Tobor

Crash

Producer: Elfin, 48K 7.95 The title frame promises excitement, but the game doesn't deliver. Poor graphics and movement make you wonder why it needed 48K in the first place. Basically you must take on some robots in a simple outline maze. Keyboard positions are irritating and there's a poor response. No joystick option. Not really worth the very high price, and certainly not as much fun as even 'Jawz' which they did and handed over to DK Tronics.

Read it at Crash - The Online Edition

Crash

Producer: Elfin, 48K 7.95 The title frame promises excitement, but the game doesn't deliver. Poor graphics and movement make you wonder why it needed 48K in the first place. Basically you must take on some robots in a simple outline maze. Keyboard positions are irritating and there's a poor response. No joystick option. Not really worth the very high price, and certainly not as much fun as even 'Jawz' which they did and handed over to DK Tronics.

Crash

Producer: Elfin, 48K 7.95 The title frame promises excitement, but the game doesn't deliver. Poor graphics and movement make you wonder why it needed 48K in the first place. Basically you must take on some robots in a simple outline maze. Keyboard positions are irritating and there's a poor response. No joystick option. Not really worth the very high price, and certainly not as much fun as even 'Jawz' which they did and handed over to DK Tronics.

Sinclair User

Gilbert Factor 7/10

NEW FIRM CRASHES IN Your spaceship crashes on to a forbidding planet, damaging your propulsion and navigation systems. To obtain the Grittan Stones, necessary to have those systems working again, you must enter the robots' city. In the city are evil robots which will try to kill you, using large magenta balls to smash you to pieces. The green robots are the King Tobors, indestructible killers which you cannot defeat. Tobor is a game for the 16K and 48K Spectrum from a new company, Elfin Software. The player moves round a succession of mazes, outwitting and destroying the robots which are in pursuit. You can use your laser gun only when on the move and can fire only in the direction in which you are running. When you die the robots are kind enough to erect a tombstone with RIP on it at the place where you fell. Elfin certainly is a company to watch as, judging by its first game, it is keen to produce top-quality software. One small reservation we had about the game, however, was that the instructions and title pages were loaded in sections and that took a long time. A player does not want to have to watch two or three minutes of graphics before playing the game every time it is loaded. Tobor is available from Elfin Software, [redacted]. It costs £5.95.

