Hotshots

Sinclair User

Overall 5/5

Greg Sullivan 5/5

With: Mindshadow, Fighting Warrior, Gyron and Shadowfire Publisher: The Force Price: £9.99 Memory: 48K/128K The antithesis of 30 Games. Just four (OK three-and-a-half) excellent games at a bargain price. The half is Mindshadow, an illustrated adventure of some sophistication that hasn't been well converted from the C64 to the Spectrum. The graphics look a bit simple and nobody has bothered to change the character set. The end result looks a bit tawdry although the actual plot and gameplay are rather good. It begins with you not knowing who you are and where you have to go, and get's even more confusing. Pure adventurers who couldn't care less about the presentation may love it. Fighting Warrior was released on the Spectrum shortly after Exploding Fist smashed its way into the Commodore charts, and it suffered because everyone hoped it was to be the Spectrum Fist equivalent (since it was also about bashing people over the head). It wasn't but it's good nonetheless. The idea is to make your way across the desert to rescue the usual imprisoned princess. The problem is that dozens of beings, some of them not entirely human, wish to prevent you. The answer is combat with what appear to be large sticks, using a series of body moves to get your point of view across. The Spectrum emits a surprisingly convincing splat as your stick hits home on the head, body, wing or claws of the enemy. Violent fun for all the family. Shadowfire was one of the first icon-controlled games. Another one of those complex mixes of strategy game-play and good graphics Beyond seems to excel at. You control, via icon instructions, a team sent to rescue Ambassador Kryxix from the clutches of General Zoff. The screen gives you visual information on what member of the team is where, what sort of baddies are around, status etc. You use the various skills of the team to best effect to find your way to where Kryxix is located. Very highly detailed graphics and a potential playing time of weeks distinguish the game. Finally Gyron. What to say of this? It's the sort of game mathematics professors heavily into science fiction would invent. Funny really since it was invented by mathematics professors. Visually it is stunningly original with a 3D view of a maze. Sections of the maze are guarded by giant towers, and through other sections giant orbs slowly move. Winning is not a matter of merely blasting but of calculating the complex principles governing both the movements of the orbs and the positioning of the towers for, whilst the towers can be removed by hitting them on their blind spot this may only cause another to be generated in a different place. Perhaps a crucial pathway that leads to the exit... think before you do anything, but not for too long. The wizzo graphics help to disguise the fact that Gyron is one of the most complicated games to win ever. If your brain is up to it, you'll love it.

