Space Island

Big K

Overall 0/3

Steve Keaton 0/3

DROID YAWN MAKER: Terminal Software MACHINE: 48K ZX Spectrum FORMAT: cassette PRICE: £6.95 Unexciting 'graphic adventure' (I'm growing slowly to hate that term) set upon the crudely etched planet of Zyro. Apparently one of your patrolling survey ships has been downed by a mysterious salvo of alien laser fire. Miraculously, though, an android has survived this attack, and he now stands amid the wreckage of the craft awaiting further instructions. With what transpires to be a particularly limited vocabulary you must try and guide the little tin man about the surface of the planet and attempt to solve the riddle of the hostile blast. The subsequent action (I use the term loosely) is then enacted across a static map with your android artfully represented as a white punctuation mark. Just nudge your marker around the planet and react to the messages displayed. Yawnsville dad. As you might imagine I found the thing exceptionally tedious. Progress is slow and the graphic display barely warrants a mention.

Personal Computer News

Mike Gerrard

SPECTRUMS IN SPACE A Spectrum was all Mike Gerrard needed to see the solar system - and with no lifeline either. Starclash (cassette £6.95, any machine), Micromega, [redacted] Fireflash and Munnery's Megatroids (£5.95 each), Abacus, [redacted] Cosmos (£5.95), Abbex Electronics, [redacted] Space island (£6.95, 48K), Terminal Software, [redacted] There must be more space games for the Spectrum than there are stars in the sky, though you'd need stars in your eyes to get any pleasure out of some of the software on offer. In concentrating on so many variations of a single theme the inevitable result is a lot of dross, so do any of this recent batch of software stand out from the crowd? Not Starclash from Micromega, which is a disappointment coming after their earlier 3-D attempts with Haunted Hedges, Luna Crabs and Death Chase. The cover gives the impression that this too is 3-D, showing a fighter zooming over the Earth's surface, but this is merely a shot of the title screen, the game itself being an invaders variation that I remember playing in the arcades at least three years ago. In this, four separate waves of aliens come down the screen at you, different shapes moving in different ways, from a straightforward downward progression to green bow-ties that move up, down and around. You have three lives, and if you let a single ship reach the bottom of the screen then the entire wave starts afresh. After four waves there's a mothership, which has two reactor cores that flash alternately, and you must hit the live one to polish it off and start all over again, it's compatible with a Kempston joystick, but there are hundreds of better games around. One of them is Fireflash, the best version of a missile command type of game that I've seen. The graphics of the base you're defending are very detailed, full of little buildings and towers, and you move your missiles along underground passages to the chosen launching pads. In addition to the nine skill levels, author Kevin Flynn has written into the program a routine enabling you to alter any of seven POKE values affecting the speed of certain aspects of the game. The pre-set values and the range of possible alternatives are given on the cassette insert, and the game itself is fast-moving, colourful and reasonably noisy. An ability to understand what you're doing with six fingers simultaneously is an advantage. From the same company comes Munnery's Mergatroids, which should be marginally easier as here you only need five fingers to enable you, as the instructions succinctly put it, to 'blast every alien you see!' This is an attempt at 3-D, with the waves of aliens moving towards your sights in the centre of the screen as you attempt to pass through seven zones of them. The main problem is that the aliens are simple geometric shapes like diamonds and triangles, and because these are transparent it's impossible to pick out what you're firing at and what you're trying to avoid as they come thick and fast towards you, overlapping each other. The fact that your own missiles are also transparent diamond shapes doesn't help matters, and the game was a case of over-kill, I thought. Cosmos has you as 'the pilot of an advanced defender class starship. You protect convoys of sub-light speed cargo vessels from hostile attack and natural dangers.' The convoy is in the centre of an area of space made up of a 3 x 3 grid. You can only see one of these grids at a time through your viewscreen, but can scroll quickly enough around them. You're watching out for the asteroid showers which float across as well as 18 alien ships that will try to destroy your convoy. Guiding your lasers by the sight in centre-screen, you must decide whether to stay close to the convoy, when you only see dangers at the last minute, or whether to roam around the grid in search of enemies and risk leaving your convoy open to obliteration. I found control of this difficult as there's quite a delay between firing your lasers, which come in from the corners of the screen, and the shot exploding when they converge in your sights, by which time the target has zipped away. You have to keep firing continually, and try to predict the movements of your enemies, which is not easy. The game is fast-moving but the graphics are ordinary and again it gets submerged beneath the mass of good material available for the Spectrum. At one time a machine code game meant automatic interest, but now they're ten a penny, so you have to produce something different. An attempt at that is promised by Space Island, a graphics adventure from Terminal Software, who have previously produced some good material for the Commodore machines. I wasn't impressed by this Spectrum effort, though, which is very similar to another they've published at the same time, Vampire Village. In both you're shown a map on the screen and you must move your character around using the cursor control keys. In this space story, where you're attempting to find the cause of dangerous time distortions, your character is simply a cross while the map is filled with black dots, representing interesting features. As you arrive at a dot you're shown some text, which may perhaps tell you that there's a rifle or a boat there. Pressing the space key will get you a list of the 19 commands at your disposal, though unfortunately not for long enough to enable you to note them all down or even read them and consider which to use. You enter the first letter of your chosen command in inverse video and the game responds (or not), the dot disappears and you go on your way to the next one. As you visit the various dots the game does start to build up like a conventional adventure, with problems to solve, but each time you die there's a lengthy wait while a new game is generated and the only time distortion I noticed was that after playing the game for ten minutes it seemed like two hours must have passed. If you want a game where you spend half your time with a finger on the cursor key while you watch a cross move slowly over a simple map then this is definitely the one for you. This only serves to raise the question again of how much of a games software industry the home computer market can support. All the signs are that a good thing is being spread much too thinly. Only one outstanding game in this crop, then, so if you're looking round for something to buy make sure you makes your choice before you pays your money.

