Trader

Sinclair User

Gilbert Factor 6/10

FAVOURITES OF YESTERYEAR Ship of Doom Memory: 16K Price: £6.95 Volcanic Dungeon Memory: 16K Price: £5 Pimania Memory: 16K Price: £10 Trader Trilogy Memory: 16K Price: £6.95 Football Manager Memory: 16K Price: £5.95 Dallas Memory: 16K Price: £5 FAVOURITES OF YESTERYEAR THE ZX-81 may leave much to be desired as an arcade games machine but it is perfect if you want to play adventures. A good keyboard is not necessary and high-resolution colour graphics is not an integral part of adventures which are, in most cases, text only. The ZX-81 also has 16K of usable memory, so a programmer is not restricted by RAM requirements. It is not surprising therefore that many good adventures have been developed for the machine. One of the first to be produced was Ship of Doom from Artic Computing. It has a text-only format and follows the usual space plot where your player-character is stranded on a strange and alien ship which you have gone to investigate. You have to suffer the perils of ice and metal rooms while trying to find the key to the control room of the spaceship. As one of the first adventures it was accepted with glee by the addicts. Few people have managed to solve it, although it is one of the easiest adventures in the Artic series. Ship of Doom can be obtained from Artic Computing. The area of graphics adventures has not been left unexplored by eager programmers. Carnell Software was the first to exploit that field with Volcanic Dungeon. The major part of that adventure consisted of text but the player is given a map of the caverns in which play takes place. The map is not very helpful and it is all too easy to be burned to a crisp, frozen, or blasted by the evil witch Magra and her denizens. Play in the dungeon is undemanding, as nearly every turn is taken up with fighting monsters. The monster conflicts are so random that one of every three or four is likely to end your life and leave you waiting for the game to be initialised again. The game is slow in execution - most of it is written in Basic - and death is always too swift. It is as if the computer is playing the player and not the other way around. Our experience shows that Magra gets the better of an adventurer. The Volcanic Dungeon is available from Carnell Software. Pirnania is another graphics adventure from Automata. The graphics are short intervals between moving or solving problems but they contain some important clues as to how to solve the central problem and find the Golden Sundial of PI. The Pi-man is an irritating little charaCIer who appears at seemingly random moments during the adventure or when you ask for help. In return for some favour, he will give you a clue as either a riddle or a jig which he dances in classic cartoon style. You might feel as if you could do without the Pi-man but he is necessary for the completion of the adventure, so you should keep on the right side of him. Pimania is a clever and classic graphic adventure. Whether you want to buy it is another matter. You might be drawn by the prize in the competition but is a game which could take more than two years to solve worth playing? The Trader Trilogy, from Quicksilva, could be loosely termed a graphics adventure. In the set of three games you are in charge of a spaceship which roams the galaxy in search of adventure. You are a trader and in your planet-hopping experiences you meet many types of alien creature. The monsters include a fluff-ball which survives on your brainwaves, a whole population 'high' on a drug with effects like Mescalin, and robots giving way to rust. On the first run of the adventure, which has to be played in a sequential format, the graphics and plot are entertaining and you will keep playing until you are killed or find sufficient supplies to make a profit. On the second and succeeding runs you will become less pleased with the game. The Trader Trilogy may be of some interest to children but even they, if they are discriminating, will grow tired of always answering the same mathematical problems to find cargo. The trilogy is the least promising of Quicksilva games for any machine and deserves to be zapped into space. Continuing the coverage of strategy games, Football Manager from Addictive Games puts you into the seat of a team manager looking for division in which it starts to the first division and make sure that you are not relegated. success or, on the other hand, failure, on the pitch and bankruptcy. There are seven skill levels, although we found the first three difficult enough. You have to make sure that your team moves from the Dallas is another strategy game but more down-toearth than the others in the roundup. As you might expect, it contains all the elements necessary to turn you into an oil baron who wants to take over the Ewing empire. You have to prospect for the best land and build a pipeline and production plant on it. All kinds of problems will crop up including tornados, heavy rain and earthquakes. If you are not quick enough you will find the Ewings have taken over your little empire. Dallas is an excellent strategy-simulation which improves the more you play it. The game is addictive, which is a comment which could not be applied to many games of its type. If you fancy a trip into the world of the Ewings, Dallas can be obtained from Cases Computer Simulations.