ZX ComputingZX Computing Monster Hit

WHAT? ONLY FOUR GAMES ON THIS COMPILATION? NEVER MIND THE QUANTITY - THIS IS A CLASSY QUARTET. The Force £9.95 Compilation tapes seem to be all the rage at the moment, and they're understandably popular with the software houses because they don't involve any development costs for new games. For the people that buy the tapes the tapes these compilations are a mixed blessing, and the value of the tape depends not so much on the games it carries but almost entirety upon how many of the games you've already bought. Obviously if you've already got some of the games included in a particular compilation then it represents less of a bargain than it would to someone who hasn't got any of them. Still, that apart, there's no denying that compilations can give very good value for money and this latest one from The Force (a.k.a Actavislon) offers four very good titles at just under £2.50 each. Surprisingly, perhaps, the first of the two tapes kicks off with an adventure. Mindshadow a very recent release from Activision. It might seem a little odd to mix adventures and arcade games on the same compilation, but it seems like a good idea to me since that's probably the best way of getting dedicated arcade addicts to try out an adventure. And Mindshadow is a good choice because it comes complete with a tutorial program that acts as an introduction to adventure playing. Melbourne House's contribution to Hotshots is Fighting Warrior. Released in the wake of their highly successful Exploding Fist, Warrior puts the martial arts action into an Egyptian setting. You play an Egyptian prince setting out to rescue your princess from the temple of the evil Pharoah. Rather than going through the combat bouts used in most other martial arts games, here you walk across a scrolling desert landscape in search of the temple and have to fight the demons and other creatures as they approach from the opposite direction. You are armed with a sword but do not have as many types of movement available to fight with as in Exploding Fist. That game offered more than a dozen different types of movement, but Fighting Warrior has only seven. This might make the game seem less sophisticated than Exploding Fist, but on the other hand it also makes it easier to get to grips with the combat (I always found the variety of moves in Fist a bit confusing). The graphics and animation are excellent, and although Exploding Fist is probably still the definitive example of martial mayhem this is a good addition to the genre. Tape Two starts with Gyron, the 'mega-game' from Firebird. This is probably the title most likely to cause disagreement, as it was originally greeted by reviews which were either complete raves or totally damning. Gyron is set in a labyrinth which apparently contains all of Space and Time. At the heart of this maze is The Place Of Wisdom, where all the knowledge of an ancient scientist-sorcerer is hidden. Your task is to enter the labyrinth in your craft, the Hedroid, and negotiate the maze to find that hidden knowledge. The pathways of the maze, which are drawn in 3D line graphics against a starry background, are guarded by Celestial Spheres - huge rolling spheres which wander the maze in patterns which repeat once ever fifteen billion years - and towers situated above the maze which can rotate to blast you as you approach. The animation in the game is superb and the movement of the stars and spheres is performed with incredible precision which lends a real impression of size and depth to the screen display. The problem is with the game itself. The maze is huge and finding the Place Of Wisdom is a task that probably could keep you occupied for fifteen billion years. If you felt like sticking with it. When Gyron was first released some of the reviews raved aabout the quality of the animation and the sheer wonderfulness of the maths involved in the programming techniques but others pointed out that the game was really just a variation on the old 3D maze games that have been rattling about since home computers first appeared, and that wandering around a maze for a billion years was just plain boring regardless of how good the animation was. Unfortunately I fell into the latter camp, and while I appreciated the sophistication of the programming I found the game a bit dull. Mind you, by buying Gyron as part of this compilation you're getting it at much less than the original price, so I'm inclined to feel more generous towards it now than I did to its first release. Wisely saving the best 'till last, the last game on the second tape is Shadowfire - the innovative icon-driven adventure from Beyond. Set in the distant future Shadowfire puts you in command of the Enigma Team, a sort of futuristic "A Team" made up of six beings from different worlds, and each with their own special talents. The Enigma team's mission is to penetrate the space vessel Zoff V and rescue Ambassador Kryxix before the villainous General Zoff can get some secret plans from him. You have only one hour and forty minutes to complete this task. The screen display is divided into two halves; the top half displays the status of all the main characters, a picture of the character that you are currently controlling, and a view screen which gives information about the location of all your characters and Zoff's forces aboard the space craft. Below this is the area of screen which displays the icon menus for the Enigma team. Each member of the team has four associated screens: the status screen which control's that character's abilities - strength, speed, stamina and so on; the objects screen with icons for commands such as Drop, Hold and Activate which allows you to manipulate objects and finally the movement of the battle screens. Despite the lack of conventional arcade action Shadowfire is an exciting and challenging game that looks just as advanced now as it did when first released. In addition, the Hotshots tape also includes the Shadowfire Tuner which allows you to alter the conditions of the game and the characters' abilities in order to make it either more or less difficult to complete, according to your own expertise with the game. All together, the four games in this compilation would cost over £40 if bought separately, so the price of just under £10 represents very good value, assuming of course that you don't already have any of these titles. Although Hotshots doesn't have as many titles on it as other compilations the average standard of these four games is much higher than on just about any other collection that I can think of. Most compilation tapes have one or two 'highlights' while the rest of the games are often just fillers, unremarkable games that just pad it out. The four titles on Hotshots though are all good quality, highly professional titles that wouldn't disgrace anybody's software collection.

Melbourne House's Fighting Warrior.

Shadowfire from Beyond.