C&VG (Computer & Video Games)

Keith Campbell

CROSS THE DOTS! Space Island turns your Spectrum into a control panel on board a starship in geostationary orbit above the island of Roba on the planet Zyro. You control an android who 'stands alone amidst wreckage and awaits your command.' Your TV set becomes a videoscanner (what else?) showing an 'orbital map' of Roba island. Somehow my Spectrum didn't quite have the feel of a control panel - well, let's face it, have you ever seen a control panel you can slip into your back pocket and not notice? Obviously my pet android felt this, for when I tried to move him around the tiny island (him a dirty great cross trying to rendezvous with microscopic dots representing objects), he didn't respond with quite the alacrity one might expect from such a high-tech device. Once moving, this obstinate creature would proceed inexorably in the same direction until commanded otherwise. Even after a good night's sleep he would wake up and plod on regardless in obedience to his previous instruction! Apart from this painful method of movement Space Island boasts a vocabulary of 19 words, yes folks - 19! Not whole words admittedly, but the initial letters of verbs. The cassette inlay mentions slick machine code display. However, the program is written in Basic, and reaction is just not slick enough to give adequate control. Space Island is for 48k Spectrum from Terminal Software, price £6.95. Fairly apt, for if I'd played it for much longer, I would now be suffering from terminal boredom. Reviewer: Keith Campbell

ZX Computing

James Walsh

Space Island is set in the year 2651 on the planet Zyro. 20000 years ago the Avafad people of Zyro developed Timespread, a machine which enables matter to be reduced to zero mass, thus making it transportable at speeds greater than that of light itself. Hence time can be changed. Your objective is to disable Timespread and return it to Earth because it has been causing time distortion around the planet Zyro. Unfortunately this is where the trouble starts, when you try and land a survey ship on the island Roba, where Timespread is situated, your ship is destroyed by Timespread's highly sophisticated defence system. There is only one survivor left on Roba, one of your androids, who is situated on a small island west of the Roba itself. Your only chance is to carefully guide this android to the island Roba where it can disable Timespread. You are shown an overhead view of Roba and the surrounding islands, whilst the android is represented by a small cross. Occasionally the android will talk to you, asking for assistance. This is a real time game, so there is little time to sit back and think. Space Island is reasonably original, complicated in some respects, whilst simple in its concept. A good game well worth considering for the long dark evenings.