Dictator

ZX Computing

Edward Davey

Dictator is a simulation game which places you as the dictator of Ritimba, a small banana republic in Africa. Sharing all your border is Leftoto, an even smaller country with slightly hostile inhabitants. According to the instructions to the game, which are in tiny print on two sides of the cassette insert, this country will never invade Ritimba, but this is not so. Your population is divided into three factions - the army, landowners and peasants. Their interests nearly always oppose each other's, except in the matter of deposing the secret police. The secret police are another group which are supposed to protect you from assassination. The other groups include the guerrillas, based in Leftoto, who are well and truly out to get you, and the two Superpowers, Russia and America, from whom money can be borrowed. The object of the game is to stay alive and popular for as long as possible, (your rule is measured in months), while siphoning as much money as possible from the state treasury into you Swiss bank account. Your final score takes into account your final popularity, length of rule and money in your Swiss bank account, (only if you are still alive at the end of the game). Every month, one of the three factions will make a request to improve, or otherwise, the country. Granting this request will usually mean addition to or subtraction from the treasury (you start off with $100,000) and will alter your popularity with various factions, and their strengths. By paying $100,000, the secret police will give you a report of your popularity with all the groups, and their strength's. They will also warn of an assassination attempt or revolution. An assassination attempt can be mounted by army, peasants or landowners, and if one occurs, your safety depends on the strength of the secret police. A revolution occurs when your popularity is very low with one or more factions, if their strength is at a reasonable level. In this case, you can either stay and fight the revolution, banding with a loyal faction, or make an escape attempt, either on foot or in a helicopter (you have the opportunity of buying one during the game). If you reach Leftoto, you will find refuge there. However, occasionally the helicopter does not start, and you have to travel on foot, which gives the guerrillas a chance of catching and killing you. If you stay behind and fight, you will be killed if the combined strength of the revolutionaries exceeds yours and your ally's. Otherwise you will win. (Your strength can be built up during your rule, but at a considerable cost in dollars.) During your rule, the treasury will become depleted due to monthly costs of running the country and various extra payments. The only way to replenish it to any major extent is to any major extent is to borrow from the two Superpowers. You can do this once, and the amount you are given depends on your popularity with them. Once the treasury is bankrupt, your popularity and strength will decrease, and you will receive no more secret police reports. After a while in this condition, you will either be assassinated or a revolution will occur. Due to the limited amount of money available, it is impossible for you to last indefinitely - a survival time of three years is extremely good. At £4.95, Dictator is a very good buy, with its attractive graphically-decorated text and superb sound effects.

Crash

Producer: DK Tronics, 48K £4.95 One of the best early games from DK. You've just become President of Ritimba, an equatorial banana republic. Your reign will be brief and unenviable. How long can you survive your greedy and hated secret police, bullying army, irritating guerillas, bothersome commies, snot-nose landlowners and revolting peasants? Money may be borrowed from the Russians or Americans (if they feel like it). As the game progresses the options run short. Can you make it too wealthy exile or will you die at your post? Recommended.

Read it at Crash - The Online Edition

C&VG (Computer & Video Games)

WORLD DOMINATION RULES OK! Do you just for ultimate power? Is world domination your greatest wish? Dictator, a new game for the 48K Spectrum places you in the shoes of some of this century's most infamous figures. Can you make the memories of past dictators pale in comparison to your horrific exploits? Can you make a monkey out of Mussolini or make Stalin look like a school boy? Dictator lets you stoop to the most barbaric crimes. No atrocity is too great for your warped brain. You must crush your own countrymen under your heel and organise and direct the activities of the secret police, crushing rebellion and rounding up dissidents. Once you have enslaved your country and killed or imprisoned all your enemies, your attentions must turn to neighbouring countries. You must stop at nothing, not even terrorism or outright war to secure victory - the only road to complete world domination. Dictator is available from DK'Tronics for the Spectrum computer or the BBC model B costing £6.95.

Crash

Producer: DK Tronics, 48K £4.95 One of the best early games from DK. You've just become President of Ritimba, an equatorial banana republic. Your reign will be brief and unenviable. How long can you survive your greedy and hated secret police, bullying army, irritating guerillas, bothersome commies, snot-nose landlowners and revolting peasants? Money may be borrowed from the Russians or Americans (if they feel like it). As the game progresses the options run short. Can you make it too wealthy exile or will you die at your post? Recommended.

Crash

Producer: DK Tronics, 48K £4.95 One of the best early games from DK. You've just become President of Ritimba, an equatorial banana republic. Your reign will be brief and unenviable. How long can you survive your greedy and hated secret police, bullying army, irritating guerillas, bothersome commies, snot-nose landlowners and revolting peasants? Money may be borrowed from the Russians or Americans (if they feel like it). As the game progresses the options run short. Can you make it too wealthy exile or will you die at your post? Recommended.

