Zone Trooper

Your Sinclair

Overall 2/10

Marcus Berkmann 2/10

BARGAIN BASEMENT Another trip to Lowprice Lane with the king of the skinflints, Marcus Berkmann! ZONE TROOPER Game Busters £1.99 Reviewer: Marcus Berkmann One thing that never ceases to amaze me is that games like this continue to be put on sale to an unsuspecting public. Again we're in the land of arcade adventures, but this is so facile and dreary that it's genuinely hard work to play it for more than about five minutes. (I stuck it, though. Can I have a pay rise please?) (No. Ed) Basically it's a matter of flying through some pretty landscapes, picking up some virtually invisible icons, shooting nasties and all the usual things you do in games like this - except for the fact that it's unutterably boring and apparently pointless. Once again we have to go back to about 1984 for the origins of this game, cos it looks as though it was written then and conveniently forgotten for five years. Collision detection is all over the place, the attribute clash is a disgrace, and the gameplay is a matter of avoiding unavoidable nasties which don't do much harm to you anyway, so that however well you play you always get through about ten screens and then die. A total write-off.

Sinclair User

Graphics 45%

Sound 30%

Playability 50%

Lastability 47%

Overall 44%

Jim Douglas 44%

Label: Gamebusters Author: In-house Price: £1.99 Memory: 48K/128K Joystick: various Reviewer: Jim Douglas This is the DANGER ZONE and YOU are the ZONE TROOPER... Well you can put me up a chimney if this doesn't ring a bell. Yessir, it's the sole-survivor scenario. Your spaceship has crash-landed on an alien planet. The entire crew is deep in computer-enhanced dreamland like so many frozen peas and you're the only one awake. Since an eternity of sleep is a little unappealing, you decide that you must collect enough plasma pods in order to save your pals. Quite what the plasma pods do is a little unclear, as is the benefit of waking up thousands of your - probably hungover - mates to let them know the ship's up the Swanee and although they're awake, they're going to starve to death. Still, if it's plasma pods you're after, this would appear to be the place. If there's one thing that annoys me more than any other in explory-mappy games it's unrealistic jetpac-gravity combinations. ZT for example, has an awful lot of obstacles to negotiate, and continually being drawn to the bottom of the screen is nothing short of bloody annoying when you're also trying to avoid homing aliens. The aliens, too, are of an especially infuriating nature. They take a number of shots before showing any signs of injury and anticipate your flight path, draining energy like little chrome ticks. I'd rather have a fair fight - you shoot them, they die - they shoot you, you die. However, on with the bananas. The graphics are colourful and riddled with attribute worries, although far from detailed. In fact the graphic style (oh good Lord. - GT) is a little tricky to pin down. Neither monochromesque detail or colourful Atwellian, it's neo-cubist representationalist, I feel. (You've been reading Arena again Jim. - GT). As a result, you certainly don't get much of a buzz from looking at the thing, so gameplay rushes into save the day. Alas no. While there are a reasonable number of objects to pick up, you can evidently only carry one at a time, and since your supply of ammunition is treated as an object, you can't kill anything when in transit to anywhere else. I felt that deciding where objects should be used was a mite unclean and I wasted a stack of time drifting from one place to another only to discover that I had the wrong item with me. Still, that's the "fun" of this sort of game. Some information can be gleaned from INFONET, the computer system, but it failed miserably to offer any remedy for the intense apathy I felt during the whole affair. Even being a budget game these days doesn't really excuse such ropey and unappealing game structure.

