1K Games Pack

ZX Computing

Brian Owen

READERS REVIEWS Taking pen in hand, you tell us what the public really think about the goods on sale. THE 1K GAMES PACK By Artic Computing £6.00 Brian Owen This cassette consists of 11 'games', although I use the term loosely. They can be summarized by the word 'rubbish', but I will go through them one by one. The first game, Slot Machine, is a crude representation of a 1p-a-go fruit machine. You pay 1p for it to pick 3 numbers and display them in the windows of the machine, which doesn't appear until you press newline to insert the first 1p. The handle stays stationary as the numbers change. You win by either getting 3 in a row, or by the numbers adding up to 7. It either announces you're bust, or, if you've got a total of 25p you will have bust the bank. This is printed about 10 times and then the machine runs out of memory. Game 2 Art, is a familiar program where you plot a picture by moving either a PLOTting or UNPLOTting cursor around. I hadn't got far with mine, when it ran out of memory. Game 3, Slalom, is where you have to move a small representation of something through a gate, represented by two o's and as many times as you can. It does knwo when you've crashed, however. Catch me if you can is a game where you have to guide an 'X' on to a randomly moving 'O' that doesn't know where it is. Space Pirate, game 5, is where you have to guide a 3-character 'ship' which descends from the top onto a randomly moving ship at the bottom, but you have to get it exactly right. You are told how much loot you took, and after 10 dockings or misses, you are told your total, and you move on to the next game. Spacefire 1 is where you control an arrow on the left and try to shoot the randomly moving ZX81 with your laser, but you can only fire when it doesn't fire at you. Game 7, Spacefire 2 is exactly the same except the ZX81 moves from right to left towards you each go, and if you don't shoot each other by then, it returns to the right and tries again. Car Crash is a substandard car driving program where you have to control an inverse V through a constant width road without hitting the edge or a V coming the other way. You can only see a fraction of the road at a time. When you crash, it multiplies the number of SCROLLS it made by 100 meters and tells you how far you drove. Man-eating budgies is one of the few games where the whole screen is in permanent use. You have to crash into 'O's without crashing into any of the weird 3 character shapes that are nothing like budgies. In Maze, you have to move in your own time through successive lines of random blotches/spaces, until you have either hit a blob or gone through 50 blocks. You can either move horizontally, or move down another line, or fall asleep. Program 11, Wall, is a primitive attempt at 'Break-out'. Of the games, only one auto-ran, at least two ran out of memory, and they all had trouble listing. Games 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 were all made worse by the fact that there was a CLS statement in the main loop. How crude!! There were however two good things to be said for all of the programs: firstly, they all loaded ok, and secondly, they all used the cursor keys - my favourite. I don't know about the £6 charged for this package; it's hardly worth sixpence and it wouldn't come as a surprise to me to learn that this has been with drawn from sale to prevent too much long term damage to ARTIC computing. It is a complete mystery to me how this found its way onto the shelves. Surely Artic would have known that nothing of any substance would be possible within 1K of ZX81 BASIC!!!