Your Computer

Meirion Jones

FROM DEEP-SPACE ADVENTURES TO WORLDLY BOARD-GAMES IN MEIRION JONES' SURVEY Less than a year ago the appearance of Scrabble on disc for the Apple caused consternation among micro owners. The program defeated three-quarters of the humans who challenged it to a dual of words. At least Scrabblers could comfort themselves with the knowledge that they had been beaten by a £750 disc-based system. Now Psion has taken even that consolation away by launching an improved version of the game with a bigger dictionary and better graphics which will run on a £150 system - the 48K Spectrum and a cassette recorder. This illustrates the rate at which Spectrum software is improving. The latest releases include clever implementations of board- games like monopoly and arcade favourites such as Scramble, long and complicated Adventures with names like Knight's Quest and combinations of arcade and Adventure like Pixel's Trader. While serious and educational material software is still thin on the ground, programs like Hewson's Countries of the World show how much useful information can be packed into the Spectrum. MORE ORIGINALITY Unfortunately the standard is not uniformly high. Sometimes imagination is lacking. Bridge software still insists on marketing what it calls "an exciting game for two to six players". Yes, you guessed, it is boring old Hangman. At other times graphics are weak. Micromega sells a version of Roulette which features a roulette wheel which looks more like a flying saucer on an off day. There is still too high a percentage of unloadable tapes and of tapes which you wished had been unloadable. Davic Games Tape 1, for instance, features a game which has Tooth Monsters instead of ghosts, which is probably the dullest-ever version of Pac-Man. The Tooth Monsters themselves are about as threatening as a pair of jelly babies. If you want real tooth monsters try Imagine's excellent Molar Maul. This is a real nerve-tingler from the moment that an enormous set of gleaming teeth appears on the screen like something out of jaws. Armed only with a toothbrush and toothpaste you have to defend these dentures from swarms of evil bacteria. These germs go by the name of Dentorium Kamikazium which allows Imagine to talk about "the DK Menace" - a triple pun partly at the expense of Imagine's Ipswich-based rivals DK'tronics. Imagine's punsters are at work again on the cover of Arcadia where we are told we are fighting against the "deadly menace of the Atarian empire". Perhaps this explains why Sinclair owners have shown such enthusiasm for Arcadia because the game itself is just a lacklustre version of Galaxians. Much better is Imagine's Schizoids. If, like me, you have always wanted to be a bulldozer, Schizoids is the game for you. You are a bulldozer in outer space and your job is to push tumbling cubes and pyramids into a nearby black hole without falling in yourself. Perhaps this nearby anomaly in the space-time continuum affects the wavelength of light. At any rate the game itself is only in black and white. Pixel is another company which cannot resist veiled messages. Trader is part space Adventure and part arcade game. The Adventure, trading commodities between different worlds, is more convincing than the crude skill tests such as finding the right orbit when approaching a planet. Trader may well be bought as much for its attractive packaging - which includes a survival guide for the would-be Trader - as for the game itself. After buying supplies for your first trip you set out for the planet Psi where the inhabitants - yes, Psions - who look like a cross between Clive Sinclair's beard and a muppet ask you tiresome questions such as "What is the formula for carbon monoxide?" or "What is your first name?". Entering "Clive" as an answer elicits the response "What a strange name". So, for that matter, does any other reply. If disaster should strike, a caption will appear saying "Is this the end...?" The answer is "No" because Trader is a trilogy so there are another two complete parts to load from the tape. There are many more traditional text Adventures of the "Go south, open door, take gold" variety but the narrowness of the replies they will accept is often irritating. DOWN THE MINES Mikrogen's Mines of Saturn starts with a cheery "Have fun" and then proceeds to ask questions like "Tunnels lead N, S, E and W - what will you do?" Attempts to answer "N" or "go N" or even "go n" will not wash. It must be "go North" or nothing. At least Phipps' Knight's Quest has a 120-word vocabulary to help you on your damsel-ridden way to a castle in the air. Everest by Richard Shepherd Software is more of a strategy game than a straight Adventure. You have to take enough food and rope to climb the mountain and cope with every hazard. I enjoyed the climb but I never reached the summit - partly because the Sherpas are not what they used to be. When Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Everest for the first time he managed to find a Sherpa called Tensing. The time when you visit a Nepalese hill village to recruit porters you are asked to choose between Sherpas with names like Keith, Brian, Ron, Tim and Paul. Presumably they are ex-hippies, lost on the road to Katmandu. Things obviously still are what they used to be down at Mikrogen. If Andy Capp sends you into fits of laughter Mad Martha might just raise a smile. It is the same old story, boy meets girl, well, hen-pecked husband meets axe-happy wife - all very predictable. Mikrogen also sells arcade games like Cosmic Raiders - a competent impersonation of Defender with a long-range screen and grabbers. Melbourne House's variation on the same theme is called Penetrator. The display looks more like the arcade version of Scramble. A training facility to help you build up specific game skills is a good idea. C-Tech's Rocket Raider is yet another competent variant on similar lines. Artic offers a suicidally fast asteroids game called Cosmic Debris. Still in the arcades, both Elfin Software and Quicksilva produce robot battles which are of the Pac-Man-meets-Tanks variety. Elfin's Tobor has the more exciting opening titles but loses on points to Quicksilva's QS Frenzy whose exotic science-fiction plot seems to offer a better justification for the game. Speaking of Tanks, DK'tronics 3D Tanx was one of my favourite programs in the whole batch. You can track you gun barrel from side to side and adjust the elevation as you lob your shells at four lines of moving tanks which can fire back at you. Although the opposing tanks at first appear to be crawling across a structure that looks more like Brighton's West Pier than a battleground, this is one of my four games you might catch me paying to play in an arcade. JOIN THE PROFESSIONALS Artic's Combat Zone is another ambitious attempt at a Tank game. Your target and the landscape - a few pyramids on an invisible plane - look like refugees from Psion's Vu-3D