Trom

Your Spectrum

Peter Newland MISS

Peter Shaw MISS

Stephen Avent HIT

JOYSTCK JURY Evaluating the batch this month is the Gloucester Computing Club. Any club wishing to offer their services should contact Ron Smith, Your Spectrum, [redacted]. This month's reviewers (all ten of them!) are members of the Gloucester Computer Club and, in alphabetical order, they are: Stephen Avent (28), Andrew Base (15), Robert Ledbury (22), Mark Manning (15), Nigel Newland (13), Peter Newland (15), Johnathan Norman (15), George Price (35), Mike Skinner (30) and Richard Vernon (15). They all set to work with Spectrum, pen and paper to tell us what's right and what's not so right with the latest new releases. THE GLOUCESTER COMPUTING CLUB In a moment we'll get on to the verdicts of our nimble-fingered, boggle-eyed band - to find out which new games are bound for the YS Top 20. But first, some details on the club. It was formed approximately eight months ago by Mr B Ledbury (who happens to be the father of Robert - one of our reviewers) and it's already built up a membership of 35 enthusiasts - ages ranging from 10 years to 'mature'. Meetings are currently held in two rooms at Mr Ledbury's home; one for games evaluation, the other for more serious studies. Membership is free and for more information, contact Mr Ledbury, [redacted]. TROM DK'Tronics £5.95 Bits lurk in the corner of the screen and you must steer your bitsearcher towards them to collect them. That done, you take all the bits to the furnace to incinerate them. But watch out for the bytes and the poisonous pixels.

Read it at Your Spectrum Unofficial Archive

Big K

Overall 3/3

Steve Keaton 3/3

TOM MEETS MORT MAKER: DK'Tronics MACHINE: Spectrum 48K FORMAT: cassette PRICE: £5.95 Cripes! This is absolutely bad, man. Imagine Tron without effects. Tom without Jerry and Gridrunner without grids. Imagine being sentenced to life in an arena of relentless peril, illuminated only by the flames from a central inferno and the flash of laser fire. Imagine heavy duty warfare. Imagine there's no people... About the screen sparkle The Bits. With your trusty Bitsearcher (fashioned after the battle cruiser from Tron, hence the awkward title) you must hoover 'em up one by one and deposit them into the central furnace. Sharing the arena are the Bytesheets, great walls of noise that grind up and down the screen, and around the edge skate the deadly Nibbles who pump poisonous pixels stage centre. All must be avoided. As you move through the screens the Bytesheets become more furious and the Pixel shower more intense. Its a visual nightmare that requires fearsome coordination. A simple idea true enough, but the game just won't quit. Like I said: it's bad, man.

Sinclair User

Gilbert Factor 4/10

Memory: 48K Price: £5.95 If you thought Trom might bear some resemblance to the film of almost the same name, forget it. The cassette insert has a confusing tale of collecting hits while avoiding pixels and nibbles. There are some bouncing bytes knocking around as well. It seems dK'Tronics could not think of any remotely credible background for what proves to be a thoroughly uninspiring game. Briefly, you have to run round the screen picking up red blobs - 'bits' - and carry them to a fiery furnace. The 'bytes' look like purple bars and rebound from the walls. Other features try to track you down and shoot you. The game is easy to play and there are three levels of difficulty. Successive screens appear to produce only more of the same and the only positive feature is a facility for choosing which keys you use for the controls. Unbelievably, there appears to be no provision for the use of a joystick. dK'Tronics has produced many good games in the past. Trom is certainly not one of them.

Read it at Sinclair User Magazine Online

Crash

Use of Computer 90%

Graphics 65%

Playability 88%

Getting Started 78%

Addictive Qualities 85%

Value For Money 83%

Overall 82%

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Producer: DK'Tronics Memory Required: 16K Retail Price: £5.95 Language: Machine code Author: B. Williams The Greater Intergalactic Stack & Nibble Co could be the alias of this grid-oriented game which, as it states on the inlay, is a task quite simple to understand but not so easy to manage. At the centre of the screen is a fiery furnace. You are in control of a bitsearcher. In the corners of the screen are the bits, and as the levels are progressed through, elsewhere on the screens as well. The idea is to collect the bits with your bitsearcher and carry them to the furnace, drop them in and incinerate them. This is done by running across the top of the furnace, but going into it will result in death. Everything would all be hunky dory and as boring as hell's fire if it weren't for the bytes which bounce around the screen. These are long (centipedal?) shaped things which keep rebounding along the same path from top to bottom and some from side to side. Additionally there are nasty green nibbles on patrol, which run around the edge of the playing area firing poisonous pixels into the screen. The more bits you incinerate and screens you clear, the more of everything there is, more bytes, bits, nibbles and pixels until your stack is overflowing. Oh, and the walls are electrified! COMMENTS Control keys: excellent - redefinable, up/down/left/right needed Joystick: almost any via user-definable keys Keyboard play: very responsive Colour simple but effective Graphics: small, one character size, amazing fire effect, generally quite smooth Sound: good Skill levels: 3 Lives: 7 on easy level, 3 on hard

A blurr of bytes, nibbling and pixelating around Trom.