Reviews

Like most other titles which are listed as "Distribution Denied" at the time of writing, this is another one blindly included on the "Speccy '99" CD-ROM that was openly on sale in the high street store "HMV" a decade ago. I'm sure many other spec-chums like myself bought this disk for £10 or less back then, in good faith. Alas, many of the "Distribution Denied" titles do tend to be amongst the better games.

Not in this case though, I don't think anyone is missing anything particularly good here. For starters, the game doesn't really feel like a CodeMasters release. Perhaps I say this because I've played too many Dizzy games. This one is a shoot-'em up where you have to shoot erratically moving aliens before they shoot you. In this game though the aliens can mutate into more deadly forms if you hesitate too long before shooting them.

You control a "laser base" rather then a spaceship and so you can only move left and right but not up and down, being fixed to the bottom of the screen (A bit like in space invaders). You get three lives. Although described as a laser base, it really only fires a small pellet upwards, and there is a limitation of one player pellet on the screen at a time, which to me seems like a needless limitation since multiple pellets are so easy to code, surely?

Overall, apart from the "aliens mutate" angle, it's a pretty unoriginal game, which admittedly plays very smoothly and has quite adequate sound and graphics. However, it is unlikely to keep most people entertained for more than a few minutes. All things being equal - give me a standard "Space Invaders" game any day!

I found White Heat to be dull, uninspiring and boring. The graphics are quite colourful but the whole game looks plain and the gameplay is very bland. Even dedicated shump fans will struggle to maintain some lastability with this game. Best to avoid this one.

Aaargh! One of the worst shoot-em-ups for the Spectrum. As it is based on an extremely old game formula, you would expect it to be noteworthy in some aspects.

Unfortunately graphics are dire, and gameplay is severely hampered by the fact that you can shoot only one bullet at a time.

Even as a budget game this doesn't quite cut it - there was much, much better you could get for £ 1.99 at the time this monstrosity was released.

It's a basic shoot'em up mixing very mossy stuff like Space Invaders and Centipede, but it's well done, the alien movements are very smooth, frenetic and unexpected, the explosion sound effect is ok. It hasn't got much to offer, but it's nice.
3/5