Games 4

C&VG (Computer & Video Games)

SINCLAIR'S SIX PACK VALUE Sinclair's six-pack of games for the ZX81 owner with a 16K pack is good value for money at only £3.95. The pack, available from Sinclair Research is called, unimaginatively, Games Pack 4 and starts off with Cursor Handling which follows some of the early cursor type programs. The screen is lull of numbers, with little attempt at graphics to alleviate the numerical information. The piece of paper tucked into the cassette case gives rudimentary instructions, but these are also presented at the beginning of each program on the screen (this applies to all Sinclair games). The program is fairly long, taking about 3 minutes to load. You are a pilot, you can control the throttle of your craft - keys 1 to 9, and altitude - P for clockwise, Q for anticlockwise. Height, horizontal and vertical velocity, fuel supply, throttle setting, altitude and time are displayed. The screen flashes every two seconds as the 'instrumentation' is updated. A simple graphic display shows height and horizontal position. Twenty-One is a simple pontoon-type game, but played with dice instead of cards. It is an interesting two-player game, and the randomness of the throws can create great excitement. Combat is a rather strange game. It purports to be a simple Space Invaders-type game, where your craft has to avoid being blown up by the alien. Unfortunately, the control keys - using A, S, Z and X - are not as obvious or easy to use as the cursor keys would be. A simple modification to the program could fix this - rather boring really. Substrike is very similar - however this time the attacker is on screen! Nobody who has so far played this game, has won! Code Breaker is a Mastermind game where you have 10 guesses to get the correct four number sequence. Finally this cassette has Mayday, which is a space rescue game. A body is adrift in a 7x7x7 matrix, you are given 10 attempts at trying to discover the position in this matrix of the body. There is also a time limit. Once you have 'cracked' the method of finding the body from the clues given, it becomes quite easy. While the games taken individually are not world beaters, this cassette is still good value and no loading problems. A number of different tape recorders were used and none gave any problems.