Reviews

Arcadia!

According to wikipedia, Arcadia is the best selling game of Christmas 1982. It should be true because Arcadia is really fast, fun game.

There is not much information about David Lawson on the web apart from his succesful venture into Amiga games until late 80's, and in the Arcadia, he managed to do the job very well done.

I remember this game when we are playing with my father. It is a fast game, unpredictable movements,no sinuses or velocity accelaration etc. Collision detection is dodgy sometimes, and occasional "fullerbox bug" makes you pull your hair out , but the game itself is extremely fun, with colourful graphics, good sound effects, nice variation through the total of 8 levels (and it's an 16k game). Ofcourse there is a loong title screen effect, like many of the earliest games had.

It's a winner, I still play it sometimes.

Arcadia brings me the sweetest memories !!!

A very skillful , colorful and quite challenging game indeed ...

Enjoyable with lots of speed on it and many spaceships to destroy !!!

A true classic from the early age of the Spectrum , too fast and very difficult !!

One thing that always surprises me about this game is that it was made in 1982. You wouldn't think it, though. The reason is the graphics look quite good. Compared to say the VIC-20 version the graphics on this version are relatively smooth. They move left or right in a sort of pixel-controlled way, not just blocky. Similarly when they go up and down, the ship and the alients, but the ship in particular. You notice the movement of the ship in the up-down direction to be smooth. It is not jerky. There almost seems to be some thrust element thrown in, but I don't know, this maybe my imagination. One feature that is ahead of the pack, specially since this game came out when Micro computers were unknown and Atari 2600's ruled, is that there is some 3D thrown in: i mean green/red colouring. Don't know if this is meant to be that way, but the spaceship changes to red and green when it thrusts or doesn't thrust respectively. The effect is still quite noticeable.

1982 Imagine Software (UK)
by David Lawson

A sort of Space Invaders/Phoenix clone with a slight twist, that almost turned into a classic.
The movement is quite smooth, but the action is sometimes too fast for it's own good. Not the most player friendly game around.
It's looks and sounds good for such an early game, but somehow it failed to capture my imagination.

This was certainly one of the first shooters on the Spectrum. It's not bad for its time but it's clustered with big smudges when you fire at enemies as well as lots of colour clash and this can interfere with the gameplay. But saying that, for 1982 this sure puts a lot of games released years later to shame.