Panic

Crash

Graphics (CP) 65%

Graphics (MU) 59%

Use of Computer (CP) 50%

Use of Computer (MU) 62%

Playability (CP) 68%

Playability (MU) 70%

Addictive Qualities (CP) 70%

Addictive Qualities (MU) 75%

Value for Money (CP) 62%

Value for Money (MU) 88%

Overall 64%

Chris Passey

Matthew Uffindell

HEADBANGERS - PANIC GAMES Armed with little more than a trusty spade, nimble fingers and wilting joystick, our two arcade playing reviewers, CHRIS PASSEY and MATTHEW UFFINDELL, enter the dusty platforms in search of monsters 'Panic' games involve climbing ladders to various levels within the screen, digging holes in the floors and letting the monsters fall into them. When you trap a monster in this manner, there is usually a short time in which to reach it, bang it on the head so that it falls through to its death, filling in the hole as it goes. Failure to kill it in time will result in the beast escaping and becoming a super monster. The more super a monster becomes, the more holes it must fall through in one go, which means digging holes in a vertical line. You have an ever-diminishing supply of oxygen, so speed is important. This selection contains some close copies and some slight variations on the theme. SHEER PANIC Visions Memory Required: 16K Retail Price: £5.59 This is a reasonable version of 'Panic'. It contains the features such as the limited oxygen supply and the increasing strength of any monster that is not buried in time when in a hole. The graphics are quite good with character movement being used but working quite well. Colour content is about right but I think the sound is limited. The major drawback to this version is the key layout, the top row being used in a straight line (6 to 9). Digging and filling is done with the up/down keys, which does reduce the number needed to play the game. On the subject of control I found it one at the worst games for moving off ladders on to levels. All in all, a decent and fairly addictive game, especially when played with a Kempston. CP This version has four well drawn platforms, connected with varying lengths of ladders. All movement is by blocks - although this doesn't spoil the playability of the game. The monsters have a low intelligence level so you don't have to wait around for a monster to fall into a quickly dug hole - good! Your man is nicely animated and moves quickly. Different coloured monsters, as usual have to be knocked down on equivalent number of platforms before they are killed. Sound and colour are put to good use and it's well worth considering. There is, however, an oddity involved. The game is the same as Mikrogen's Panic. MU

Crash

Graphics (CP) 65%

Graphics (MU) 59%

Use of Computer (CP) 80%

Use of Computer (MU) 78%

Playability (CP) 70%

Playability (MU) 70%

Addictive Qualities (CP) 73%

Addictive Qualities (MU) 75%

Value for Money (CP) 65%

Value for Money (MU) 69%

Overall 70%

Chris Passey

Matthew Uffindell

HEADBANGERS - PANIC GAMES Armed with little more than a trusty spade, nimble fingers and wilting joystick, our two arcade playing reviewers, CHRIS PASSEY and MATTHEW UFFINDELL, enter the dusty platforms in search of monsters 'Panic' games involve climbing ladders to various levels within the screen, digging holes in the floors and letting the monsters fall into them. When you trap a monster in this manner, there is usually a short time in which to reach it, bang it on the head so that it falls through to its death, filling in the hole as it goes. Failure to kill it in time will result in the beast escaping and becoming a super monster. The more super a monster becomes, the more holes it must fall through in one go, which means digging holes in a vertical line. You have an ever-diminishing supply of oxygen, so speed is important. This selection contains some close copies and some slight variations on the theme. PANIC Mikrogen Memory Required: 16K Retail Price: £5.95 All my comments on Sheer Panic by Visions apply to Mikrogen's Panic, because unless I'm grossly mistaken, this is the self same program. Well, there are a few little differences and one big one. The big difference is that this version offers the player user definable keys. The small ones are a few peripheral frills like text characters. In all other respects it is identical. How come? CP One thing became instantly apparent when reviewing this version - it's an exact copy of Sheer panic. Or is it the other way round? As far as I am aware this Mikrogen version has been on the market for much longer. Keyboard layout is different, and a few other frills have been left out, but the sound, graphics and content are the same. Who copied who? MU

Crash

Use of Computer 58%

Graphics 60%

Playability 68%

Getting Started 64%

Addictive Qualities 60%

Value For Money 65%

Overall 63%

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Producer: Visions Memory Required: 16K Retail Price: £5.95 Language: Machine code Author: Kevin Bezant This game deserves a few percentage points in its favour just for the inlay cover design, possibly the most vivid and accurate description of a 'Panic' game ever seen! Sheer Panic is a conventional 'Panic' with five floors, the bottom one of which is undiggable. Your man carries a very long shovel with which to dig his holes into which, hopefully, the three monsters encountered on the first screen will fall. As is customary, monsters getting out of holes turn another colour and then have to be knocked through two holes, or even three holes in a row. The game is played out against a background of falling oxygen. Between lives as well as games, the layout of the ladders is changed. COMMENTS Control keys: 6/7 left /right, 8/9 up/down Joystick: Kempston Keyboard play: responsive, but Sinclair keys are not the best arrangement Use of colour: good Graphics: fair to good Sound: very good Skill levels: 1 Lives: 3

