On Cue

Your Sinclair

Overall 4/10

Nat Pryce 4/10

BARGAIN BASEMENT And down in the basement this month, it's Nat Pryce - himself available at 20% discount on alternate Thursdays. Any offers? ON CUE Mastertronic Added Dimension £2.99 Reviewer: Nat Pryce Snooker games have been around on the Speccy ever since the first rubber keyed door stop stepped off the ark, and none of 'em have been anything to write home about, almost as bad as watching the stuff on TV in fact. On Cue is no better than any other snooker game though in this package, you get both pool and snooker games on one cassette. It suffers from all the worst problems possible in this kind of game. Attribute problems change the colours of the balls, the controls are fiddly, inaccurate and sometimes over-responsive, and the balls slow down drastically when many are moving. On Cue is fun for a while, but the appeal soon wears off and it becomes terribly boring. Only buy this if you know you like this kind of thing.

Sinclair User

Graphics 50%

Sound 45%

Playability 55%

Lastability 55%

Overall 52%

Chris Jenkins 52%

Label: MAD Author: Sean de Bray Price: £2.99 Memory: 48K/128K Joystick: various Reviewer: Chris Jenkins Good evenings everybody peeps. Tonights I ham talkin' about one of my alltime fave compute games, the game of snook, you know, that with the chalky stick for which you need plenties of balls. There is lots of games of snook on the Spec compute, an' you know they is all called Champions Snook or Jolly Good Pool. Well this one is a little diff, it is called On Cue because there is two games on it. snook an' pool, an' because it turned up just in time to get reviewed in this ish, ha ha little jokes. There's not much diff between snook an' pool, you know; in one, you knock the balls in the pocks red-colour-red-colour-red-colour like that, in the other it's all the same colour, much simpler, specially for supporters of the Arsenal. So you plugs in your joys stick, or uses your keyboards to move the curse (that's a little X for peeps who don't know better) around the screen. First you has to position the curse, then you press fire and choose the spin. Up, down, left, right, any bloody combination, you select on the big white ball on the top right then press Fire again. Last you choose power, usin' bar chart on left, the press fire and corblimeyhurricanehiggins, off goes the balls all over place. Except some of them goes nice an' fast, an others crawl around like Ossie Ardiles on Valiums. It gotta be said all the angles work like theys meant. The computer got three skill levels from 'Dennis Taylor with his eyes shut' to 'Cliff snort snort I takes a long time to pot a ball Thorburn' an' it knows more about fouls than Chelsea FC, an' tells you whose go it is and whether you want red balls or coloureds. Other great thing is, peeps can make their own screens using game designer, pick up balls, put them anywheres deletes them, then goes back to game. So anyways, it's not bad for £2.99 but oh blimeys! Do you have to wait for the compute to make up its mind which balls to shootl 'Trying Red 1"... 'Trying Red 2"... "Trying Red 3"... I'll say it's bloody trying! You could eat a giant kebab with tomate lettis onion peppers gherks cuke mouse droppings oh blimey how did those get in there lamb pitta an' lots chilisauce while you was waitin'. So, it's not quite as interest as Steve "Interest" Davies, but it won't give you pain in the head like Alex 'oh dears mister journalist I appear to have nutted you in the brain,' Higgins.