Gulp

ZX Computing

Joseph Nicholson

YOU HAVE BEEN SEEN GULPING... I bought Campbell Systems' GULP from W H Smith for £3.95. When I bought the game I was under the impression that this was a kind of one 'ghost' Pac-man game under a new name. The only 'instructions' on the cassette for playing the game was "Can YOU outwit the GRUESOME GULPER that seeks out... gives chase... accelerates... and devours!". I had not much to go on. The game seemed to be saved under a name other than "GULP" as when I typed LOAD "GULP", it didn't load, and when I typed LOAD "" it loaded very easily. It took about two minutes to load. The game auto-ran. A menu appeared, it said: "A...PLAY, B...MAZE, C...SPEED, D...GRADE, E...RESET, F...SAVE, PRESS G FOR INSTRUCTIONS." I pressed G. I was reassured that the game WAS a one 'ghost' version of Pac-man, the 'ghost' being called a 'chaser'. You have 5 lives and you have to eat up all the dots in the maze. The more you eat the faster he gets. You have a choice of 5 different mazes, wow! The cursor keys are used to move. You are an '0' and you start in the middle of the screen (on all games apart from game 3 where you start at the left-hand side). The chaser is an inverse 'X' and he starts in the bottom right-hand corner. High scores are kept. Pressing newline again explained what the menu meant. The speed of the game could be altered by pressing 'c' and the appropriate number (1-), and his acceleration could be altered by pressing 'd'. I set the speed to 1 and the acceleration to 1 for the slowest game. The maze was already set at 1 so I pressed 'A' to RUN. The maze flashed up instantly, obviously written in machine code. It looked suitably complicated. The game moved at a reasonable pace. One point I noticed was that your movement stopped directly a finger was lifted from the key. This is different from the movement in the arcades and makes the game much harder. The maze lacked things like power pills and tunnels, but the fact that you could choose one of 5 mazes and choose the speed and acceleration seemed to make the game just as good. In maze 5 the walls Of the maze make the world 'GULP'! The game is very addictive and great fun, but I do have a few grumbles: When the screen is cleared of dots the game does not display a new screenful. Instead it relies on you pressing the '0' key to end the game. Some mazes have more dots than others, so if you win maze 2 for instance, you could still beat that high score on maze 1. However, this problem is compensated for by a function that allows you to reset the high score. My last grumble is that when a life is lost the chaser places another dot in the square that he started off from. This means that to obtain the best score you have to lose all your lives. This seems pretty idiotic. However, after all those grumbles I still stick to my statement that the game is exciting, addictive and great fun to play.