Baron

ZX Computing

Nick Pearce

THE ZX81 SOFT SELECTION Nick Pearce looks at the new 'three pack' from Temptation. ADMIRAL GRAF SPEE It is 1940 and you are in command of the Admiral Graf Spee prowling the Atlantic. The mission is to sink as many enemy - Allied - ships as possible. The Graf Spee is armed with six 11 inch guns and two torpedo tubes. The support ship Altmark is at hand to replenish your supplies and ammunition. There are two main screen displays. Firstly a map of the South Atlantic is displayed showing the location of the Graf Spee (denoted by a flashing pixel), and the allied ships (intermittent flashing pixels). Also shown is your instrument display giving speed, compass heading, fuel, target distance, and so on. You close in on the allied ships using the map, and then move to the second screen display which shows the horizon and, when you get very close, the allied ship itself. To destroy the target you must fire whilst it is in visual range. The instrument panel continues to be show n in this second display. Instrument readings are constantly updated. The game gets quite exciting as you get close to an allied ship and it starts to fire at you, rocking the Graf Spee and inflicting damage; or taking evasive action and moving out of range. Graf Spee has the makings of a good game. I thought the graphics had been used to good effect, but the game is let down by its slow response to keyed-in commands. This is partly because the player has to wait between moves whilst each instrument reading is updated in turn, and partly because the game is written entirely in BASIC. The incorporation of machine code routines to speed up the programs would result in a faster, more interactive and improved game. BARON Baron is a role playing game of strategy for one to four players. Each player starts with 1500 dubloons, 70 acres of land, and 100 workers. The decisions to be made each year include whether to buy or sell land, whether to feed all your workers, or let some starve - merciless dog; whether to hire or fire mercenaries; and so on. If you are too extreme your workers revolt and impale you on the castle portcullis. Games last for five to 50 moves (selectable at the start), if you can survive that long! There is a year by year analysis of your performance as a Baron, and a final score is given. There are frequent disasters to thwart your struggle for success, for example the plague may strike or rats eat your grain. Baron is a text-only game. It is a reasonable simulation although perhaps somewhat short on interest to hold the attention of the avid role player for long. DUNGEONS OF DOOM Finally in this set of three cassettes from Temptation Software is Dungeons of Doom, a maze game for up to four players. In this game you have to find your way through some 400 rooms and 600 corridors in an attempt to build up a high score by surviving for as long as possible, and at the same time kill monsters or collect treasure. The screen displays the room or corridor you are in, and black squares to the North, South, East and West, and above and below. Only on attempting to move into one of these squares is its nature revealed - corridor, room, cave, or stone wall! And any content - monsters or treasure - becomes apparent. Again the game is written in BASIC, and is consequently rather slow. After each move there is a few seconds wait whilst the display is updated to show your current position. Dungeons of Doom is not really a computer "adventure" in the true sense; it has locations and objects, but no vocabulary. Control is effected through the use of movement keys. A reasonably good game. Each of these three programs from Temptation Software use most of the available 16K memory and take 7 to 8 minutes to LOAD. They each feature a 30 second "pre-load" program, a good idea which overcomes the frustrating problem of waiting for perhaps ten minutes only to find that the volume settings were wrong, the program hasn't LOADed and you have to start again. Incidentally I had no trouble loading any of these cassettes. The games are sold as a "triple-pack", and are available only as a set by mail order. Three cassettes each containing a reasonable game for just under £6.00 must be good value for money. Admiral Graf Spee, Baron and Dungeons of Doom are available as a set, price £5.99 inclusive of VAT postage and packing, from Temptation Software Limited, [redacted].-