Crash

Graeme Kidd

THE GAMES GATHERINGS There have always been collector's editions of books, records, tapes, and nowadays even of videos. The computer game industry has featured compilations from the very earliest days, but there have been a few recent developments in the compilation market, as GRAEME KIDD notes... One way of picking up cheap copies of original games is to pop along to computer shows, such as the ZX Microfairs, which are invariably attended by companies offering all sorts of old and not-so-old games at discount prices. The Great Space Race, for instance, is no joke at £15-odd, but for a couple of pounds it makes a reasonable bargain, if only for the large box which is very handy for keeping bits of string, conkers and other oddments in. Budget labels are on the increase - and another source of cheap games is becoming more widely available. Sometimes a firm like Mastertronic will give an 'old' game a new lease of life by re-releasing it at a knockdown price, but more often than not one of the cheapest ways to buy games or fill that gap in your software collection is to snap up a compilation tape. Compilations offer value for money, too - the price per game for titles on compilations ranges from around 33p a game in the case of Argus Press Softwares 30 Games to the more usual £2.50 per-game level. CHARITABLE INTENT Compilations of games put together with charitable intent, with software houses donating games and companies involved in duplicating, printing, distribution and sales giving their services or working at cost, have already raised considerable sums for worthy causes. Softaid, put together specially for the Ethiopian Famine appeal raised an awful lot of money for famine victims last year, becoming the biggest chart success in the history of computer gaming. This year, The Industry (with a capital I) has collected together ten games under the Off The Hook title, which sells for £6.99 with all profits going to the Prince's Trust to alleviate the suffering caused by the illegal use of drugs. War on Want, the charity set up to combat world poverty, has also just released a fourteen game compilation tape available by mail order (see the advertisement that should appear in this issue). Spending a little money having fun and contributing to charity at the same time is no bad thing... On the purely commercial front, some companies have decided to offer collections of their own games for sale. Hewsons, for instance put together a value pack last Christmas which was a compilation in all but name - a shrink wrapped set of original games in original packing. Such 'collected works' are really limited offers rather than compilations proper. Mikro-Gen is planning to collect the Wally games together one day soon, perhaps putting them out back-to-back or including them with budget titles the ranks of Wally fans will no doubt be swelling soon. IS THE FORCE WITH YOU? Melbourne House supplies Mugsy as a freebie with their new release, Mugsy's Revenge, thus enhancing the monetary value of their product quite a bit. The same company has also entered into a co-operative venture with Firebird, Activision, and Beyond. This quartet of companies call themselves The Force for the purpose of compiling game albums, and so far The Force has issued Hotshots, which contains one hit game from each team member. Plans are apparently afoot to take the Christmas market by storm, with a collection of games the like of which no Spectrum Game Player has seen before. Mindshadow, Fighting Warrior, Gyron and Shadowfire plus Tuner for £9.99 on the first Hotshots tapes must represent good value for anyone who has only got a couple of those games already. The biggest bumper bag of goodies is currently on offer from Argus in the form of 30 Games, which as its title suggests, leads the field in terms of volume. Argus has access to a massive back catalogue of titles - software house buy-outs and licensing deals as well as in-house labels, including tape magazines, puts the Argus Press Software Group in a very good position to go for The Biggest Compilation record. As is so often happens in life, however, quantity is at the expense of quality in the case of 30 Games. A few moments spent on mental arithmetic produces an average price of 33p a game - so perhaps one shouldn't really expect too much of the original titles. There are a few neat games hidden in the jungle, and half the fun of buying 30 Games for £9.95 probably lies in loading them all, one after another, and working out which ones to load again! CHRISSY COMPILATION Although They Sold A Million is a rather ambitious claim to make in the title of a compilation - unless it contains an awful lot of very good games, They Sold A Metaphorical Million doesn't have quite the same ring, as Ocean/US Gold and The Hit Squad no doubt realised when they launched their first TSAM collection in time for Christmas at £9.95. Beach Head I, Jet Set Willy, Daley Thompson's Decathlon and Sabrewulf got the title off the ground, and more recently TSAM II appeared, giving a new lease of life to Bruce Lee, Match point, Knight Lore, and the classic Match Day. Virgin is yet another company well into compilations - WOW! Games One and Two have appeared so far, at the slightly lower price point of £8.95, with the first collection featuring half a dozen games (average unit price £1.49) and WOW! II slimmed down a little to the five games level (£1.79 a game to save you working it out). Respectable games all, although Wow II probably presents slightly better value in that the quality of the games is a little better as compared with its predecessor. (That old argument about the Two Q's crops up again!) Ian Stewart, the Main Man at Gremlin Graphics hit upon the wizard wheeze of going for games to put on a compilation on the basis of reviews - CRASH Reviews, naturally for Spectrum software - and the first CRASH Smash collection has already been let out of the Gremlin stable to zoom up the charts. Yet another £9.95 collection, this one features Dun Darach, Alien 8, Night Gunner and Spy Hunter. A neat selection of top rate games that is spread across a range of gameplaying interests. Mr S from Gremlin has plans for a 'top notch' compilation in time for Christmas - this time featuring at least one Gremlin Graphics game. THE MARKETING APPROACH Marketing companies have seen the possibilities of entering the software world without the pain and aggravation of actually writing games. Beau Jolly has assembled several compilations for the Spectrum so far: a £5.99 Value Pack featuring old Imagine (of Wacky Waiters fame) product; the £9.95 Mega Hits collection; 6 Computer Games for £6.95 and 10 Computer Games for £9.95. With the possible exception of the value pack, some quite respectable titles can be had from Beau-Jolly at a very fair price, although their £19.95 mega-compilation didn't do a storm by all accounts. More compilations are on the way from the Beau-Jolly team - who learnt their trade in the record industry. Remember K-Tel? So far there have been few "theme" compilations, concentrating on the works of one programmer or on one kind of game. Global's Fourmost Adventures reviewed by Derek a little while ago sprang quickly to mind, but resident strategist Sean Masterson was at a loss to name a Strategy compilation... perhaps there's still a niche or two left unexploited in the compilation market after all! The last word in compilations must surely go to Firebird who had a bit of fun with a small collection of slightly dire games that had been submitted for consideration to the Silver Range. Don't Buy This, paradoxically, was sold. But with a strong disclaimer and a very tongue-in-cheek inlay blurb...