Crash

Overall 30%

BUDGET BUREAU £1.99 New on Mastertronic's 'flippy flippy' label this month is Nonamed (56%), a tale of kings, wicked wizards and courageous knights. You have to battle your way (ninja style) through the Castle With No Name which has been filled full of terrible ogres. All the graphics in the game are excellent and would do any full-price game proud, it's just a pity the gameplay isn't so good - it takes ages to get used to the continual attack by various nasty creatures. After a bit of practice you can get some enjoyment from just walking around and admiring all the locations. Another Mastertronic 'flippy flippy' game, with the Spectrum and Amstrad versions on the same tape, is Reveal (24%). The object of the game is to memorise an onscreen isometric pattern. Then, when the screen is plunged into darkness, you have to manoeuvre your object, lighting up the blocks again (sounds like fun, doesn't it?) Once they are all fully lit you can move onto the next screen and repeat the process. This soon gets extremely tedious, especially when aliens decide to darken the blocks on the opposite side of the screen again (fume!). I doubt whether anyone would find Reveal worth even £1.99. If, on the other hand, you'd rather suffer with blocky sprites and plenty of colour clash then Gamebusters have for the very thing. Zone Trooper (30%) is another arcade adventure but this time you're the lucky crew member chosen to collect plasma pods scattered across a spaceship. This involves bouncing around the ship - and surrounding landscapes - while popping the odd alien and collecting anything in sight. Some particularly nice sequences are the airlocks and the ship's computer but it's hardly worth buying just for those. Zone Trooper could provide an hours exploring for the hardened arcade adventure player, but it won't last long. If you liked the last two Atlantis titles - Gunfighter and Cerius - then the author's latest should prove welcomed. Called Tank Command (71%) it asks you to fight your way across an island in a tank, blasting away the enemy with a choice of either grenade or bombs. This may sound easy but you soon find out that if you don't bomb the enemies in the correct order you will end up in lots of little bits all over the screen. Simple sounding, but incredibly addictive. Tank Command is a pleasing mixture of arcade and strategy wih simple, but effective graphics. Well done, Atlantis. The new offering from Silverbird this month is a simplistic race game, International Speedway (24%). you have to test your streetwise racing skills in the world of league racing. All it involves is racing around track after track of simplistic graphics, the most exciting part is when you crash into another racer - not my idea of fun. If I had £1.99 knocking about this would be one of the last games I would buy, definitely not recommended. £2.99 Code Masters dominate the £2.99 slot this month with three games, the first of which is yet another of their famous cartoon adventures. This time it's called Bigfoot (47%) and stars a furry monster who goes by the name of Footsy! The graphics in the game are just mindblowing, not because they are any good, but because you just can't tell what's going on. There are three colour options to try but they are all pretty bad and cause clash unless you them totally monochrome. There just isn't enough in this game to keep me occupied for long and I don't recommend it unless you are a hardened Code Masters fan. What, another Code Masters BMX game?! Yes, I'm afraid so. The programmer that brought you 4 Soccer Simulators has now come up with BMX Freestyle (76%). It's a great improvement on the original BMX game that had an overhead view and tiny bikes but BMX Freestyle is just too hard. All the graphics are excellent (what I've seen of them); well-defined bikes and backgrounds on most sections with the usual jolly Code Masters tunes and effects. The only problem is that it's almost impossible to get past the first section (wheelies), I did it once, only to foul up and squash my mates on the ramp section that comes after (splurt!). If you think you are skilled enough to do well, give this one a whirl. Flushed with the success of winning the Embassy World Darts Championship Jocky Wilson has gone and got himself a darts game, Jocky Wilson's Darts Challenge (54%) courtesy of Zeppelin Games. It's one of theose games where all you do is aim the wobbling dart somewhere near the place you want it to go and hope for the best. You would have thought a beer drinking tournament would have been included but alas all you get is the screen where you throw the dart and an aerial view of some beer belly throwing a dart at the board. It's a fair simulation and I'm sure fans of the sport will rush out to buy it. Another Zeppelin Games offering is Rally Simulator (27%), a dire car racing game that just has no appeal at all. The car skids and slides about the monochrome play area seemingly out of control and it can even run over the houses causing hardly any damage. There are no decent sound effects to speak of and to complete even the first level is an impossibility. Rally Simulator would simply be a waste of money if you bought it, stay away! (No way! This is a great game - well, not bad. Phil and I had great fun struggling to complete the first, incredibly hard level. Level Two is extremely hard - Stu.) The final £2.99 priced game this month is from the Hewson budget label, Rack-It. Called into Africa (69%) it is, unsurprisingly, set in the jungles of Africa. If your Spectrum days go back a few years you may remember the classic strategy/adventure Lords Of Midnight, well into Africa is very similar in look and feel to that. The control method is the first thing that hits you, for some strange reason it has only three keys to select a whole host of options making it slightly difficult. The game itself should provide hours of play for adventure fans with forty controllable characters, eight radio operators and a massive landscape to explore.