Black Planet

Crash

Producer: Phipps Associates, 48K £5.95 Author: B G Cornhill A mammoth game for wet Sundays. You'll need a printer or a note pad or a good memory, for the complex of instructions are on one side and the game on the other. Your task is to rid the space lanes of pirates whose home is on the Black Planet, which is invisible until you find the Key, which has been broken into seven parts and distributed on seven different planets, which each have a different arcade adventure, which each has different key instruction, which means you've got to know it all backwards! That said, it's tons of fun. The cockpit view with moving stars is very good. An instrument panel tells you where you are in space, where the star base is or the planets on which you must land. Navigating is quite difficult, but if you get it right the sight of a planet looming up is very cimenatic, You can land manually or use the auto-docking feature. Between planets you may well be attacked by the pirates who know you are after them, in which case you are into a furious dog fight. It's not a game for a few moments. Excellent value and highly recommended.

Read it at Crash - The Online Edition

Crash

Producer: Phipps Associates, 48K £5.95 Author: B G Cornhill A mammoth game for wet Sundays. You'll need a printer or a note pad or a good memory, for the complex of instructions are on one side and the game on the other. Your task is to rid the space lanes of pirates whose home is on the Black Planet, which is invisible until you find the Key, which has been broken into seven parts and distributed on seven different planets, which each have a different arcade adventure, which each has different key instruction, which means you've got to know it all backwards! That said, it's tons of fun. The cockpit view with moving stars is very good. An instrument panel tells you where you are in space, where the star base is or the planets on which you must land. Navigating is quite difficult, but if you get it right the sight of a planet looming up is very cimenatic, You can land manually or use the auto-docking feature. Between planets you may well be attacked by the pirates who know you are after them, in which case you are into a furious dog fight. It's not a game for a few moments. Excellent value and highly recommended.

Crash

Producer: Phipps Associates, 48K £5.95 Author: B G Cornhill A mammoth game for wet Sundays. You'll need a printer or a note pad or a good memory, for the complex of instructions are on one side and the game on the other. Your task is to rid the space lanes of pirates whose home is on the Black Planet, which is invisible until you find the Key, which has been broken into seven parts and distributed on seven different planets, which each have a different arcade adventure, which each has different key instruction, which means you've got to know it all backwards! That said, it's tons of fun. The cockpit view with moving stars is very good. An instrument panel tells you where you are in space, where the star base is or the planets on which you must land. Navigating is quite difficult, but if you get it right the sight of a planet looming up is very cimenatic, You can land manually or use the auto-docking feature. Between planets you may well be attacked by the pirates who know you are after them, in which case you are into a furious dog fight. It's not a game for a few moments. Excellent value and highly recommended.

Personal Computer News

Lasting Appeal 4/5

Playability 3/5

Use Of Machine 4/5

Overall Value 4/5

Mike Gerrard 4/5

NAME: The Black Planet SYSTEM: 48K Spectrum PRICE: £5.95 PUBLISHER: Phipps Associates, [redacted] FORMAT: Cassette LANGUAGE: Machine code, some Basic OTHER VERSIONS: None OUTLETS: Mail order PIECES FOR PEACE 'Two for the price of one' always was good sales spiel, but with The Black Planet Phipps might be excused for yelling 'Roll up, roll up, seven for the price of one!' as that is the number of separate games incorporated into this space quest. OBJECTIVES As the 21st Century draws to a close, and Planet Earth's empire stretches throughout the Galaxy, you must assume the role of the good guys yet again in order to conquer the pirates who are threatening the Galaxy's peace and harmony. To destroy the pirates you must collect the seven pieces of the key which will then enable you to obliterate the sunless Black Planet where they hide out. IN PLAY In practice, so long as you have the instructions handy, the game becomes reasonably straightforward to play, yet very hard to master. The main screen is the nose of your rocket ship travelling through space, with read-outs for shield strength, helm co-ordinates, target co-ordinates and distance to target. The K key sets your target co-ordinates, such as 30,30 for the planet Bellatrix, and the cursor keys align your helm co-ordinates with this. Then, with careful use of hyper-jumping or gunfire to destroy the pursuing pirates, you should reach your destination and the first game challenge. You can visit the planets in any order, provided you succeed eventually at all seven. One game could be described as Frogger on a crossword puzzle, where you have to move down the screen and back up again using just the black squares, which are moving quickly and haphazardly. Another is a diamond-shaped draughts board across which you plot your course a square at a time, alternating moves with a mobile fire that is protecting the piece of key that you're after. Others involve you in shootouts, minefields, monsters and jumping off cliffs into tiny boats. To add to your problems there will be a decreasing fuel supply and diminishing shield strength, to be replenished by a tricky docking at the Starbase from time to time. VERDICT Anyone who succeeds at destroying the Black Planet will discover a secret code word, and revealing this to Phipps will earn you a free badge. Despite limitations on graphics and sound. The Black Planet is both different and difficult.

Personal Computer Games

Steve Mann

MACHINE: Spectrum 48K FROM: Phipps Associates PRICE: £5.95 FORMAT: Cassette The story goes like this. As Starmagon of the Empire Fleet, the player's task is to rid the space lanes of a group of pirates who are threatening the trading vessels. The pirates, who are based on the Black Planet, understandably feel contemptuous about attempts to deal with them - their planet has no sun, and is thus invisible (I'm not sure how well that ties in with currently established scientific thinking). There is a way to detect their homeworld - all you have to do is to find the seven parts of the Key, which was broken up long ago, and hidden on seven different planets. As with Quicksilva's Time Gate, the instructions for this game are so complex that they have to loaded as a separate program before the game proper is attempted - a printer is a great help here to save constant reloading of the instruction portion. The instructions tell you about the special peculiarities of each planet, and the steps you will need to take to locate the key segment on each. Procedures for segment retrieval take the form of a mildly intellectual exercise - on one planet, for example, you have to outguess your opponent who is moving towards you on a sort of honeycomb grid. You start the game with 30 crew members, and it's one of these - not you - that gets wiped out each time you make a mistake, which certainly mirrors real-life military behaviour. At various stages your ship will be attacked in deep space by the pirates and you are equipped with weapons to deal with this eventuality - alternatively, of course, you can simply run away. You have to make sure that your shield strength is sufficient to deal with the attackers, and you have navigational aids to enable you to land on the various planets. This is the sort of game that's fascinating to play once or twice, but once you have managed to work out suitable methods of dealing with the obstacles on each planet, the enjoyment rapidly fades. I found this to be the case with Time Gate, as well - it soon became extremely tedious. This genre of games seems to equate quality with length - as long as the program takes an age to complete, it doesn't really matter if the constituent parts aren't up to much. This is a view to which I have never subscribed, but I may well be in a minority here - I know people who have been playing Time Gate for months and months. If you fall into this category then The Black Planet is for you.