Personal Computer News

John Lettice

SPECTRUM SPECIAL John Lettice takes his Spectrum from the Spanish Main to the familiar monster mazes. Plunder (£6), Cases Computer Simulations, [redacted] Baron (£5.95), Temptation Software, [redacted] Escape (£4.95), New Generation Software, [redacted] The Detective (£5.50), Arcade Software, [redacted] Home Runner (£4.95), Britannia Software, [redacted] The Spectrum has now passed its first anniversary, and the current batch of games being released shows that age cannot wither it nor custom stale its infinite variety - in some cases at least. PLUNDER First off the slipway is an everyday story of seafaring folk. In Plunder, your objective is to stop the Spanish Armada sailing by pillaging the convoys of gold Spain is shipping to finance it. You sail your ship - a nice little user-defined graphic - around a very impressive high-resolution map of the Atlantic Ocean, seeking out galleons (can be nasty), troopships (you can deal with these, but boarding might not be such a smart idea), merchant vessels (sitting ducks) and finally the warships (run for your life). While you're doing this, the sea takes its toll of crew and hull, and naturally the odd cannonball can make mischief. So you use some of your winnings - they're probably tainted with the curse of Montezuma anyway - to hire new crew, make repairs, and perhaps do a little trading and/or drug running. Yes, that's right, you can buy one of Central America's less savoury products in Haiti and sell it at a profit at Marseilles. I didn't run into Gene Hackman, but he and other cops might still prefer it if you stuck to grain and diamonds. One nice point about Plunder is that it's actually fairly realistic. Broadly speaking, you can take on the ships a thieving buccaneer/national hero of the time would be able to, with approximately the logical consequences (although merchant seamen seem to be a lot less ready to run up the white flag than I'd expect). And I won't swear to it, but the warships really do seem to follow you around, hunt the Graf Spee style. All in all, it's a particularly neat and inventive execution of what is becoming a fairly common idea. BARON Baron is another offering in the honourable tradition of Candyfloss. Here your goal is to manage a small fiefdom, fighting off the villains and beating up the villeins. You can play it solo, but the game is really geared to several - up to four - players. All players start off with the same amount of land, peasants and cash, and your goal is to manage these resources. You can play the game the peaceful way, tending your crops and amassing land legitimately by purchase, or you can hire mercenaries and pillage your neighbours. It's certainly refreshing to see a computer game that'll take more than one player, but there are problems with this one. The instructions are a little ropey for example, you can increase your supply of peasants by feeding more than you've got, but you aren't told this. There was one annoying bug on the review copy. At one point the program asked if you wanted to hire mercenaries. You answer 'y' or 'n'... and then it asks you if you want to hire mercenaries, up to a dozen times. It defies belief that a manufacturer could send out a game with a louse-up like this in it, but there it is. If it wasn't for this boredom-inducing bug, the game would be relatively entertaining for several players. The one-player version is a fairly pointless exercise. ESCAPE I could forgive this one a lot. It's a new twist on maze games, where you're stuck in a Hampton Court style environment, being pursued by various prehistoric monsters. Your aim is to find an axe, then use it to break down a door and get out of the maze. But the real killer is the way the dinosaur comes after you, using the Spectrum's excessively quiet speaker to produce a 'pad pad pad' noise as it runs. I never did get out of the maze, but I plead that I was too busy laughing at the dinosaur. If you can control yourself, it has potential to be a fast and entertaining maze game. THE DETECTIVE More humour here. Load up the Detective and you're presented with a natty title page, across which you see a row of bullet holes creep. Start on the game and you see a small figure in the centre of the screen; cursor left or right and the figure saunters, slowly but purposefully, in the relevant direction. If you press the fire button the figure stops, whips out two guns and blazes away at the sky, the reason for this being that there are things falling out of the sky at you. Yes, you've guessed it, someone's thought of yet another twist on Space Invaders. According to the instructions, you've got to get through Dagger Alley (all 25 screens of it), then crack a safe. The mob's 'out to get ya' (according to this 'broad' you met), and they're trying it in all sorts of weird ways. The first screen seems to have them dropping giant-sized ring-pulls on you, while in the second they seem to be lampshades. In addition to this, rows of car tyres form up above your head and then fall on you, and if the dog comes by you lose all your points. It's not particularly fast to start with, but it's tricky, and highly entertaining. HOME RUNNER Put together an Olympic runner, a set of monsters and some scaffolding, and Home Runner is what you come up with. You hop, skip and jump your way up a number of levels, avoiding monsters and the holes that appear in the floor every now and then, until you get to home, at the top level. I didn't find the monsters made my pulse race.