Producer: Hewson
Retail Price: £8.95
Author: Steve Marsden and David Cooke

Authors of Technician Ted, David Cooke and Steve Marsden have just finished working on their latest project, an arcade adventure about life in the capital of Britain. Abru Cadabbra decides to plant a bomb in the Houses of Parliament and emulate the action of Mr Fawkes all those years ago.

The game starts with the timeclock set at eight in the morning. The bomb is primed to go off at midnight so Slick only has a limited amount of time to get to the Houses of Parliament and defuse it. To do this he must find the parts of his Bomb Disposal Unit. When Slick finds a bit of the B.D.0 he must scamper back to his hide out underneath the houses of Parliament and deposit the part there. Apart from the pieces of B.D.0 there are also various other useful objects littered throughout the screens which Slick can collect and use to his advantage.

London certainly has some odd characters in it these days. From marauding Beefeaters to bottle lobbing Skin Heads, they're all there to hamper Slick in his mission. Each character has a different pattern in the game. They can open doors, throw objects, steal objects, follow Slick and generally hassle him every inch of the way. Every time Slick makes contact with a character in the game he looses some of his energy resulting in an inability to jump as high or as far as he could before. Some characters will even send him back to the start of the screen which he's currently exploring. Slick can also loose energy if he falls from a great height.

His energy can be restored by collecting various pieces of edibles which appear at intervals throughout the game. At the start of the game there are three pep pills at the bottom of the screen. If Slick's energy gets too low and there's no food in sight then he can take one of these pills to keep him going a bit longer.

Abru Cadabbra is a very crafty terrorist and obviously very keen that his plot should go ahead without any interruptions. He also roams around the City pursuing Slick and trying to catch him. If he succeeds in this then Slick dies and the bomb automatically detonates. An alarm sounds when Abru is about to enter the same screen as Slick.

COMMENTS

Control keys: Left=Q, E, T, U, O Right=W, R, Y, I, P jump-CAPS SHIFT , Z, X, C, V, B, N, M, SPACE Pick up=H, J, K, L Drop=S, D, F, G Pause=A Pause off=A again Sound=ENTER (toggle on/off) Reset=BREAK
Joystick: Kempston, Sinclair
Keyboard play: pretty good
Use of colour: pleasant
Graphics: well defined and nicely drawn
Sound: Amusing spot effects
Skill levels: one
Screens: half flip screens

I feel that Steve Marsden and company have really scraped out the barrel here. They haven't really changed their style since Technician Ted in early '85, which was slightly outdated then. Although there are some very nice touches in City Slicker the game as a whole is very similar to so many other games on the market that it is hard to appreciate this one. The graphics are very pretty, the characters are excellently detailed and animated and the backgrounds are colourful but there is a bit of colour clash.

Oh my goodness, now even HEWSON has gone back into the platform arcade adventure days. Surely the public must be getting sick of this type of game, I sure am! That said, there no doubt that City Slicker certainly is a good game. The graphics are very smart and original. The movement of all the characters is a bit simple but good enough. Colour is well used throughout all the screens with no clashes at all. More of the Uridium stuff would go down better here.

Oh dear. I'm not here. I'm busy. I'm anything except writing a City Slicker comment. Please, don't make me do it! Nooooo! I've played and written about innumerable arcade adventures today. I'm well and truly sick of them. City Slicker is another big, boring typification of this sort of game. And therefore I don't like it much. After Uridium & Firelord I expected more from HEWSON.

Hewson
£8.95

Just how far can you take a platform'n'ladders game? Steve Marsden and David Cooke of Technician Ted fame reckon they've got a long way to go. So put the Speccy on load, eat and inwardly digest the cassette card and start out on yet another one.

City Slicker casts you as Slick (the city blah, blah... though what one is isn't quite clear). You've got to wander round famous London landmarks portrayed in attribute-confusing fuzzy detail and stuffed with a motley collection of sprites.

Your aim is to defuse a bomb planted in the HP sauce building by evil Arab Abru Cadabra and to do this, you've got to - you guessed it - first collect all the bits of a Bomb Disassembly Unit which some careless loon has scattered all around the screens.

Curiously enough, it's got nothing whatsoever to do with Guy Fawkes. Maybe the licensing deal cost an arm and a leg... and your insides torn out and being hung from... ah, forget it.

But you've just got to accept that this one's a bit different. Firstly, you're hotly pursued by Cadabra himself (who looks remarkably like our ol' friend Harry the Hippie) and contact is instant death with a big bang. Next there are plenty of objects and other characters to play with, including food and pep pills to keep your energy topped up.