program. They are very simple three-dimensional shapes but they change position smoothly and realistically as if you were walking past them in some world inside your Spectrum. You and your opponents fire fragments of cubist paintings at each other but the abstraction is not so important as the fact that you are playing the first real Spectrum game in three dimensions - Vu-3D itself is a Psion program which allows you to build up three dimensional objects on the screen and then rotate them, or float them towards you and back again. In effect it is a crude version of the mainframe programs which create the effects for films like Tron. ET makes an appearance too in an Abbex Adventure with voices called ETX. Unfortunately after loading pages of instructions about how I should phone home ending with the advice that I should treat any MI5 man who appeared as an enemy, the tape self-destructed. This left me with an unnerving impression of "the strength of Britain's security services. The secret police are certainly important in DK'tronics strategy game called Dictator. The setting is a banana republic. The instructions ominously point out that "your rule is measured in months". You have to balance political factions, army, secret police, peasants, landowners, guerillas and superpowers if you are to survive. Breaking into embassies would doubtless be all in a day's work for a dictator. So for all prospective saviours of the nation, Sinclair's Embassy Assault will come in useful. It is very much like those maze games which present your view. standing in the maze. Instead of trying to avoid a minotaur, this time you are looking for secret codes and the like. All this is enough to send you back into the arcades but Jet Pac's creators have moved from the arcades into home computing. Ultimate Play the Game's Jet Pac puts you into the position of an astronaut who has to build a rocket from the pieces he can find sitting on clouds around the screen. The scenario is not entirely convincing but it makes for a good game. The same cannot be said of the simulations by CCS. CCS's representations of the oil business, Dallas, running a printers, Print Room, and of international aviation, Airline, may be realistic but they are not very exciting. Although these were originally designed as training for middle management, livelier presentation would not necessarily have made them less useful. Hewson's simulations of air-traffic control, Heathrow, and the Nightflite flight simulator are more convincing. Board-games seem to transfer particularly well to the Spectrum. Psion's Scrabble has already been recommended. With its four levels of play and 11,000-word dictionary it can offer almost as tough opposition as you could want. There are also two different approaches to that old favourite Monopoly. Automonopoli offers a continuous display of the part of the board around your current position. This display moves smoothly when the dice are thrown. Do Not Pass Go from Workforce has a less interesting display but at least shows the whole board all the time. Automonopoli allows you to personalise the program with the names of players and both programs give the option of being either a board for humans to play on or of letting the computer join in as a player. In each case the computer becomes a soft opponent once you have reached the stage of building houses and hotels. If you have ever wandered into a rundown dockland hotel or pub and been confronted by the sort of balding drunk who says he used to sail the seven seas and boasts that he can name the capital of any country you care to choose, I can reveal his secret. At home he has a Spectrum with Hewson's Countries of the World up and running on it. At the touch of a button it will remind you that N'djamena is the capital of Chad or that Yaounde is the capital of Cameroon. In the corner of the pub someone with probably be playing a video game not unlike Firebirds. Softek's Firebirds is a Galaxians-type game distinguished by good croaking noises from the birds. Still on the subject of sound effects Workforce's Jaws Revenge is very noisy and fun. The graphics are great. You are a shark and you are after the divers and- boats which are after you. Mined Out from Quicksilva is a very strange version of Mines. It is subtitled "Rescue Bill the worm from certain old age" and if you find a way through the first minefield you then have to rescue damsels in distress. Someone at Quicksilva has been playing too many Adventure games and it is beginning to show. The last words on the cassette packet read "the image fades to soft focus which is replaced by waves falling on a rocky shore, except in Bill's dream there are no waves or soft focus..." It is certainly time that software cassettes carried a government health warning. Company: Abbex Game: ETX Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.95 Company: Artic Game: 3D Combat Zone Memory: 48K Price: £5.95 Company: Artic Game: Cosmic Debris Memory: 48K Price: £4.95 Company: Automata Game: Automonopoli Memory: 16/48K Price: £6 Company: Bridge Game: Lynchmob Memory: 16K Price: £6.50 Company: CCS Software Game: Dallas Memory: 48K Price: £6 Company: C-Tech Game: Rocket Raider Memory: 16K Price: £6.50 Company: DK'Tronics Game: 3D Tanx Memory: 16/48K Price: £4.95 Company: DK'Tronics Game: Dictator Memory: 48K Price: £4.95 Company: Elfin Game: Tobor Memory: 48K Price: £7.95 Company: Hewson Game: Heathrow Memory: 16/48K Price: £7.95 Company: Hewson Game: Countries of the World Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.95 Company: Imagine Game: Molar Maul Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.50 Company: Imagine Game: Arcadia Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.50 Company: Imagine Game: Schizoids Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.50 Company: Melbourne House Game: Penetrator Memory: 48K Price: £6.95 Company: Micromega Game: Roulette Memory: 16/48K Price: £4.95 Company: Mikrogen Game: Cosmic Raiders Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.95 Company: Mikrogen Game: Mines of Saturn Memory: 48K Price: £5.95 Company: Mikrogen Game: Mad Martha Memory: 48K Price: £6.95 Company: Phipps Game: Knight's Quest Memory: 48K Price: £5.95 Company: Psion Game: Scrabble Memory: 48K Price: £15.95 Company: Psion Game: Vu-3D Memory: 48K Price: £9.95 Company: Quicksilva Game: Frenzy Memory: 16/48K Price: £4.95 Company: Quicksilva Game: Trader Memory: 16/48K Price: £9.95 Company: Quicksilva Game: Mined Out Memory: 48K Price: £4.95 Company: Richard Shepherd Game: Everest Ascent Memory: 48K Price: £6.50 Company: Sinclair Research Game: Embassy Assault Memory: 16/48K Price: £4.95 Company: Softek Game: Firebirds Memory: 16K Price: £5.95 Company: Ultimate Play The Game Game: Jet Pac Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.50 Company: Workforce Game: Do Not Pass Go Memory: 48K Price: £6.95 Company: Workforce Game: Jaws Revenge Memory: 16/48K Price: £5.95

