Spawn of Evil

Crash

Producer: DK Tronics, 16K £4.95 It's a bit of a cheat - to keep the program in 16K the very long-winded instructions are on one side of the cassette and the game on the other, which is irritating at first. The viewscreen works well with stars defining movement, but control is exceptionally sluggish and hitting the alien swarm is a bit like trying to kill ants with a pogo stick. In the end a slow and confusing game with no joystick option.

Read it at Crash - The Online Edition

Crash

Producer: DK Tronics, 16K £4.95 It's a bit of a cheat - to keep the program in 16K the very long-winded instructions are on one side of the cassette and the game on the other, which is irritating at first. The viewscreen works well with stars defining movement, but control is exceptionally sluggish and hitting the alien swarm is a bit like trying to kill ants with a pogo stick. In the end a slow and confusing game with no joystick option.

Crash

Producer: DK Tronics, 16K £4.95 It's a bit of a cheat - to keep the program in 16K the very long- winded instructions are on one side of the cassette and the game on the other, which is irritating at first. The viewscreen works well with stars defining movement, but control is exceptionally sluggish and hitting the alien swarm is a bit like trying to kill ants with a pogo stick. In the end a slow and confusing game with no joystick option.

ZX Computing

Documentation 4/5

Addictive Quality 4/5

Graphics 4/5

Programming Achievement 4/5

Lasting Appeal 4/5

Value 4/5

James Walsh

PRICE: £4.95 MEMORY REQUIRED: 16K Deep in space alien spawn are going through a complex multi-stage breeding process, before maturing into their full attack potential. Your task is to break this cycle and so save yourself. There are two screens - a long range scan in which the approximate position of the Spawn can be determined, and a short range window in which there is a sight to line up the aliens and destroy them. Two types of weapon are available - a short but accurate single blast, or a shower of less accurate fireballs. The action is smooth and fast - often too fast. The idea of the game is pretty original, which coupled with the excellent graphics makes for a visually exciting game and one which is well worth playing.