Energy is crucial; getting bumped by a nasty wastes it and so does falling long distances. Feeling energyless affects your performance - it reduces your jumping height and eventually kills you.

The other change from the norm is that rooms are much bigger than screens - the game 'half-flips' from one screen to the next but if you get properly pranged, you can get sent back miles. Getting through a room isn't the easy task it once was.

All in all, it's a jolly good romp - perhaps the only really nasty bit being the graphic you're treated to every time the Houses of Parliament goes up - it looks like the MasterMind studio. But then what do I know... maybe it really does? If you like arcade/adventure on platforms, check it out...

Label: Hewson
Author: David Cooke and Steve Marsden
Price: £8.95
Joystick: various
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Graham Taylor

In City Slicker you combat the forces of urban terrorism (as represented by a very dodgy racial stereotype Sprite in the shape of an Arab ie, it's got one of those cloth things over its head) and try to prevent the houses of Parliament being destroyed by a bomb.

Not an objective I found it very easy to identify with.

Even more difficult to assimilate is the fact that City Slicker is, superficially, yet another Manic Miner game.

In fact, my first reaction on seeing it was of horror. I thought games like this had been relegated to the budget ranks long ago.

It isn't that simple, however. City Slicker is by the people who brought you Technician Ted which got mixed reviews but sold in zillions mainly because what the reviews hadn't realised was that whilst the game looked dull, it had a lot of clever puzzles, some of them fiendishly difficult.

City Slicker is pretty much the same. Its failings are similar and it might easily be dismissed but when you come to play it - well it's quite good fun. A sort of Jet Set Willy meets Spellbound in that your time is equally divided between working out how to jump over obstacles 'leap over the penguin when it nearly reaches the cherry then quickly drop down the whole screen whilst turning around...' and working out what object you can pick up does what 'having got the herring I should now be able to open the box and get the lathe to make the key to the door...'

The plot is all about assembling a bomb deactivator device. The various unlikely parts of the device are strewn around London as it would look if it comprised 50 caverns. Between some areas you can take the tube and thus rest your weary feet from all that intensive jumping.

Then there is this terrorist whose arrival is indicated by weird noises from your Spectrum. In fact there are dozens of odd little things, that redeem this game no end.

The graphics are well - how can I put this - they look like almost every single one of the Jet Set gang. There are telephones, cute little guards (beefeaters actually), 100 ton weights, platforms, sudden gaps, indescribable blobby things in fact the complete 'how to make a Jet Set Willy game' kit of sprites. They don't flicker too much, though there is the occasional attribute clash.

I quite liked the birds in Trafalgar Square whose air to ground bombings must be avoided on pain of death and was impressed by the poor herberts - people - you can pick up and treat as an 'object' dropping them from great heights on to nasty objects for example. The main virtue of the game is its puzzles, however.

In the cheat sheet handed out to reviewers, the solution to getting the first part of the deactivator ran to two pages.

I can't say this sort of thing fills me with much joy but for some it'll be game of the year.

MACHINE: Spectrum/Amstrad
SUPPLIER: Hewson
PRICE: £8.95 cassette/£14.95 Amstrad disk
VERSION TESTED: Spectrum

Urban terrorism is a dodgy subject for fun computer games. Bombs in the heart of London have in the recent past been all too real. People died - horribly. So to make the centrepiece of your game the blowing up of the Houses of Parliament could be seen as - at the very least - in very dubious taste.

And that's exactly what the normally ever so tasteful Hewson has done with City Slicker.

Anyway, enough of the moralising and down to the game.

City Slicker is the latest offering from the minds of Technician Ted authors Steve Marsden and David Cooke. It is set in London where an evil Arab Abru Cadabbra has planted a bomb in the Houses of Parliament set to explode at midnight.

You play the part of Slick, who's been called in by some mysterious department to defeat his fiendish plot.

So what you have is an arcade adventure set across more than 50 or so screens in which Slick has 16 hours in which to find and make a Bomb Disassembly Unit and dismantle the bomb.

The backdrops range from the Tower of London, Trafalgar Square, British Museum, Buckingham Palace and, of course, Parliament.

Slick moves around London by using the tube. All he has to do is find a station, get onto the tube and select his required destination. This is a very nice touch.

The game is packed with problem solving. You know the type - put the top weight over the trapdoor to open it or ring the telephone to distract the guard.

There are many characters who drain your energy, including pigeons who's personal habits when flying above your head leave much to be desired.

And there's Abru who crops up all over the place bringing a somewhat lethal touch with him.

Graphically it's very slick. There's also what Hewson term the "half flip" feature which moves the screen image a half width, extending the play area into the next room.

If you ignore the background to the game, City Slicker is excellent fun. As it is, it should be renamed City Sicker.