ZX Computing

Nick Pearce

THE '81 SOFT SELECTION Nick Pearce levels his critical eye at some of the latest software packages for the ZX81. GALAXIANS AND GLOOPS - QUICKSILVA Quicksilva have produced an excellent game of Galaxians for the ZX81. The action is fast and responsive and it is a pleasure to play. Two types of Galaxian move in formation across the top of the screen, and swoop down attacking your base. You have three lives and the speed, firing rate and the number of swooping Galaxians are adjustable by the player. You get more points for hitting Galaxians as they swoop down rather than those in formation. Scoring is displayed on the screen, and at the end of each game your score is entered onto a league table which can cater for up to 15 games/players. The first batch of swooping Galaxians are particularly good at searching out and destroying your base, and some deft manoeuvering is required to avoid their attack. Thereafter the battle is fierce but a high score can be achieved by the experienced player. If it becomes too easy, the level of difficulty can easily be increased. A fast-moving and impressive machine code game. Nicely boxed and with Gloops - a maze game on the B side of this cassette, it is reasonable value for money. Quicksilva have recently taken on the marketing of Pixel games. The Pixel games have been re-packaged by Quicksilva and have been given attractive covers featuring science fiction artwork. Trader and Subspace Striker are two such games. TRADER Trader is a three-part space adventure in which you travel round a galaxy of six planets trading with the inhabitants. The object of the game is to make a fat profit on the way whilst avoiding the many and varied pitfalls you will encounter. The graphic displays with this game are very good indeed. There is a short interactive-type game within each of the three parts of this adventure, and a few decisions have to be made - the wares to buy and at what price you sell them, for example. But to a large extent this game moves along at a relaxed pace through the various screen displays with only a little input necessary from the player. One problem is that each of the three parts of the adventure have to be LOADed separately - the variables are held in a secure memory space to be carried forward to the next part to make a continuous game. The first time I played the complete game took about one hour, but altogether some 20 minutes were spent waiting - impatiently - for the next successive part to LOAD. A game in a number of parts to overcome the limitations of even 16K of RAM (which is soon filled by adventures of this sort) is a good idea, but is more suited to a computer system with fast access disc storage. The slow ZX81 cassette based system makes patience an essential prerequisite - perhaps one of the 'fastload' programs on the market could be used with Trader to good effect. The cassette comes attractively packaged in a box with a comprehensive booklet describing the background to the game and including a Trader story. A good idea, excellent screen displays, and a game to sit back and enjoy. Perhaps a little overpriced at just under £10. SUBSPACE STRIKER Subspace Striker is a more interactive game, but a lot of time is still spent watching the screen displays too much maybe for the trigger happy arcade game enthusiast itching to shoot down some federation ships with antimat torpedoes. The graphics are certainly very good; each of the four types of ship in the federation fleet, and your own ship Swordfish - is displayed in great detail on the screen at the appropriate time. The interactive part of the game involves targetting a federation ship in your gun sights and then blasting it from the sky, after which you quickly dive back into the safety of deep space to await the next federation ship to pass. You have ten antimat torpedoes in each game, and there is an element of danger as the federation fleet also has weapons. Not a game to get the adrenalin really flowing too much time is spent watching the screen displays for that - but nevertheless an absorbing game which is good fun to play. The second game on this cassette is Zor, Battle of the Robots. Graphics are a feature of this Pixel game too. In this one, you are on a remote and barren planet and must uphold Earth's honour and supremacy in a battle with a Champion of Zor. You start equally matched with your opponent with 2,500 MJ of energy, which can be used as a weapon or shield. From then it's up to you to use your energy in the best possible way to overcome your adversary - and good luck. The extensive use of graphics in each game on this cassette means that both take up nearly all 16K of memory, and both take a long time to LOAD. The programs are preceded by a short loading test which can be used to set optimum volume/tone settings on your recorder. I had no problem loading either game. Quicksilva is at [redacted]. The cassettes reviewed above are priced as follows: Galaxians + Gloops £4.95 Trader £9.95 Subspace Striker + Zor £3.95