Personal Computer News

Shirley Fawcett

SPECTRUM SPECIAL Another box of ZX tricks, and Shirley Fawcett squares up to fend off mutants and pulsoids. A handy little machine, the Spectrum - especially when it comes to saving the world. This current batch of new Spectrum games includes no fewer than three different opportunities to rescue this planet from a fate worse than... and all in the privacy of your own home. ANDROID ONE (£5.50) - Vortex Software, [redacted] The best of this batch by a very short head is Android One: The Reactor Run, from the Vortex stable. This proclaims itself to be just the first of a series of Android adventures, Horace-style - and rightly so, I think, since this game is going to make its way well up the charts. The plot is nothing new - in fact, this is really a souped-up version of Berzerk. You have to charge through a heavily guarded enemy mutant warren in search of their reactor - which has to be destroyed, since it is about to... yes, end the world. No problem, though - for you are in control of Android One, the Very Latest in Android 'Technology. How can you fail? The graphics in this epic are faultless, and it is a very superior version of the old game. In place of robots to pot-shot, you are faced with four different kinds of mutants, all of which have different ways of moving about the screen and are worth different numbers of points if you do manage to pot them. Groupies travel in groups of three or four. Wanderers potter about by themselves, generally. Bouncers spring up and down the screen and can't be killed, but they can kill you perfectly well when they land on your head. Skaters slither unpredictably around, and are fiendishly difficult to hit. This is an unreasonably addictive game. There are five levels of play, and at even the slowest there's enough of a challenge to keep you screen-glued and bug-eyed. There's a long and varied series of chambers to explore, with random layouts of obstacles to get round each time. You control your android by rotating it till it's facing the way you want to go and then running like the clappers. This one will run and run and run. JUNGLE TROUBLE (£5.50) - Durell Software, [redacted] A close second that one is Jungle Trouble, a Durell Software extravaganza. It's a mini obstacle course a la Miner 49er, but the objective is simply to get out of the jungle as fast as possible. You are a little explorer... three little explorers. In fact, since you get three chances to be eaten by crocodiles or hit by a falling tree. You first have to collect an axe, then leap across a set of stepping stones in a river filled with crocodiles. Once on the other side you climb a ladder to get to the trees - rather cuddly oak-like things, these, and standing in a neat row. Oh well , who wants realism in their games? You have to chop down the trees, remembering to get out of the way as they fall. But you will have to go back to the start at least once, since monkeys will steal your axe unless you manage to swipe them with it before it gets too blunt. Even then, it will get blunt just from tree-felling, so you'll have to fetch another. Then, once you've done your bit to reduce the great wild places of the world, you climb another ladder and swing on a rope across a firepit, take a flying leap over a yawning chasm, and run for home. Eat your heart out. Tarzan! SPAWN OF EVIL (£5.50) - DK'Tronics, [redacted] Back to saving the world, or galaxy, with Spawn of Evil by Dk'Tronics. What a title - just calls out to be said in a sinister Vincent Price voice. The cover is pretty lurid, too, with a queue of green amorphous blobs advancing on you through the trackless wastes of space. Great stuff. The game itself doesn't quite live up to the title's promise, mostly because it isn't easy to get the hang of operating your spacecraft. There's an excellent set of instructions on the second side of the tape, which you can dump to a printer if you have one - there's a lot to remember. In a nutshell, you have to beat the living daylights out of a - wait for it - Ectogenetic Galactic Gamete, the First Stage of a Breeding Process that produces Mature and Dangerous Aliens! If you hang about, you'll also have to shoot its offspring: pulsoids, cycloids, aliens, that sort of thing. Pulsoids fuse with each other to produce cycloids. Cycloids do the same, to produce aliens. Aliens are green and amoeba-shaped, and fuse to produce more gametes. Gametes wait till they number three, then turn the aliens loose on you in seek-and-destroy mode. In this mode, the brutes spit at you until your windscreen is filled with red goo and you are destroyed. Nasty! Yes, there's plenty to cope with in this game, but the overall effect is just a bit incomprehensible. You have two viewer screens, one to show you a wide-angle view of approaching clusters of creatures, the other to give you a close-up of what's coming at you. You have to flip between the two, and shoot at the ones you manage to get in your sights. Since the ship slides through space at odd angles, this isn't easy and the keys you control it with are not at all easy to use, being S, D, O, and A, and F to fire. All in all, good graphics, shame about the game. Maybe it would be better with a joystick. BOZY BOA CDS Microsystems Bozy Boa, from CDS Micro Systems, is a bit of a puzzler. What does bozy mean? Sort of boozy and dozy? Anyway, this turns out to be a predictable and unambitious little game, the sort of thing you might choose to play for half an hour on a wet winter Sunday afternoon. It's no more than a competently done version of that old game where you steer a snake around the screen gobbling numbers, and each time you catch a number, your tail gets longer - and you mustn't bump into it, or any of the walls and obstacles. Bozy Boa's only novelty value is the fact that it is set in an English country garden, as the little tune at start-up tells you. And your boa has to eat beetles, snails and things that look like red dice but are in fact ladybirds, while avoiding the flowers - more of which grow each time you get your fangs into a beetle. The cross-eyed snake on the cassette cover is the best thing about this one. HIDDEN CITY (£5.95) - Bytewell, [redacted] Hidden City is yet another earth-saving mission, from Bytewell. This time, you have to pilot a ship into the underground alien cities which now infest the earth, and destroy them with a single well-placed shot in the reactor. Your ship, says the instructions, can 'Penetrate all known alien defences' - even the parts other ships cannot reach? - as long as you pilot it properly. You have to get through three screens - a cliffside, down which you fly to reach the cavern entrance under fire from three guns; a maze, from which you have to pick up cans of fuel; and the underground tunnel itself. In which cities and various odd satellites are scattered. I found this one unimpressive. There are several levels of play, level 1 being slow enough to be usable as a practice mode and level umpteen being one long history of being shot at and shooting - but the graphics are fairly crude and it's too easy to get through the various screens, at least at the slower speed levels. Probably worth a few hours' play if you like that sort of thing, though. KAMIKAZE AND GOPHER Block-Byte Computing, [redacted] Block-Byte Computing is a very modest little company. 'Arcade games used to be boring.' screams the title screen. 'Then came BlockByte, to make them an EXPERIENCE!!!!!!' Then came Block-Byte, maybe, but one of the two offerings on this tape, Kamikaze and Gopher, is the dullest thing I've played for months. The other kept me up till 3am - but I beat it in the end. Gopher is the one. It doesn't look like anything special - just move up, down and across the screen to eat a random bunch of dots and avoid white blocks, till you manage to score 450 or run out of time - but the level of difficulty is just right. You can see your score getting close, you begin to get the hang of the best strategy to eat the maximum number of dots in the minimum time, but it still takes a while before you actually reach the 450 mark. When you do, your reward is a tune... and the chance to do it all over again. As for Kamikaze .., well. It's filled with bugs, and crashed at the end virtually every time. You have a rectangle which is supposed to beam aircraft's windscreen, a horizontal line across the screen, and one or two objects in the air which are supposed to be enemy aircraft. You can scroll left or right, and using the symbol key is supposed to speed up the scrolling (but has no perceptible effect). You can shoot at the enemy but my gun didn't work most of the time. At the end of this magical experience you get a snatch of Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, and the following message: 'You're score was PATHETIC' (sic). So is the game.

Sinclair User

CRACKING THE EGG IS NO JOKE When you hear that the universe is being threatened by a giant Ectogenetic Galactic Gamate - EGG to all you intelligent people - you may decide to catch the next bus out of the Universe. In Spawn of Evil, however, a new game for the 16K Spectrum, you decide to fight and promptly put your spaceship into attack mode. Your job is not only to destroy the EGG before it becomes indestructible but also to kill all the Pulsoids, Cycloids and Aliens which breed from it. The software is in two parts and each part can be run independently. Your spaceship glides through a 3D representation of outer space where waves of spawn dart across the screen. We found it extremely difficult to hit anything. The controls of the spaceship can be changed to meet your requirements but the speed at which a change of direction is accomplished is so slow that we could not hold many pulsoids in our gun sites long enough to fire a laser blast. Despite the difficulty of getting used to, Spawn of Evil is a well-presented and graphically-impressive package. It can be obtained for £4.95 from dK'Tronics, [redacted].

Read it at Sinclair User Magazine Online