Read it at Sinclair User Magazine Online

Your Computer

Meirion Jones

FROM DEEP-SPACE ADVENTURES TO WORLDLY BOARD-GAMES IN MEIRION JONES' SURVEY Less than a year ago the appearance of Scrabble on disc for the Apple caused consternation among micro owners. The program defeated three-quarters of the humans who challenged it to a dual of words. At least Scrabblers could comfort themselves with the knowledge that they had been beaten by a £750 disc-based system. Now Psion has taken even that consolation away by launching an improved version of the game with a bigger dictionary and better graphics which will run on a £150 system - the 48K Spectrum and a cassette recorder. This illustrates the rate at which Spectrum software is improving. The latest releases include clever implementations of board- games like monopoly and arcade favourites such as Scramble, long and complicated Adventures with names like Knight's Quest and combinations of arcade and Adventure like Pixel's Trader. While serious and educational material software is still thin on the ground, programs like Hewson's Countries of the World show how much useful information can be packed into the Spectrum. MORE ORIGINALITY Unfortunately the standard is not uniformly high. Sometimes imagination is lacking. Bridge software still insists on marketing what it calls "an exciting game for two to six players". Yes, you guessed, it is boring old Hangman. At other times graphics are weak. Micromega sells a version of Roulette which features a roulette wheel which looks more like a flying saucer on an off day. There is still too high a percentage of unloadable tapes and of tapes which you wished had been unloadable. Davic Games Tape 1, for instance, features a game which has Tooth Monsters instead of ghosts, which is probably the dullest-ever version of Pac-Man. The Tooth Monsters themselves are about as threatening as a pair of jelly babies. If you want real tooth monsters try Imagine's excellent Molar Maul. This is a real nerve-tingler from the moment that an enormous set of gleaming teeth appears on the screen like something out of jaws. Armed only with a toothbrush and toothpaste you have to defend these dentures from swarms of evil bacteria. These germs go by the name of Dentorium Kamikazium which allows Imagine to talk about "the DK Menace" - a triple pun partly at the expense of Imagine's Ipswich-based rivals DK'tronics. Imagine's punsters are at work again on the cover of Arcadia where we are told we are fighting against the "deadly menace of the Atarian empire". Perhaps this explains why Sinclair owners have shown such enthusiasm for Arcadia because the game itself is just a lacklustre version of Galaxians. Much better is Imagine's Schizoids. If, like me, you have always wanted to be a bulldozer, Schizoids is the game for you. You are a bulldozer in outer space and your job is to push tumbling cubes and pyramids into a nearby black hole without falling in yourself. Perhaps this nearby anomaly in the space-time continuum affects the wavelength of light. At any rate the game itself is only in black and white. Pixel is another company which cannot resist veiled messages. Trader is part space Adventure and part arcade game. The Adventure, trading commodities between different worlds, is more convincing than the crude skill tests such as finding the right orbit when approaching a planet. Trader may well be bought as much for its attractive packaging - which includes a survival guide for the would-be Trader - as for the game itself. After buying supplies for your first trip you set out for the planet Psi where the inhabitants - yes, Psions - who look like a cross between Clive Sinclair's beard and a muppet ask you tiresome questions such as "What is the formula for carbon monoxide?" or "What is your first name?". Entering "Clive" as an answer elicits the response "What a strange name". So, for that matter, does any other reply. If disaster should strike, a caption will appear saying "Is this the end...?" The answer is "No" because Trader is a trilogy so there are another two complete parts to load from the tape. There are many more traditional text Adventures of the "Go south, open door, take gold" variety but the narrowness of the replies they will accept is often irritating. DOWN THE MINES Mikrogen's Mines of Saturn starts with a cheery "Have fun" and then proceeds to ask questions like "Tunnels lead N, S, E and W - what will you do?" Attempts to answer "N" or "go N" or even "go n" will not wash. It must be "go North" or nothing. At least Phipps' Knight's Quest has a 120-word vocabulary to help you on your damsel-ridden way to a castle in the air. Everest by Richard Shepherd Software is more of a strategy game than a straight Adventure. You have to take enough food and rope to climb the mountain and cope with every hazard. I enjoyed the climb but I never reached the summit - partly because the Sherpas are not what they used to be. When Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Everest for the first time he managed to find a Sherpa called Tensing. The time when you visit a Nepalese hill village to recruit porters you are asked to choose between Sherpas with names like Keith, Brian, Ron, Tim and Paul. Presumably they are ex-hippies, lost on the road to Katmandu. Things obviously still are what they used to be down at Mikrogen. If Andy Capp sends you into fits of laughter Mad Martha might just raise a smile. It is the same old story, boy meets girl, well, hen-pecked husband meets axe-happy wife - all very predictable. Mikrogen also sells arcade games like Cosmic Raiders - a competent impersonation of Defender with a long-range screen and grabbers. Melbourne House's variation on the same theme is called Penetrator. The display looks more like the arcade version of Scramble. A training facility to help you build up specific game skills is a good idea. C-Tech's Rocket Raider is yet another competent variant on similar lines. Artic offers a suicidally fast asteroids game called Cosmic Debris. Still in the arcades, both Elfin Software and Quicksilva produce robot battles which are of the Pac-Man-meets-Tanks variety. Elfin's Tobor has the more exciting opening titles but loses on points to Quicksilva's QS Frenzy whose exotic science-fiction plot seems to offer a better justification for the game. Speaking of Tanks, DK'tronics 3D Tanx was one of my favourite programs in the whole batch. You can track you gun barrel from side to side and adjust the elevation as you lob your shells at four lines of moving tanks which can fire back at you. Although the opposing tanks at first appear to be crawling across a structure that looks more like Brighton's West Pier than a battleground, this is one of my four games you might catch me paying to play in an arcade. JOIN THE PROFESSIONALS Artic's Combat Zone is another ambitious attempt at a Tank game. Your target and the landscape - a few pyramids on an invisible plane - look like refugees from Psion's Vu-3D