Galaxy Invaders

ZX Computing

Overall 70%

Alistair Lindsay 70%

FORMIDABLE SOFTWARE ZX Computing has a number of 'staff reviewers', but we welcome reviews from readers. This review comes from Darren-John Norbury of Andover who looks at a ZX81 cassette from ICL, and the Psion/Sinclair Fantasy Games' tape. Alistair Lindsay from Frodsham, Warrington reviews Bridge Software's "Galaxy Invaders" After hearing so many good reports about this cassette, I decided that I must see it. I sent off on a Bank Holiday and it arrived four days later - good service, you must admit. When you have loaded it, (I did it first time), it runs automatically. You are asked what level you want to play on, between 0 and 9. On level 0 it is just about possible to have a long game, but you have to be a complete expert to score anything on level 9. The game is flicker-free but that is replaced by the fact that the aliens "shimmer". This means that it is hard on the eyes and therefore difficult to play for longer than half an hour. Apart from this fact, the game is very good and I can see that much more thought has gone into it than into some (most) ZX Invaders. The shapes of the invaders are very good, considering that they can only use the Sinclair character set. One thing which I discovered is that by using Tim Hartnell's method of finding out how much memory a program uses, this Invaders takes up just over 2K. In some of the advertisements it says that a 16K RAM pack is required. Bridge Software are not the only company to do this, by any means. (Tim Hartnell's method is: "Print Peek 16396 + 256 * Peek 16397 - 16509". When this is used as a direct command, it will print the number of bytes which that particular program has used). CONCLUSION This is definitely one of the best "Invaders" type games on the market at the moment for the ZX81. It only takes up just over 2K of memory, so do not be put off if you do not have a full 16K expansion. "Galaxy Invaders" costs £3 from Bridge Software of [redacted]. It has adequate instructions and my percentage rating for it (with the average "Invaders" scoring 50%) is 70%.