamber pot. One thing this program isn't shy about is the use of colour. No wonder Henry feels the urge to get out from time to time. You scuttle around the house, with plenty of jollies in store for you as you open the various doors, though sadly, the pictures are only there when you first enter a particular room. You have to banish them if you want to carry on playing. The nursery is tasty, complete with giant teddy hear. The piece de resistance, though, must be 'The WEE ROOM', which of course stars 'The Throne'. There's something rather weird about the geography of the house. You land up near an understairs cupboard at one point, and if you decide to try going upstairs, you land up in the bedroom again. You never actually come downstairs, though. And objects which you find in cupboards and take away with you somehow miraculously seem still to be there if you take a second look in the cupboard. Minor points, maybe, but they could do with being tidied up. Hungry cats and crying babies are the biggest danger in this part of the program, as they are liable to bring your sweet spouse running. Once that happens, there's not a thing you can do about it. You get a grandstand view of your own execution, complete with instant tombstone (will someone please write a program without tombstones in it?). I found the cash and helped myself. So far, so good, but I was immediately brought to a standstill by the discovery that, to get any further. I would have to beat what I found to be a very tricky arcade-style game. I plugged away at the game, time and time again. Time and time again I failed to beat it, Martha came running, and it was back to square one. I would have welcomed some short cut to get me to this point with just a couple of commands rather than making all 20-odd moves to get there - especially since response times are dreadfully slow. At long last, heart in mouth, I cracked it. Picked up enough pound notes, didn't trip over the cat too many times, still had a life left. I was on top of the world, assuming that now I would be able to save the game, and wouldn't have to go through all that lot again, or explore the house for the twenty-fifth time. But then came an even worse shock... and I won't spoil your undoubted pleasure by telling you what came after that. Suffice it to say that the only way I got an idea of what else happens was by taking a look at the program listing. And there's certainly a good deal in there. Casinos, with plenty of opportunity to fritter away your ill-gotten goodies at roulette, pubs, cinemas, even an establishment named 'Fifi's Fun Emporium'. Gosh. But don't ever forget that this part of the program, too, is not the least bit Martha-proof. Save the game, for goodness sake, before you do something daft and get the chop. Again. VERDICT This is a game to invest in - but only if you have either the patience of a dead donkey, or you're a natural wonder at unexpected arcade action. It's funny. It's genuinely original, and the graphics are great though it's a shame they vanish when the text appears. True, it's sexist and violent - but after all, it isn't every day that the women get a chance to take a swing at the men. So get a slice of the action...

C&VG (Computer & Video Games)

HEN-PECKED HERO IS ON THE RUN! Poor little Henry is the hen pecked hero of this domestic tale. One night Henry can take no more. He steals his wages from his wife's purse, sneaks out of the house being careful not to wake the baby or trip over the cat, and heads for the bright lights to have some fun. Trouble is he runs out of money. His only way to raise some cash is to gamble his few remaining pounds on the spinning wheel of the roulette table. Just as Henry is getting into his evening at the tables his wife - Mad Martha - has noticed his absence. Realising Henry has absconded with the housekeeping she sets out after him with an axe. Guess what part you play in this happy little tale? That's right, you are Henry. Watch out for that axe! Mad Martha runs on a Sinclair Spectrum or ZX81 in 16K and costs £5.95 from Swansea based Saturnsoft. Also new from Saturnsoft this month are two adventure games for the Spectrum or the ZX81. Mines of Saturn challenges you to find the hidden crystal mines and then escape with the goodies. If you succeed, then you are ready for a stiffer challenge - to find your way safely back to planet Earth. Mines of Saturn and Return to Earth are available from the Swansea-based firm at £4.95 for the ZX81 versions and £5.95 for the Spectrum with a pound off if you purchase both games.