Personal Computer News

Lasting Appeal 3/5

Playability 4/5

Use Of Machine 4/5

Value 4/5

Mel Pullen

NAME: Trader APPLICATION: Graphic Adventure Game SYSTEM: Sinclair ZX81, 16K PRICE: £9.95 PUBLISHER: Pixel Productions, through Quicksilva [redacted] FORMAT: Cassette LANGUAGE: Basic OTHER VERSIONS: Vic 20, £14.95 OUTLETS: Mail order, various major computer stores STARSHIP GROCER Trentor, space trader and merchant extraordinaire, is two days out from Epsilon Dock with a full cargo of gold nuggets, raw fuel and priceless booster spice. Armed only with an atom blaster, credit card, notepad and pen, Trentor makes his living by flitting between the six moons of his home world Meridien, swapping fuel for food for narcotics for statues for... You can try your own luck as a space trader in this three-part space adventure from Pixel, marketed by Quicksilva. OBJECTIVES You are in charge of a cargo spaceship. You have a little money, or credits, and your task is to exchange the credits for goods on one moon and visit the others, trading as you go. The part of the trader is played by one person, but two could co-operate on decision-making. You have little control over the action, and must cope with the sort of activities you've come to expect from a computer, including quizzes, graphic action and strategy. Your objectives are to return to the main port of Epsilon, and to come back with more credits than you started with. FIRST IMPRESSIONS The cassette comes in a large box, together with an eight page booklet giving instructions, and a story about Trentor's adventures with the statue-collecting Alphan s and pet-loving Psions. You get a short loading test which tells you what to do next, and the instructions are straightforward. LOADing the first part of the game took a good six minutes on my ZX81. IN PLAY At the start of the game you are at Epsilon Dock and have 1,000 credits. You must buy a tankful of fuel for your hopper - 60 enough to get you to your next landfall. Now is also the time to spend your credits on a stock of as many commodities as you can afford. Choose from such treasures as Petrochem, munch (a food that comes in sweet red or savoury green varieties), synthomunch, another foodstuff (disgusting to eat, but highly nutritious and cheap), boosterspice (a narcotic with unpredictable side-effects), gold and raw fuel. But don't go for just one commodity - not even the entrancing boosterspice - you could lose the game fast. Now you must travel, and trade. You go to Psi first, but be warned, the inhabitants will look down on you, and will try to humiliate you - they scorn your materialistic lifestyle. 'Use your calculator if necessary,' the game instructions advise. 'They can't think any less of you.' A calculator, pen and paper really are needed to keep track of your changing cargo and the number of credits you have, or you owe. Without these aids you'll be thrown into a panic the first few times you play. There are different things to do on all five moons, and just getting to them is a major exercise in itself. You must battle against gravity on your approach to Beta, work out your angle of approach to Alpha, and steer clear of Gamma's sky-high radiation levels. You are kept in touch with developments by several sentences of background material at each event. But even if you go through the game several times, you still have to sit through all that background, as there is no way of turning it off. Twice you are left in suspense while you LOAD parts two and three, but these breaks in play are useful, as playing time for the whole game runs to around 15 minutes - unless you are killed. VERDICT As a trading simulation, this game is quite good, but does have limitations. You have no choice about the moons you visit, or the order in which you visit them. The prices at which you buy and sell and the unexpected events you encounter are all random. As a result, after you've played two or three times, you will have a good idea of what to expect, though there will still be some surprises even after ten games or more. What with letting your friends play, not to mention your parents or children, I think the game should retain some interest for several months. But for just one player, I expect it would last maybe a dozen plays.

Sinclair User

PIXELS MAKE USE OF SPACE Two interesting new space games, both in 16K, are from Pixel Productions. In Subspace Striker, you are the captain of the Swordfish, which lurks in hyperspace shooting-down enemy vessels with its deadly Antimat torpedoes. A fairly familiar theme is enlivened by some splendid graphics of the various spaceships and excitement is added by the capacity of the Swordfish to surface and dive to avoid enemy fire. An especially good destruction sequence compensates for the misfortune of suffering a direct hit. The instructions are a little confusing at first but stay with it. It costs £5.50 for the ZX-81 version. There are outstanding graphics in Trader, too, many of them animated, and the story line is original and entertaining. You are an inter-galactic trader trying to make a profit on your wares while escaping a variety of pitfalls on your journey from moon to moon. You will need to do some quick thinking and it helps to have pen and paper handy to keep tabs on your stocks. We made a killing on Synthomunch, a yukky kind of staple food popular in the Meridian area, but cannot guarantee it will work for you. The game is in three parts, so that it is in effect a 48K saga, with plenty to keep you absorbed to the end. The complete thing costs £10.50. Both games are available from Pixel Productions, [redacted].