Reviews

1985 Icon Software (UK)
by Peter Fothergill

You play Agent Starman, your job is to avoid the destruction of civilization and taking over the galaxy by the bug-eyed Xabanneus alien hordes. Then penetrate the ten levels of the Mother ship and destroy the power generator. He carries on its back an oxygen supply (represented by the energy bar on top) and an alien repulsion mechanism that will sometimes activate in times of danger.

Another game following the success of Manic Miner. The game is quite simple, move thru each level until reaching level 10, avoiding all the bug eyed aliens, negotiating bridges and moving platforms. Still it requires some thinking as your timing as to be near perfect in some parts of the game.

This sort of games always appealed to me, specially with the funny looking humorous sprites, and awkwardness of the characters, and still today I find it quite playable and addictive.

Quite a nice game where you have to drop through 10 linear flick screens of bug-eyed monsters with left and right your only means of control. A game of timing that favours combined haste and precision.
Coulouful gfx, crisply drawn, poor FX.

10 screens would have been poor value back in the day.

It's not bad. But I've reached only the third screen, and the interest fastly waned. The gameplay consists in a robotic perfection in timing, which I found very limited and constrictive. It's smooth and very well done, early Spectrum cuteness [by one of the guys that will program Odin's catalogue], but not soooooo terribly entertaining.

An extremely playable little game. There are only 10 screens to get through, but it takes a bit of practice.

Screen 9, and part of screen 2, are big difficulty spikes. Fortunately once you work out how to do a screen you can usually do it most of the time. Unfortunately it does mean a lot of players may well give up on the second screen.

You only use 2 keys - left and right - to control the main character, so most of the gameplay revolves around timing and practice.

Overall not a particularly deep game, but good fun for a short time and quite enjoyable. Might possibly make a decent conversion to a modern platform.

A very simple game of precision timing which I found a bit boring.

I think I'm too impatient for this game but it's a nice game for what it is and it'll keep you coming back for more. It's well programmed and pretty nicely drawn too.