Games 1

C&VG (Computer & Video Games)

CAN LIFE EXIST IN JUST 1K? When there's only 1K of memory to play with, the programmer is faced with a real challenge. Sinclair have come up with six games for its ZX81 and, although the games are necessarily simple in concept, Games Pack No. 1 represents good value at £3.95. The software package consists of a C12 tape with three games on each side, along with program loading instructions and a short but descriptive summary of the actual playing instructions. I particularly enjoyed the Orbit and Meteors games which involve, in the first case docking your spacecraft with cargo - rather tricky; and avoiding meteorites for as long as you can in the second game. Sniper and Wolfpack are both games for those of us with bloodlust! Sniper involves making 40 sequential pot shots at a randomly appearing figure, the final score informing you how many times you managed to kill him. Wolfpack is not a wolf shooting game but, in fact, dropping depth charges on to a submarine, this is again hard to master. The final two games were not so entertaining. Golf asks you to enter a number between 35 and 75 to determine the strength of your drive and see if you can drop the ball in the hole. By the way, don't expect too sophisticated graphics, this is just a line with a hole at one end. Life is another version of the cell generating game. By entering a two letter code you build up a pattern of "cells" and according to several simple rules you can then automatically generate new cells to build up random patterns. There were loading difficulties, but only on side two, and after loading the tape with the 16K RAM pack the problem was overcome.