Producer: Imagine, 16K
£5.50

Imagine come up with some of the best games - this isn't one of them. You're supposed to clear the space lanes of civilisation's debris by bulldozing it into a black hole in the centre of the screen. The graphics are black and white, though nicely drawn but the game is confusing. Joystick; Fuller.

Producer: Imagine, 16K
£5.50

Imagine come up with some of the best games - this isn't one of them. You're supposed to clear the space lanes of civilisation's debris by bulldozing it into a black hole in the centre of the screen. The graphics are black and white, though nicely drawn but the game is confusing. Joystick; Fuller.

Producer: Imagine, 16K
£5.50

Imagine come up with some of the best games - this isn't one of them. You're supposed to clear the space lanes of civilisation's debris by bulldozing it into a black hole in the centre of the screen. The graphics are black and white, though nicely drawn but the game is confusing. Joystick; Fuller.

LACKING IMAGINATION

Despite the glossy advertisements, Spectrum games from Imagine seem to be only average. The first program to be released is Arcadia. The player controls a spaceship at the bottom of the screen and waves of enemy fighter swoop in, dropping bombs. There is a series of levels to the game and on each level the spaceship Arcadia faces a different foe.

The colour and explosion effects in the game are unusual and the range of space invaders was interesting but the game lost its appeal after a few hours and became just another version of beat the evil nasties.

The second game also gave a good first impression but that wore off after play. The game centres on a black hole which sucks in all the garbage of the universe. The player controls an inter-galactic refuse collector.

The rubbish is displayed as three-dimensional cubes and pyramids and the collector must push it into the black hole. If the collector gets too near the black hole it will be sucked in.

Both games are for the 16K and 48K Spectrum and cost £5.50 each. They can be obtained from Imagine, Mason's Buildings, Exchange Street East, Liverpool, Merseyside, L2 3PN.

WELL, IT'S A VERY GOOD IDEA, BUT...

Spectrum Schizoids is one of the best ideas for a game to arrive on the C&VG reviews desk for several weeks.

You are at the wheel of an intergalactic Space-Dozer charged with the unfortunate task of having to bulldoze refuse from all over the galaxy into a black hole.

Your dozer can be made to thrust forward, rotate left and right and 'flip' - which has the effect turning the machine instantly through 180 degrees to face in the opposite direction.

The controls for the dozer are very much in the style of asteroids - and indeed the space refuse comes at you from all four corners of the screen in Asteroids-fashion.

The space debris spirals towards you in three dimensional geometric shapes. There are cubes, diamond shapes, hexagons, rectangles and bars and all in different shapes and sizes.

One of the strongest features of Schizoids is the three dimensional movement of the shapes.

The dozer itself is quite difficult to manoeuvre and will take you a lot of practice to master it.

As you drift around the screen, drift because the dozer has inertia, you must be careful not to tumble into the black hole yourself.

The black hole has a slight gravitational pull and can suck you down even if you don't make contact with any of its spike edges.

The secret of shunting the shapes towards the hole is to make sure you catch them head on with your shovel. If they touch the side of your vehicle they will explode it.

Despite an excellent idea and clever programming with good graphics, I did feel that the playability of the game left a little to be desired.

It is very difficult to move the pieces of debris and control the dozer at the same time. Furthermore, the debris has a tendency to stick to the dozers shovel, or get entangled in the skyhook at the rear. With a little bit more care a good idea could have been turned into a really good game. What we are left with is an average game but not quite up to the standard of Arcadia, and not up to the high standard we have come to expect from Imagine software.

The game runs on a Spectrum in 16 or 48k and is available at £5.50 from the Liverpool-based firm.

I bought this program on the strength of Arcadia, an excellent program, and also on the strength of the advertising which accompanied its launch.

The object, so the cassette insert says, is to manoeuvre your Space-Dozer around space, shunting refuse from one galaxy to another, into a black hole. Sounds easy enough, but the sides of your dozer are fragile and the black hole has a strong gravitational pull which seems to suck your dozer in towards the black abyss. The refuse comes in various shapes and sizes, spinning and hurtling through space - and all this in glorious 3D.

Loading the program was easy, it loads first time every time - if it doesn't load it is covered by a guarantee under which Imagine will replace the tape. The loading time was about five minutes.

A 'Schizoids' logo appears and asks you to press any key to begin. And this is where my first criticism arises. Your first glimpses of the program show a black screen with a circle in the middle with what looks like rays coming from it - this is the black hole. Below this is your dozer complete with a skyhook on the back for picking up refuse. Underneath the graphics are a clock (your score is measured by the length of time you survive rather than the amount of refuse you dump in the black hole - which is rather disconcerting), the number of ships you have (you start with four) and the highest time so far.

Then the refuse appears - cubes, diamond shapes, hexagons, rectangles and bars - all perfectly shown in 3D as they hurtle through space. When they touch the spikes of the black hole, they are sucked down and more refuse emerges onto the screen.

The keys for controlling the dozer are well thought out and are easy to use. The spaceship itself, however, is almost impossible to manoeuvre in the direction you want to go in and, once you've got the ship moving, because of inertia, is almost impossible to get it to stop and get under control.

The controls are left, right and thrust, but in place of a fire button you have a 'flip' control which turns your ship through 180°. The secret is to hit the refuse head-on and not let it hit the side of the dozer. The debris has a tendency to stick to the sides of the craft. Also, the craft sometimes seems to have a life of its own - but this may be part of the program.

While I enjoyed the game, I do not feel it has reached the high standard set by their previous effort on Arcadia. The program runs in 16K or 48K on a ZX Spectrum and is widely available for £5.50.

Imagine
Masons Buildings, Exchange Street East, Liverpool.
16/48K Spectrum
£5.50

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 Workforcé'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.