program. They are very simple three-dimensional shapes but they change position smoothly and realistically as if you were walking past them in some world inside your Spectrum. You and your opponents fire fragments of cubist paintings at each other but the abstraction is not so important as the fact that you are playing the first real Spectrum game in three dimensions - Vu-3D itself is a Psion program which allows you to build up three dimensional objects on the screen and then rotate them, or float them towards you and back again. In effect it is a crude version of the mainframe programs which create the effects for films like Tron. ET makes an appearance too in an Abbex Adventure with voices called ETX. Unfortunately after loading pages of instructions about how I should phone home ending with the advice that I should treat any MI5 man who appeared as an enemy, the tape self-destructed. This left me with an unnerving impression of "the strength of Britain's security services. The secret police are certainly important in DK'tronics strategy game called Dictator. The setting is a banana republic. The instructions ominously point out that "your rule is measured in months". You have to balance political factions, army, secret police, peasants, landowners, guerillas and superpowers if you are to survive. Breaking into embassies would doubtless be all in a day's work for a dictator. So for all prospective saviours of the nation, Sinclair's Embassy Assault will come in useful. It is very much like those maze games which present your view. standing in the maze. Instead of trying to avoid a minotaur, this time you are looking for secret codes and the like. All this is enough to send you back into the arcades but Jet Pac's creators have moved from the arcades into home computing. Ultimate Play the Game's Jet Pac puts you into the position of an astronaut who has to build a rocket from the pieces he can find sitting on clouds around the screen. The scenario is not entirely convincing but it makes for a good game. The same cannot be said of the simulations by CCS. CCS's representations of the oil business, Dallas, running a printers, Print Room, and of international aviation, Airline, may be realistic but they are not very exciting. Although these were originally designed as training for middle management, livelier presentation would not necessarily have made them less useful. Hewson's simulations of air-traffic control, Heathrow, and the Nightflite flight simulator are more convincing. Board-games seem to transfer particularly well to the Spectrum. Psion's Scrabble has already been recommended. With its four levels of play and 11,000-word dictionary it can offer almost as tough opposition as you could want. There are also two different approaches to that old favourite Monopoly. Automonopoli offers a continuous display of the part of the board around your current position. This display moves smoothly when the dice are thrown. Do Not Pass Go from Workforce has a less interesting display but at least shows the whole board all the time. Automonopoli allows you to personalise the program with the names of players and both programs give the option of being either a board for humans to play on or of letting the computer join in as a player. In each case the computer becomes a soft opponent once you have reached the stage of building houses and hotels. If you have ever wandered into a rundown dockland hotel or pub and been confronted by the sort of balding drunk who says he used to sail the seven seas and boasts that he can name the capital of any country you care to choose, I can reveal his secret. At home he has a Spectrum with Hewson's Countries of the World up and running on it. At the touch of a button it will remind you that N'djamena is the capital of Chad or that Yaounde is the capital of Cameroon. In the corner of the pub someone with probably be playing a video game not unlike Firebirds. Softek's Firebirds is a Galaxians-type game distinguished by good croaking noises from the birds. Still on the subject of sound effects Workforce's Jaws Revenge is very noisy and fun. The graphics are great. You are a shark and you are after the divers and- boats which are after you. Mined Out from Quicksilva is a very strange version of Mines. It is subtitled "Rescue Bill the worm from certain old age" and if you find a way through the first minefield you then have to rescue damsels in distress. Someone at Quicksilva has been playing too many Adventure games and it is beginning to show. The last words on the cassette packet read "the image fades to soft focus which is replaced by waves falling on a rocky shore, except in Bill's dream there are no waves or soft focus..." It is certainly time that software cassettes carried a government health warning. Company: Abbex Game: ETX Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.95 Company: Artic Game: 3D Combat Zone Memory: 48K Price: £5.95 Company: Artic Game: Cosmic Debris Memory: 48K Price: £4.95 Company: Automata Game: Automonopoli Memory: 16/48K Price: £6 Company: Bridge Game: Lynchmob Memory: 16K Price: £6.50 Company: CCS Software Game: Dallas Memory: 48K Price: £6 Company: C-Tech Game: Rocket Raider Memory: 16K Price: £6.50 Company: DK'Tronics Game: 3D Tanx Memory: 16/48K Price: £4.95 Company: DK'Tronics Game: Dictator Memory: 48K Price: £4.95 Company: Elfin Game: Tobor Memory: 48K Price: £7.95 Company: Hewson Game: Heathrow Memory: 16/48K Price: £7.95 Company: Hewson Game: Countries of the World Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.95 Company: Imagine Game: Molar Maul Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.50 Company: Imagine Game: Arcadia Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.50 Company: Imagine Game: Schizoids Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.50 Company: Melbourne House Game: Penetrator Memory: 48K Price: £6.95 Company: Micromega Game: Roulette Memory: 16/48K Price: £4.95 Company: Mikrogen Game: Cosmic Raiders Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.95 Company: Mikrogen Game: Mines of Saturn Memory: 48K Price: £5.95 Company: Mikrogen Game: Mad Martha Memory: 48K Price: £6.95 Company: Phipps Game: Knight's Quest Memory: 48K Price: £5.95 Company: Psion Game: Scrabble Memory: 48K Price: £15.95 Company: Psion Game: Vu-3D Memory: 48K Price: £9.95 Company: Quicksilva Game: Frenzy Memory: 16/48K Price: £4.95 Company: Quicksilva Game: Trader Memory: 16/48K Price: £9.95 Company: Quicksilva Game: Mined Out Memory: 48K Price: £4.95 Company: Richard Shepherd Game: Everest Ascent Memory: 48K Price: £6.50 Company: Sinclair Research Game: Embassy Assault Memory: 16/48K Price: £4.95 Company: Softek Game: Firebirds Memory: 16K Price: £5.95 Company: Ultimate Play The Game Game: Jet Pac Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.50 Company: Workforce Game: Do Not Pass Go Memory: 48K Price: £6.95 Company: Workforce Game: Jaws Revenge Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.95

