The Detective

Crash

Producer: Arcade, 48K £5.50 Another game which sounds unlikely as a galaxian type contender, but then, we couldn't quite figure what the title had to do with the game. But it is a good game anyway. Nice packaging as usual from Arcade and reflected in the graphics. Avoid the falling objects which change characteristic by level or shoot them for points. Tyres (?!) form up like thunderclouds and fall on you, a wretched dog keeps stealing your points. Avoid him by using the wrap-around screen, 25 levels. Joystick: Kempston and AGF or Protek. Good value.

Read it at Crash - The Online Edition

Crash

Producer: Arcade, 48K £5.50 Another game which sounds unlikely as a galaxian type contender, but then, we couldn't quite figure what the title had to do with the game. But it is a good game anyway. Nice packaging as usual from Arcade and reflected in the graphics. Avoid the falling objects which change characteristic by level or shoot them for points. Tyres (?!) form up like thunderclouds and fall on you, a wretched dog keeps stealing your points. Avoid him by using the wrap-around screen, 25 levels. Joystick: Kempston and AGF or Protek. Good value.

Crash

Use of Spectrum 80%

Addictive Qualities 75%

Value For Money 85%

Chris Passey

Lloyd Mangram

Memory Required: 48K RRP: £5.50 Chuck, they know what yer doing and they're out to get ya!' She means the Mob, and they're after the secrets of the safe - so are you. From the cover you could be forgiven for thinking that this is a 1940s Chicago adventure, but actually it's an arcade game, where you run back and forth shooting at various things such as 'lips', things on legs firing lasers, little men, arrows, bomb-dropping helicopters, aricraft etc. Eventually you enter 'dagger alley' where men throw daggers at you. At level 25 you get a chance to open the safe. Additional hazards include indestructible falling tyres and a canine point-thief. Keyboard layout is quite good but I thought the man moves slowly. Also I think I spotted a bug in the scoring which sometimes gave me F lives and SSS points. CHRIS PASSEY Despite its name and scenario, this is definitely a galaxian variant, and a rich one too. Dodging the tyres which gather in rows and fall on you gets to be difficult when at the same time you're avoiding the other objects and the little dog that pops up now and again and steals points from you. Fortunately its a wrap around screen, otherwise it would all be impossible! Arcade seem to design games that look easy at first, but being so long tend to wear you down until you start making mistakes. I liked the way that towards the end of each screen the aliens get less and so it all speeds up enormously. Good spread of joystick options. Perhaps its only fair to point out that with 48K in play it has an obvious advantage over the other games in this bunch. LLOYD MANGRAM

Crash

Producer: Arcade, 48K £5.50 Another game which sounds unlikely as a galaxian type contender, but then, we couldn't quite figure what the title had to do with the game. But it is a good game anyway. Nice packaging as usual from Arcade and reflected in the graphics. Avoid the falling objects which change characteristic by level or shoot them for points. Tyres (?!) form up like thunderclouds and fall on you, a wretched dog keeps stealing your points. Avoid him by using the wrap-around screen, 25 levels. Joystick: Kempston and AGF or Protek. Good value.

Sinclair User

Gilbert Factor 7/10

DETECTIVE STORY WILL LEAVE YOU GUESSING In the Detective for the 48K Spectrum, you must imagine you are a private eye who is trying to get through Dagger Alley to steal secrets from a mysterious safe. The game has 25 levels and if you reach the final level, which the insert warns is unlikely, you have 10 guesses at the combination of the safe. The game starts with the detective being pelted by unexplained objects which could be bells or possible cups; you score points by shooting at them but are threatened with extinction by old car tyres which gather together and drop on you if you do not move out of the way. The detective moves left and right along the bottom of the screen and if he disappears off one side he will reappear from the other. The action is fast and even the first level is difficult but there is no explanation, either on the tape or on the cassette insert, as to what is happening, which detracts considerably from the interest of the game. Unless you are already firmly addicted to zapping anything in sight, this it unlikely to convert you. The Detective is produced by Arcade Software, [redacted]. It costs £5.50.

