With: Mindshadow, Fighting Warrior, Gyron and Shadowfire
Publisher: The Force
Price: £9.99
Memory: 48K/128K

The antithesis of 30 Games. Just four (OK three-and-a-half) excellent games at a bargain price.

The half is Mindshadow, an illustrated adventure of some sophistication that hasn't been well converted from the C64 to the Spectrum. The graphics look a bit simple and nobody has bothered to change the character set. The end result looks a bit tawdry although the actual plot and gameplay are rather good. It begins with you not knowing who you are and where you have to go, and get's even more confusing. Pure adventurers who couldn't care less about the presentation may love it.

Fighting Warrior was released on the Spectrum shortly after Exploding Fist smashed its way into the Commodore charts, and it suffered because everyone hoped it was to be the Spectrum Fist equivalent (since it was also about bashing people over the head). It wasn't but it's good nonetheless. The idea is to make your way across the desert to rescue the usual imprisoned princess. The problem is that dozens of beings, some of them not entirely human, wish to prevent you. The answer is combat with what appear to be large sticks, using a series of body moves to get your point of view across. The Spectrum emits a surprisingly convincing splat as your stick hits home on the head, body, wing or claws of the enemy. Violent fun for all the family.

Shadowfire was one of the first icon-controlled games. Another one of those complex mixes of strategy game-play and good graphics Beyond seems to excel at. You control, via icon instructions, a team sent to rescue Ambassador Kryxix from the clutches of General Zoff. The screen gives you visual information on what member of the team is where, what sort of baddies are around, status etc. You use the various skills of the team to best effect to find your way to where Kryxix is located. Very highly detailed graphics and a potential playing time of weeks distinguish the game.

Finally Gyron. What to say of this? It's the sort of game mathematics professors heavily into science fiction would invent. Funny really since it was invented by mathematics professors. Visually it is stunningly original with a 3D view of a maze. Sections of the maze are guarded by giant towers, and through other sections giant orbs slowly move. Winning is not a matter of merely blasting but of calculating the complex principles governing both the movements of the orbs and the positioning of the towers for, whilst the towers can be removed by hitting them on their blind spot this may only cause another to be generated in a different place. Perhaps a crucial pathway that leads to the exit... think before you do anything, but not for too long. The wizzo graphics help to disguise the fact that Gyron is one of the most complicated games to win ever. If your brain is up to it, you'll love it.

WHAT? ONLY FOUR GAMES ON THIS COMPILATION? NEVER MIND THE QUANTITY - THIS IS A CLASSY QUARTET.

The Force
£9.95

Compilation tapes seem to be all the rage at the moment, and they're understandably popular with the software houses because they don't involve any development costs for new games.

For the people that buy the tapes the tapes these compilations are a mixed blessing, and the value of the tape depends not so much on the games it carries but almost entirety upon how many of the games you've already bought. Obviously if you've already got some of the games included in a particular compilation then it represents less of a bargain than it would to someone who hasn't got any of them. Still, that apart, there's no denying that compilations can give very good value for money and this latest one from The Force (a.k.a Actavislon) offers four very good titles at just under £2.50 each.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the first of the two tapes kicks off with an adventure. Mindshadow a very recent release from Activision. It might seem a little odd to mix adventures and arcade games on the same compilation, but it seems like a good idea to me since that's probably the best way of getting dedicated arcade addicts to try out an adventure. And Mindshadow is a good choice because it comes complete with a tutorial program that acts as an introduction to adventure playing.

Melbourne House's contribution to Hotshots is Fighting Warrior. Released in the wake of their highly successful Exploding Fist, Warrior puts the martial arts action into an Egyptian setting. You play an Egyptian prince setting out to rescue your princess from the temple of the evil Pharoah. Rather than going through the combat bouts used in most other martial arts games, here you walk across a scrolling desert landscape in search of the temple and have to fight the demons and other creatures as they approach from the opposite direction.

You are armed with a sword but do not have as many types of movement available to fight with as in Exploding Fist. That game offered more than a dozen different types of movement, but Fighting Warrior has only seven. This might make the game seem less sophisticated than Exploding Fist, but on the other hand it also makes it easier to get to grips with the combat (I always found the variety of moves in Fist a bit confusing). The graphics and animation are excellent, and although Exploding Fist is probably still the definitive example of martial mayhem this is a good addition to the genre.

Tape Two starts with Gyron, the 'mega-game' from Firebird. This is probably the title most likely to cause disagreement, as it was originally greeted by reviews which were either complete raves or totally damning. Gyron is set in a labyrinth which apparently contains all of Space and Time. At the heart of this maze is The Place Of Wisdom, where all the knowledge of an ancient scientist-sorcerer is hidden.

Your task is to enter the labyrinth in your craft, the Hedroid, and negotiate the maze to find that hidden knowledge. The pathways of the maze, which are drawn in 3D line graphics against a starry background, are guarded by Celestial Spheres - huge rolling spheres which wander the maze in patterns which repeat once ever fifteen billion years - and towers situated above the maze which can rotate to blast you as you approach.

The animation in the game is superb and the movement of the stars and spheres is performed with incredible precision which lends a real impression of size and depth to the screen display. The problem is with the game itself. The maze is huge and finding the Place Of Wisdom is a task that probably could keep you occupied for fifteen billion years. If you felt like sticking with it.

When Gyron was first released some of the reviews raved aabout the quality of the animation and the sheer wonderfulness of the maths involved in the programming techniques but others pointed out that the game was really just a variation on the old 3D maze games that have been rattling about since home computers first appeared, and that wandering around a maze for a billion years was just plain boring regardless of how good the animation was.

Unfortunately I fell into the latter camp, and while I appreciated the sophistication of the programming I found the game a bit dull. Mind you, by buying Gyron as part of this compilation you're getting it at much less than the original price, so I'm inclined to feel more generous towards it now than I did to its first release.

Wisely saving the best 'till last, the last game on the second tape is Shadowfire - the innovative icon-driven adventure from Beyond. Set in the distant future Shadowfire puts you in command of the Enigma Team, a sort of futuristic "A Team" made up of six beings from different worlds, and each with their own special talents.

The Enigma team's mission is to penetrate the space vessel Zoff V and rescue Ambassador Kryxix before the villainous General Zoff can get some secret plans from him. You have only one hour and forty minutes to complete this task.

The screen display is divided into two halves; the top half displays the status of all the main characters, a picture of the character that you are currently controlling, and a view screen which gives information about the location of all your characters and Zoff's forces aboard the space craft.

Below this is the area of screen which displays the icon menus for the Enigma team. Each member of the team has four associated screens: the status screen which control's that character's abilities - strength, speed, stamina and so on; the objects screen with icons for commands such as Drop, Hold and Activate which allows you to manipulate objects and finally the movement of the battle screens.

Despite the lack of conventional arcade action Shadowfire is an exciting and challenging game that looks just as advanced now as it did when first released. In addition, the Hotshots tape also includes the Shadowfire Tuner which allows you to alter the conditions of the game and the characters' abilities in order to make it either more or less difficult to complete, according to your own expertise with the game.

All together, the four games in this compilation would cost over £40 if bought separately, so the price of just under £10 represents very good value, assuming of course that you don't already have any of these titles. Although Hotshots doesn't have as many titles on it as other compilations the average standard of these four games is much higher than on just about any other collection that I can think of.

Most compilation tapes have one or two 'highlights' while the rest of the games are often just fillers, unremarkable games that just pad it out. The four titles on Hotshots though are all good quality, highly professional titles that wouldn't disgrace anybody's software collection.