ZX Computing

Documentation 3/5

Addictive Quality 4/5

Use of Graphics 3.5/5

Programming Achievement 3.5/5

Value 3.5/5

James Walsh

PRICE: £7.95 MEMORY REQUIRED: 48K You are in a maze protected by robots. The aim is to destroy these either by shooting them or causing them to collide and hence destroy themselves. They continuously change colour and depending on this, your score is calculated. If a robot goes green then it is indestructible until it changes again, so it is a good idea to keep out of its way. When one lot of robots have been destroyed then a new maze and robots are created. If you are killed, a small tombstone is built, and another of your three lives is lost. Tobor can also be used as a two player game, in which the players take it in turn to try their skill against the robots. Though the principal is pretty straightforward, the graphics are good and the way in which the game has been put together is good and very professional indeed. It is definitely a program that I would recommend. As far as I know, Elfin Software have not been in existence for long, though they have a good range of Spectrum programs, including: 3D Starwars, Checkman, 3D Game Hunt, Pilot and Pack Man. I very much look forward to receiving these titles as, if they come up to the high standard of Tobor, then they too should be very good value for money. My only grievance would be that the instructions were rather limited.

Personal Computer News

Lasting Appeal 2/5

Playability 3/5

Use Of Machine 4/5

Value For Money 3/5

Shirley Fawcett

NAME: Tobor SYSTEM: 48K Spectrum PRICE: £7.95 PUBLISHER: Elfin Software, [redacted] FORMAT: Cassette LANGUAGE: Machine code OUTLETS: Mail Order RAGING ROBOTICS Tobor comes in slick, well-designed packaging which seems to promise a new high in Spectrum thrills, arcade action par excellence. As for what you get when you load it up... well, that's another story. OBJECTIVES On a mission to discover new life (sounds a bit familiar?) you develop trouble with your propulsion and navigation systems. You land on the planet Kalanium to look for grittian stones to repair your ship. But (surprise!) the planet just happens to be ruled by a race of vicious robots whose only aim in life is to destroy invaders. But watch out: the robots will disintegrate-well, that's what the instructions say - if they collide, but green robots are indestructible. IN PLAY Oh, what a lovely bore. After a very promising title screen with some tasty-looking graphics built up during loading, the game opens with a very basic maze indeed. Then a door at the top left corner of the screen opens to admit the little man you control. He strolls - very, very slowly - to the bottom right corner of the screen, where he simply stands and waits for a pack of five robots to move into position. The whole process takes a good twenty seconds, during which all you can do is sit and watch. When at last you are set free of your time warp, you can start to move, once again pretty slowly, and shoot at the robots. The robots can also bowl balls at you - again, these don't exactly move at the speed of light, and they disappear if they hit the edge of the screen. But you can come a cropper if you take a potshot at a robot which has just turned green. If you manage to get yourself killed, you'll get a jolly little tombstone, and the tune you can probably guess. If, on the other hand, you zap all the robots, you get a snatch of Land of Hope and Glory, and a new maze. This time, the robots and you move just a shade faster. VERDICT Give me Pacman any day of the week. This game is just too predictable for my tastesthe robots don't even take up random positions in the maze, but trundle to the same spot every time. Wiping them out is so easy, at the lower levels it's guaranteed to give you a guilt complex. You'll never be able to open a can of beans with an easy conscience again...