Read it at Sinclair User Magazine Online

Personal Computer News

John Lettice

SPECTRUM SPECIAL John Lettice takes his Spectrum from the Spanish Main to the familiar monster mazes. Plunder (£6), Cases Computer Simulations, [redacted] Baron (£5.95), Temptation Software, [redacted] Escape (£4.95), New Generation Software, [redacted] The Detective (£5.50), Arcade Software, [redacted] Home Runner (£4.95), Britannia Software, [redacted] The Spectrum has now passed its first anniversary, and the current batch of games being released shows that age cannot wither it nor custom stale its infinite variety - in some cases at least. PLUNDER First off the slipway is an everyday story of seafaring folk. In Plunder, your objective is to stop the Spanish Armada sailing by pillaging the convoys of gold Spain is shipping to finance it. You sail your ship - a nice little user-defined graphic - around a very impressive high-resolution map of the Atlantic Ocean, seeking out galleons (can be nasty), troopships (you can deal with these, but boarding might not be such a smart idea), merchant vessels (sitting ducks) and finally the warships (run for your life). While you're doing this, the sea takes its toll of crew and hull, and naturally the odd cannonball can make mischief. So you use some of your winnings - they're probably tainted with the curse of Montezuma anyway - to hire new crew, make repairs, and perhaps do a little trading and/or drug running. Yes, that's right, you can buy one of Central America's less savoury products in Haiti and sell it at a profit at Marseilles. I didn't run into Gene Hackman, but he and other cops might still prefer it if you stuck to grain and diamonds. One nice point about Plunder is that it's actually fairly realistic. Broadly speaking, you can take on the ships a thieving buccaneer/national hero of the time would be able to, with approximately the logical consequences (although merchant seamen seem to be a lot less ready to run up the white flag than I'd expect). And I won't swear to it, but the warships really do seem to follow you around, hunt the Graf Spee style. All in all, it's a particularly neat and inventive execution of what is becoming a fairly common idea. BARON Baron is another offering in the honourable tradition of Candyfloss. Here your goal is to manage a small fiefdom, fighting off the villains and beating up the villeins. You can play it solo, but the game is really geared to several - up to four - players. All players start off with the same amount of land, peasants and cash, and your goal is to manage these resources. You can play the game the peaceful way, tending your crops and amassing land legitimately by purchase, or you can hire mercenaries and pillage your neighbours. It's certainly refreshing to see a computer game that'll take more than one player, but there are problems with this one. The instructions are a little ropey for example, you can increase your supply of peasants by feeding more than you've got, but you aren't told this. There was one annoying bug on the review copy. At one point the program asked if you wanted to hire mercenaries. You answer 'y' or 'n'... and then it asks you if you want to hire mercenaries, up to a dozen times. It defies belief that a manufacturer could send out a game with a louse-up like this in it, but there it is. If it wasn't for this boredom-inducing bug, the game would be relatively entertaining for several players. The one-player version is a fairly pointless exercise. ESCAPE I could forgive this one a lot. It's a new twist on maze games, where you're stuck in a Hampton Court style environment, being pursued by various prehistoric monsters. Your aim is to find an axe, then use it to break down a door and get out of the maze. But the real killer is the way the dinosaur comes after you, using the Spectrum's excessively quiet speaker to produce a 'pad pad pad' noise as it runs. I never did get out of the maze, but I plead that I was too busy laughing at the dinosaur. If you can control yourself, it has potential to be a fast and entertaining maze game. THE DETECTIVE More humour here. Load up the Detective and you're presented with a natty title page, across which you see a row of bullet holes creep. Start on the game and you see a small figure in the centre of the screen; cursor left or right and the figure saunters, slowly but purposefully, in the relevant direction. If you press the fire button the figure stops, whips out two guns and blazes away at the sky, the reason for this being that there are things falling out of the sky at you. Yes, you've guessed it, someone's thought of yet another twist on Space Invaders. According to the instructions, you've got to get through Dagger Alley (all 25 screens of it), then crack a safe. The mob's 'out to get ya' (according to this 'broad' you met), and they're trying it in all sorts of weird ways. The first screen seems to have them dropping giant-sized ring-pulls on you, while in the second they seem to be lampshades. In addition to this, rows of car tyres form up above your head and then fall on you, and if the dog comes by you lose all your points. It's not particularly fast to start with, but it's tricky, and highly entertaining. HOME RUNNER Put together an Olympic runner, a set of monsters and some scaffolding, and Home Runner is what you come up with. You hop, skip and jump your way up a number of levels, avoiding monsters and the holes that appear in the floor every now and then, until you get to home, at the top level. I didn't find the monsters made my pulse race.