Voidrunner

Sinclair User

Overall 8/10

Tony Dillon 8/10

Label: Mastertronic Author: Icon Price: £2.99 Memory: 48K/128K Joystick: various Reviewer: Tony Dillon Look into my eyes. You are getting sleepy, ever so sleepy. You are going baaack... baacckk... back to the time of mutant camels and strange colours. When I count three, you will awake and Jeff Minter will arise to rehaunt you down to your local software dealer. One, two, three. It's true! Jeff's back with a vengeance. Icon design has lovingly converted his old C64 hit Voidrunner to Spectrum, and I think its got a hit on its hands. So what kind of game is it? After wading through all the blurb, you eventually realise it's a basic shoot-em-up. Pure and simple. Just weaving around the screen making "neeow doo-doo boom" noises, destroying droids and camels alike and saving the Earth. No big deal for hardened tough guys (or tough persons, if you want to be technical). The game has you flying vertically, blasting away at all sorts of 'orrible meanies which react in different ways - some explode while some leave pods behind which have to be shot again. Your ship, or rather, group of ships change formation as you zoom from level to level, each with an animally sort of name such as Llama, Goat, or Sheep. This insures that the amazingly cool tactics that you used to get off the last level are not necessarily going to get you through the next. Voidrunner is fast, colourful, highly playable, extremely addictive and a snip at the price. In the immortal words of Douglas Adams: "Boffo. A good one".

Your Sinclair

Graphics 6/10

Playability 7/10

Value For Money 8/10

Addictiveness 8/10

Overall 8/10

Rick Robson 8/10

M.A.D. £2.99 Reviewer: Rick Robson Double hoopy hot stuff! All you (slightly) wrinklies out there will probably remember Voidrunner as an all time Commodore classic from Jeff Minter's vivid imagination. Many eons later, here's MAD's Speccy conversion - and it's one of cosmic wonderousness! The first thing to say is that Voidrunner is no relation, poor or otherwise, to Bladerunner. It's made up of pure violence, going back to the good old days when Speccy programs were lovely and violent and Speccy players were glad of it. Voidrunner deals in ultra-death and hyper-violence - nothing more and nothing less! All you do is command your crack corps of ships (you start with four, flying in Red Arrows formation) against the remorseless onslaught of wave after wave of aliens. There is no firepower, time or energy limit, and the whole screen is free for gameplay. You start with five lives, but for every wave you vanquish, you gain another life, up to a total of nine. There's nothing very sophisticated about the enemy either. They have eight basic forms, few can actually attack you, and those that can are easily avoided. Most are just cattle to the slaughter! So, okay, where's all the fun in this? Well, Voidrunner has none of this messing about with poncy graphics and whizzy sound. What it does have is more aliens moving faster in more directions in true pyrotechnicolour than any other game of the type. And what's more, on each level you get onto, you get more ships which can fire independently at all angles until the whole screen's just one boiling mass of total death and destruction. It's one magic game.

Read it at Your Sinclair Rock'n'Roll Years

Crash

Presentation 66%

Graphics 38%

Playability 59%

Addictive Qualities 58%

Overall 54%

Mark Rothwell

Mike Dunn

Robin Candy

Producer: M.A.D. Retail Price: £2.99 Author: Jeff Minter The Droid Wars are over, but the vengeful losers are intent upon attacking the Home-world with a retaliatory holocaust. They must be stopped. You have control of a multi-directional green command craft supported by three drone fighters. At first these adopt a clustered grouping around the command ship, but on higher levels they go into symmetrical formations and move in different patterns. Each craft has a blaster that can fire independently (and in later space regions they can fire in different directions). Some aliens move predictably and others randomly; some drop bombs and others fire lasers. Some have to be blasted several times before they're destroyed, and then can spawn other aliens. There are 30 waves of attackers, and all aliens within a wave must be destroyed before the next can be tackled. A periodically pulsing 'zapper' line scans the screen from top to bottom. If the command ship is on the line when it pulses, you and your drone craft are destroyed. COMMENTS Control keys: Q/A up/down O/P left/right, SPACE for fire Joystick: Kempston, Cursor, Interface II Use of colour: lots of it Graphics: simple and plain Sound: little Skill levels: one Screens: plenty to hold your interest

The look of yesteryear - fast pixels from Jeff Minter make for a classic shoot-'em-up.