Personal Computer Games

Graphics 5/10

Sound 4/10

Ease Of Use 3/10

Originality 2/10

Lasting Interest 5/10

Overall 4/10

Steve Cooke 4/10

MACHINE: Spectrum 16/48K JOYSTICK: Optional CATEGORY: Arcade SUPPLIER: Visions PRICE: £5.95 Space Panic is an old favourite in the arcades, but there are many more adventurous games now available for the Spectrum. However, if you are dead set on adding a version of this game to your collection then Vision's Sheer Panic is fine. For those of you unfamiliar with the game, you control a figure armed with a shovel, whose task is to climb ladders and dig holes for careless monsters to fall into. You then rush up and bury them before they have a chance to clamber out. Vision's monsters are intelligent, the action fast and smooth, and high scores are difficult to get. Sheer Panic holds no surprises. The graphics are acceptable, and the sound is what we have come to expect from the Spectrum, which isn't much.

Crash

Producer: Mikrogen, 16K £5.85 Panic is a standard digger-filler game, where you rove several floors with your spade trying to clean up the monsters by digging holes for them to fall into. A neat touch is that you must reach them quickly and batter them to death or they change colour and get out of the hole, which means you must mash 'em up through two holes before they die. The going gets tougher as you progress. Not bad and reasonably addictive.

Crash

Producer: Mikrogen, 16K £5.85 Panic is a standard digger-filler game, where you rove several floors with your spade trying to clean up the monsters by digging holes for them to fall into. A neat touch is that you must reach them quickly and batter them to death or they change colour and get out of the hole, which means you must mash 'em up through two holes before they die. The going gets tougher as you progress. Not bad and reasonably addictive.

Personal Computer News

Lasting Appeal 3/5

Playability 3/5

Use Of Machine 3/5

Overall Value 3/5

Mike Gerrard 3/5

NAME: Sheer Panic SYSTEM: Spectrum 16/48K PRICE: £5.95 PUBLISHER: Visions, [redacted] FORMAT: Cassette LANGUAGE: Basic OTHER VERSIONS: None OUTLETS: Mail order DIG FOR VICTORY Sheer Panic is another version of that well-known game involving running up and down ladders and beating aliens over the head with a shovel. According to Visions you are 'mining for magnetic quartz in a Dromedan Leisure Complex...' Oh, never mind all that, we all know the objective is hitting meanies with shovels and amassing high scores for doing so. FIRST IMPRESSIONS Visions is a new company which has launched itself Imagine-style with lots of glossy colour adverts, though the spending doesn't stop when it comes to the cassette either, with a full-colour cover showing a cartoon of a demented earthling attempting to deal with a host of slavering aliens. IN PLAY The instructions are included in the game, should there be anyone who needs them, and Sheer Panic can be played with either a Kempston joystick or keyboard control. This layout is a little confusing, to say the least, using the already silly arrangement of arrow keys and then rearranging them! So, the down arrow moves you left, the up arrow right, the right arrow up and the 9 key down. The joystick, too, takes more than a little getting used to, the digging being done by pushing the joystick up but in the direction you're facing, ie north west or north east, and any rapid repair work by moving it south west or south east. Nimble footwork proved a problem at first, as the stick also seems to have to be centred each time before the little man would start moving. One or two nasty deaths resulted, but perseverance was rewarded with a certain dexterity. As to the man, he's your typical Swan Vestas creation, though he leaps about smoothly enough once the controls have been mastered. In case you don't know, the idea of the game is that you're running round a construction of platforms and ladders, pursued by meanies. You can dig holes, and if a meanie falls in and you can hit it on the head it goes to meet the meanie maker. In this version there are red meanies who have to plummet through one hole, blue ones who need two holes beneath each other to see them off, and white ones who require three holes. There's no choice of skill level but the game will progress through nine levels as you go, with a maximum of seven meanies after you are one time. VERDICT Yet another variation on yet another arcade game, it's as good as any of the other 57 varieties around, though if the graphics matched the cassette cover it would be a winner.

ZX Computing

Documentation 3.5/5

Addictive Quality 4/5

Graphics 4/5

Programming Achievement 3.5/5

Lasting Appeal 4/5

Value 4/5

James Walsh

PRICE: £5.95 Memory: 16K Panic is very similar indeed to the ladders type arcade game. An almost identical version is available for the BBC under the name 'Monsters'. Though Panic may not be 100% original as a game, it is very well written indeed. The idea is that you are caught in a maze of walls and ladders with a load of rather nasty aliens. The object is to lure them into holes which you have dug and then bang them over the head until they die. As if this wasn't enough you are in danger of running out of oxygen. As time goes on, and especially if an alien gets through a hole without getting hit, they get even more ferocious and difficult to kill. Maybe not original, but this is the first time I have seen it for the Spectrum. It is definitely a highly addictive and enjoyable game to play.

