Odyssey 1

Personal Computer News

Overall 3/10

Bryan Skinner 3/10

PRICE: £4.95 PUBLISHER: Softstone, [redacted] And you thought that Spectrum games had come of age? Odyssey 1 is a throwback to early days of games software. The inlay is almost more interesting than the game itself. 'It is the duty of Algorth (that's you), an incredible fighting man-machine, to protect the Star Gate'; 'The Riggos will attack with the dreaded Blind Mutons', and so on. What all this boils down to on the first screen is you at the intersection of' four red walls, surrounded by four quadrants. It's in these that the dreaded Blind Mutons are assembled; they're somewhat indistinct purple blobs which fire more or less at random. Algorth is yellow and can be rotated to fire through the compass points as well as diagonally. Shown as a rectangular torso and a blob for his head, his firing arm stuck out to one side, or elbow bent, he's one of the worst UDGs I've ever seen. At the foot of the screen there's your score, a high-score and lives left. You can move Algy into the quadrants, blasting away at your adversary. Here you control a space ship and have to fire at diagonal waves of coloured enemy vessels - the awesome Astro-Fleet. Got to watch out though, as each destroyed vessel changes the craft into a homing missile, if you survive this, on screen three you'll meet the Rigossans - pterodactyl-like creatures of incredible ferocity. I was almost tempted to have a bash, just for a laugh. Leave it out, this one's a bad egg; even at just under a fiver.

Crash

Overall 72%

Producer: Perfection, 16K £5.50 (1) Author: T Williams First prize winner of the games section of Computech 83, Odyssey 1 is a three-part mixture of arcade games, designed to test the skills and reflexes of shoot em up freaks. Screen 1 is a 'Berserk' type with your man at the cross roads of four rooms filled with firing robots. He can move in any direction with rotational controls, go forward and fire up or down at will. Getting through this screen lands you up in an 'Arcadia' type situation where wrap around wedges of alien ships fly overhead dropping missiles on you as you shoot up at them. Mean trick here is that once dropped, the missiles wrap around vertically, gradually filling the screen with weaponry. Screen 3 pits you against pterodactyl-like creatures which swoop down in a wholly original and alarming manner. The general feeling of our reviewers was that his was a surprisingly difficult and addictive game to play. The graphics are fairly small but the 100% machine code program makes everything work extremely well and smoothly. No joystick option, overall CRASH rating 72%, recommended.

Read it at Crash - The Online Edition

Crash

Overall 72%

Producer: Perfection, 16K £5.50 (1) Author: T Williams First prize winner of the games section of Computech 83, Odyssey 1 is a three-part mixture of arcade games, designed to test the skills and reflexes of shoot em up freaks. Screen 1 is a 'Berserk' type with your man at the cross roads of four rooms filled with firing robots. He can move in any direction with rotational controls, go forward and fire up or down at will. Getting through this screen lands you up in an 'Arcadia' type situation where wrap around wedges of alien ships fly overhead dropping missiles on you as you shoot up at them. Mean trick here is that once dropped, the missiles wrap around vertically, gradually filling the screen with weaponry. Screen 3 pits you against pterodactyl-like creatures which swoop down in a wholly original and alarming manner. The general feeling of our reviewers was that his was a surprisingly difficult and addictive game to play. The graphics are fairly small but the 100% machine code program makes everything work extremely well and smoothly. No joystick option, overall CRASH rating 72%, recommended.

Crash

Use of Computer 63%

Graphics 60%

Playability 80%

Getting Started 72%

Addictive Qualities 83%

Value For Money 75%

Overall 72%

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Producer: Perfection Software Memory Required: 16K Recommended Retail Price: £5.50 Game Type: Arcade Author: T Williams Features: 100% machine code, on-screen scoring, hi score, freeze frame. This is a 3-part arcade game. Stage one is a berserk variation. You find your man at the centre of the screen, standing at the open crossing between four rooms, containing diamond shaped baffles and several purple robots or 'dreaded blind mutons' as the inlay blurb describes them. Despite their blindness they fire away into the dark at random, keeping you on your toes. Your controls are asteroidal, ie rotate left and right, thrust and fire. The program allows for continuous fire/rotation/thrust. The walls of the rooms are electrified and must be avoided and we got the feeling some of the diamonds killed us off too. Otherwise it's fairly easy to kill off the mutons, which leads you into stage two. Now you're faced with an Arcadia copy. Staggered rows of alien ships sail across the screen from left to right and your ship can move across the bottom of the screen or thrust up to avoid the wedges of aliens as they get lower. At first it all seems pretty easy to hit them, but every ship hit turns into a falling missile. A clever move this, since it forces you to move the instant after firing - and meaner still, the missiles don't vanish when they hit the ground, but wrap vertically round the screen. So the more ships you hit the more the screen fills with flying weaponry. Stage three pits you against pterodactyl-like creatures with strange habits - but we won't spoil your fun and tell you what happens when you shoot one. General: Now as it does not provide a standard joystick option anyone using a programmable interface will have to load the game first to discover the keys: However they are: rotate left: Caps Shift; rotate right: Z; thrust: H - ENTER: Fire: Y-P: Pause:6-0; and S starts the game.

Timothy Williams' prize winning ODYSSEY 1. First screen is a 'Berserk' type.