Personal Computer News

Lasting Appeal 4/5

Playability 5/5

Use Of Machine 4/5

Value For Money 5/5

John Lettice

NAME: Dictator SYSTEM: 48K Spectrum PRICE: £4.95 PUBLISHER: DK Tronics [redacted] FORMAT: Cassette LANGUAGE: Machine code OTHER VERSIONS: None OUTLETS: Mail Order, most retail BANANA DRAMA Somewhere in the Caribbean - or is it central Africa - lies the tiny, troublesome and fundamentally bankrupt Republic of Ritimba. Its two main industries are bananas and revolution, although nowadays revolutions are often imported from the neighbouring - and hostile - Republic of Leftoto. El Presidente is a reasonable man, and realising the futility of trying to hold on to the reins of power for any length of time, has decided to divert as much money as possible from the treasury to his pension plan. OBJECTIVES You are cast as the dictator of Ritimba, and your goals are first, to stay in office for as long as possible, second, to get as much money out to Switzerland as possible, and third, to take yourself out of Ritimba before the Ritimbans take it out of your hide. IN PLAY No expense has been spared - it looks like the aid budget was paying - to bring you a particularly slick and colourful text game. It starts with the Ritimban national anthem on a loop - 'Press any key when you can't stand it any longer', as the instructions say - and proceeds through gunfire sounds, raspberries from the secret police if you're unpopular with them, to the dead march. The country's running expenses tick away as the game goes on, and each month one of the interest groups, the army or peasants for example, comes to you with some request. After the audience you usually get a chance to please a group, strengthen a group, raise cash, or please yourself. The latter can involve increasing your bodyguard, buying an escape helicopter - very bad for your popularity, that one - or moving half the treasury's current funds to Switzerland. Sooner or later, you face a revolution. You can try to crush it (if you succeed you get to shoot the ringleaders) or run. VERDICT Dictator seems fairly simple on the first few plays, but as you get the hang of it you find it actually has hidden depths. I initially thought I'd worked it out when I managed to play-off all the groups against one another, crushing a series of revolutions on the way, but then I ran into a new problem. If everyone's too weak to start a revolution, how do you runaway? It's certainly the Duce of a job being a dictator.