Personal Computer News

Mike Gerrard

SPECTRUM SPECTACLE Mike Gerrard looks at Spectrum releases, confronting amazing mazes and alien invasions. And still they come at you, trying to turn your home into the ultimate arcade. Games good, bad and indifferent - this latest batch of 16K Spectrum cassettes has examples of all three. BEETLEMANIA £4.95, AWA Software, [redacted]. To start with the good. Beetlemania is a Pacman style game, written in machine cod, in which four beetles chase you round a maze. I found it even more addictive than the original it is based on. For one thing, the graphics are excellent, with the green beetles scuttling round like scorpions, while the man races frantically along with his little legs going at nineteen to the dozen. The game begins with a brief demonstration showing you how you're to collect the eggs, which are left one at a time by the beetles, and deposit them safely in what is described for some reason as a lock. Eggs and locks appear randomly in the maze, and when four eggs have been safely collected an exit will flash, and you must scurry out of that to the next level. This is the same maze, but with several of the walls joined up, so giving you a little less breathing space. Succeed here and the same thing happens again, making it very tricky indeed to avoid the beetles in the increasing numbers of blind alleys. Further success takes you back to the original maze, opened up again, but this time with a purple spider racing along the corridors to add to your problems. Beyond that I don't know, as the spider got me every time. This increasing difficulty is a welcome feature, as is the sensible way the control keys are spread: Q for up, Z for down, I for left and P for right. You have five lives, three skill levels, and while there is a high-score record the game's only fault is that as soon as the last life is lost it switches instantly back to the opening screen without giving you a chance to check your score. But that apart, congratulations to the game's author, Steve Hughes, for improving on a good original. MAZE CHASE £4.95, Hewson Consultants, [redacted] What a contrast to Maze Chase, which is a simple (and I do mean simple) variation on the same game. The action is quick enough, being also in machine code, but this isn't so much Pacman as Matchstickman. Control here is by use of the arrow keys, which has never seemed to me the most sensible part of the Spectrum keyboard layout, and the graphics are disappointing after Beetlemania. There are four mazes in the 16K version, with 12 in the 48K program also on the tape, and your opening options are instructions, demonstration, resetting the high-score to zero, or play. A major complaint is that if you don't press any key within about 30 seconds, which is quite possible if you've left the tape to load, you automatically get a long demonstration game, with all three lives, and no way to break out of it that I could find. Otherwise you get the usual features of four ghosts, fruit to eat, and increased speed as you go. Not a patch on the original, though. JAWZ £4.95, Elfin Software, [redacted] Jawz is the underwater Space Invaders which most people will know - in fact you'll need to know it as there are no instructions in the program to explain exactly what you're meant to be doing. You are told the control keys and the cassette insert tells you that you're meant to be killing the sharks while avoiding the poison pellets the jellyfish at the top of the sea are dropping down on you. This isn't a game that ever particularly appealed to me, but Jawz is an adequate if slightly limited adaptation offering you a one or two-player game, a high-score record and three skill levels. Unfortunately the sharks look as frightening as a bowl of goldfish. GALAKZIONS £5.95 each, Micro-Gen, [redacted] The aliens in Mikro-Gen's Glakzions are more menacing - or at least the first five rows are. The final row contains what look remarkably like two pairs of flying yellow knickers. The action in this game should be fast enough to appeal to the addicts, though the creatures don't move off the side of the screen and back on again. In fact the aliens are quite restrained to begin with, the first wave peeling off in ones and twos and firing very few shots at you - but you have to watch the shots they do fire, which spit down the screen with great speed. From the second wave on, though, they come at you in great swirling bunches, and while they don't exhibit the usual nasty tendency to herd you into a corner for the kill, they are nevertheless very nippy movers - especially those knickers. Not a perfect copy, then, but still a satisfying version. PANIC £5.95 each, Micro-Gen, [redacted] Panic, or Space Panic as it's better known, comes from the same company. It is the familiar aliens and ladders game where you control a little man, or as in this version, a tall thin man, who is being pursued along levels and up ladders by nasty little creatures which he must kill by luring them into holes and then bashing them on the head, it's just as well they're not an endangered species. With the wealth of colour available on the Spectrum, it's hard to see why anyone would choose to make the creatures purple against a black background, unless they have a strong sadistic streak. As with Galakzions, if you like the original you probably won't be disappointed with the speed and features of this version. The man turns into an ominous skull and crossbones should he be sent to meet his maker, while if you fail to bash an alien after luring him into a hole he will change colour (or she will, it being difficult to tell with aliens). It will then take a plunge through two holes to see the alien off. If you fail again you get another colour change, and will need three holes to despatch him. After that, forget it. A choice of skill levels would have been nice, but you can't have everything, I suppose. Both these Mikro-Gen games will work with MikroGen joysticks, though when I attempted to use my Kempston ones I got some very odd results. Or maybe I've just been killing too many aliens lately, I don't know.