Sinclair User

John Gilbert

SINCLAIR ACTS TO IMPROVE THE STANDARD OF ITS NAMED SOFTWARE John Gilbert looks at the latest group of cassettes issued by Sinclair and finds that it is now setting the standards. A new batch of Sinclair Research software for the ZX-81 and Spectrum shows a marked improvement in the quality of programs and a continuation of fine artwork on the cassette inserts. The reason is that the company is selling programs from other independent companies, such as Melbourne House and Artic, instead of continuing to rely on Psion, Mikro-Gen and ICL. The Hobbit which takes first place in the new releases for quality and value for money. This adventure game, which the makers claim uses artificial intelligence, is discussed in Mind Games on page 93. VU-3D, for the 48K Spectrum, is another good offering from Psion. It allows the user to create a three-dimensional representation of an object on the television screen. The object can then be rotated and viewed from any angle. The objects can be displayed as wirework figures or can be shaded. They can also be magnified and reduced. It is possible to store the figure on tape in a data file and re-load it to view again. The program costs £9.95 but even though it has some good features it still seems over-priced. Games feature strongly in the new tapes. Sinclair is selling the Artic range of adventures, A, C and D. Adventure A works on the 16K or 48K Spectrum and 16K ZX-81 and is called Planet of Death. You are stranded on a planet and must return to your spaceship. There is no guide to the keywords but with a little thought you can discover the help command. At times the suggestions can be very unhelpful and it is a good idea to construct a map, as some of the help suggestions may make you retrace your footsteps. The next adventure so far released is C, called Ship of Doom. It can be run on the 48K Spectrum and 16K ZX-81. Your ship is captured by aliens who are searching for humanoids to replace their brains with microchips. The object of the game is to escape from the alien craft by breaking the gravitational field. To do so you must find the control room of the alien ship. The help command is a little more useful in this game and it is easier to get further when playing the game. Adventure D, called Espionage island, can be used on the 48K Spectrum or 16K ZX-81. You must escape from an aircraft which is about to crash into the Atlantic. You must the reach the island safely, avoid capture, and try to discover the secret of the island. The game is more difficult than the others and many people have not managed to get out of the aircraft, even though there is a parachute. All the adventures cost £6.95. Leaving adventure games, Reversi, or Othello as it is sometimes called, can be played on the 16K Spectrum or 16K ZX-81. The game has nine levels, from novice to expert, and the computer is difficult to beat. The makers claim that Reversi reflects the strict contemporary morality of Victorian society but we believe that it can traced to Arabic origins. Reversi costs £7.95. An interesting addition to the range of software is the Artic 1K Chess. It takes some technical wizardry to squeeze this kind of game into the unexpanded ZX-81. The game can be played using one of two opening moves. Because of the lack of memory, castling, pawn promotion and capturing en passant are not allowed. The game loads in approximately 40 seconds and that is ideal for someone who wants a quick game of chess without having to load from a tape which takes several minutes. The computer also makes its moves very fast for the amount of memory available to it. 1K Chess costs £4.95. Super Glooper is an amusing game of Pac-man on the 16K ZX-81. Glooper must paint the maze before the aliens kill him. Unfortunately it is difficult to evade those aliens using the standard ZX-81 keyboard but it is not impossible. Glooper can also pick up one of the shields at the corners of the maze to protect himself and chase the aliens. On the other side of the tape is Frogs, a game of Frogger. You must get the frogs over the river via the moving boats to the jetties on the other bank. If froggie falls into the river, it drowns. You score points for each frog you get across the river and you can have eight frogs to send to their deaths. Super Glooper and Frogs cost £4.95. Another game with a familiar-sounding theme is Through the Wall. It is based on Breakout and is available for the 16K ZX-81. On the other side of the cassette is Scramble, also a familiar theme. Both games on one cassette represent good value at £4.95. A package for the 1K ZX-81, called 1K Games, has also been released. The games include Jackpot, in which you must try to win the 25 pence jackpot from a one-armed bandit; Etch and Sketch, where you can draw pictures on the screen; and Maze Game, where you must find your way out of the conventional maze. The release of this cassette, costing £4.95, is a good idea at a time when so many people are buying ZX-81s. A basic Toolkit is available for the 16K ZX-81. It provides a series of machine code routines to make the job of programming easier. It includes a re-number routine, a search and replace routine, a merge routine to put together two separate Basic programs, and a routine to put a Basic program above RAMTOP and out of the way of the NEW command. The Toolkit costs £5.95. Two database programs are available in the range for the 48K Spectrum. They are called Collector's Pack and Club Record Controller. Collector's Pack can be used to store information about coins, stamps or even records. The Club Record Controller will store information about people such as addresses and telephone numbers. It would be useful to schools or even someone who runs a private club. Both packages are easy to use and cost £9.95. Adventure B, Inca Curse, for the 48K Spectrum is an upgrade of an adventure which Artic wrote for the 16K ZX-81. The adventurer is exploring in the jungle when he finds an Incan Temple. The aim is to go in and drag out all the treasure, or as much a you can carry. It all seems so easy until you enter the game and step into the temple. The authors have managed to cram a good deal into this adventure and the Artic top score of 3,200 points will take some beating. We must admit that it is not one of the adventures in which we have made much progress. Adventure B costs £6.95. The latest release of tapes is certainly better than the previous one. The games, utility, and business areas have been covered well but there is still a lack of good educational software. The only tapes available tend to be multi-choice and question-and-answer sessions. The Psion tapes seem to be the best for quality at the moment and the ones with the most interesting concepts. None of the cassettes reviewed was bad but The Hobbit, Vu-3D, 1K Chess, and Super Glooper seem best.

Sinclair User

1K GAMES BARGAIN Eleven games in one pack for £6 must be a bargain and as they all fit into 1K of the ZX-81 they are ideal for the person who has just bought the machine. The games have to be simple to fit into the space but most are interesting and give a good guide to the possibilities of the ZX-81. There is a good variety with names like Man-eating Budgies, Space Pirate, The Wall and Maze. Attempts to play the games in sequence require stopping the cassette as soon as it has loaded but if only one game is required that can be done easily. The pack is available from Artic Computing at [redacted].