Producer: Software Projects
Retail Price: £7.95
Author: Special FX

Somewhere in the mists of time and space, someone is changing our future by altering our past. An extinct primeval entity is being summoned through the barriers of time by a fanatical sect whose aim is to disrupt the future balance of power.

You are the sole survivor of a once-elite time corps, and you have been summoned to destroy this evil threat. The battle takes place in a once-thriving small town in the middle of nowhere - where there's a big problem. The locals aren't all that keen on time warriors and time lords, and they tend to get a mite upset at the sight of the multicoloured scarf and the police box.

But your mission is essential, and among your heavy armour and weapons you have a revolutionary energy-conversion kit that will turn harmless mortal objects such as lemons and worms into ultra-powerful weapons. (Some of the weapons don't last very long, though.)

The evil conspirators can be unveiled by destroying hostile busts - different ones on every level - which sometimes tire at you. Destroying a bust earns you a piece of a special jigsaw puzzle; collect six pieces of the jigsaw and an evil being becomes visible. This terrible entity is then forced to attack you - and this is your chance to weaken the monstrosity and repel it before moving on to another era and another enemy.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: well-defined and colourful
Sound: a couple of tunes and perfunctory FX
Options: definable keys

Hysteria is the right name for this game, it's so frustrating when you get savagely kilted. The game layout is very similar to Ghosts 'n' Goblins and the colour scrolling works quite well despite occasional clash. The gradually disappearing bust which shows your remaining strength is a neat idea, like the icons. Hysteria is a superb game with plenty of depth.
NICK [76%]

Graphically superb and well-animated, with some beautifully detailed characters, Hysteria is an addictive and playable game. The screen display seems well thought-out: there's never any confusion, whether you want to know your energy level, how many more pieces to collect, or whatever. Though Hysteria doesn't offer a long-term challenge, it'll certainly provide a lot of frantic fun for a while.
RICKY [80%]

At first I was well put off by Hysteria's resemblance to Cobra. Basically it's like the Ocean game tailed up with a few extra features; the graphical style, the sound and the feel are all unoriginal. But the gameplay has been changed, if not for the better, and Hysteria is good fun -and probably will be till I complete it.
BEN [78%]

Software Projects
£7.95

Arrgeekoooee! I'm hysterical because I'm late for a date with Gwyn and he said he wouldn't forgive me after last time. Can anybody come to my rescue?

Perhaps Software Projects can because it's got its own form of Hysteria going on, and it's all because somebody has been messing around with the flow of time... hey, do you think Gwyn will accept that as an excuse? I thought not, but if I explain that I've been hooked on saving the temporal flow, that's a different matter.

Hysteria isn't the year's most original game. It's another of those walk-along shooting the nasties, with the addition of a weapon changing feature. You don't even get the multi-levels that gave Green Bert his ups and downs.

But you do get a well-judged game play and enough neat touches to make Hysteria really stand out. From the multitude of options, which include sound or silence and mono or colour graphics, to the hall of fame with its twisting letters, you'll be totally hooked.

It takes time to get time straightened out, and you have to start early (around 3,000 BC), strolling past pillared temples. Then skip to days of old when knights were bold and an Englishman's castle was his home. After that it's into space for a touch of the R2D2s.

The time warriors and their assorted monsters don't take too kindly to the fact that you want to sort out their evil deeds, and before you can say 'time-warp' they'll be popping up from nowhere and trying to wrap you up. All the monsters are relevant to their eras, so the ancient scene sets you against centaurs.

You don't really start out equipped for the job either, with only a shield, which has limited power, and a short range sonic head-butt. But you do have the power to transform ordinary objects into further weaponry. What further objects? The answers a lemon, worm!

Yes, walk over one of the worms which surface from time to time, or shoot a gargoyle and turn it into a lemon, then leap or fly into it, and your weapon indicator will move up one notch. You can select that weapon or carry on until you're entitled to something even more powerful. You can even use multiple powers in some cases!

As you progress, certain nasties will leave behind a jigsaw piece, and once you've collected enough of these a picture of your arch-enemy for the level will appear, at which stage a mega-sprite enters and flies around, shooting at you. Killing it is no easy task but success brings in a bonus and takes you to the next era.

There's nothing that you haven't seen before but it doesn't matter because this is such a well-judged program, it's got the magic JOMG (Just One More Go) Factor. If this was a coin-op machine I'd be bankrupt by now. Instead it's in my Spectrum and it's making me late for dates but so what? Save the hysterics for real problems - like losing yet another life! Oogragghheeeooo!

Label: Software Projects
Author: Special FX
Price: £7.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joysticks: various
Reviewer: Graham Taylor

It's killing the flying squirrels that bothers me the most.

I can go for taking out the nasty skeleton things and I got a little bit used to blasting the galloping horses but every time I had to say bye bye to another furry friend... It really choked me.

Hysteria is the name of the game.

This is yet another in the continuing series of games-where-you-build-up-your-fire-power-by-collecting-and-killing-things called BWYBUYFBCAKT's (for short). In Hysteria you move a sprite - one so butch it was mistaken for a naked woman by at least one impressionable SU staffer - over assorted mythical landscapes. One mythical landscape per level. The first is sort of Medieval and the rest are um... different from that I expect. (Only joking, naturally I played through and completed the entire game.*)

Some odd adversaries on this one. As already indicated there are flying squirrels, horses, skeletons - and you kill them all. This is a bit odd. More odd is the way sometimes squirrel statues seem to turn into lemons or bits of jigsaw puzzle. The idea behind this is that each level has its head honcho baddie, a mega-bad guy much more dangerous s/he/it is an absolutely gigantic sprite that takes one hell of a lot of killing. You first have to kind of "call up" the baddie by building up his face in a window in the top of the screen - this is where those bits of jigsaw puzzle come in. As you grab each bit so the complete face is formed.

Having got the baddie to appear in the guise of a sort of bouncing slug (very threatening!) you have to kill him. This means firepower-a-gogo, and using your defensive shields a lot. As you score hits so the face disappears but then as it gets blasted, so does yours (in another window) so that's fair isn't it? if by any slim chance you manage to completely destroy the slug then it's onto Level 2.

Level 2 is more of the same though it also features some hilarious knights that zoom across the landscape as though on fast forward. Pretty neat. The bad guy on this level looks curiously like a Greek Travel agent I once knew who sold dodgy tickets but I expect it's a coincidence.

The range of fire power you can collect is pretty impressive. You begin with humble lightning bolts, but can graduate to long black lines and orbiting frizbees. If you do really well you can even get a backpack affair and take to the air.

Though it's easy to sneer about the plot - it's more or less the same as Sidewize and countless other games - Hysteria is actually excellent. It's really fast, graduates in difficulty at just about the right rate and looks excellent. There are options to play the game in straight black and white or in colour - the colour option does not mean attribute craziness, it looks fine - there's even a sort of half attempt at relative scrolling, which works OK.

Graphic design is excellent, stylish and individual and there are signs that real effort has gone into this one - check out the ultra-sophisticated High Score table for example. So minus one for being similar plotwise to a number of other games around at the moment, but otherwise, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Read the standard Gremlin - some of this may not be complete true here.

*Read the standard Gremlin - 'some of this may not be completely true' here.

Go down in history with Software Projects.

Antiquity beckons in this just game from Ocean splinter-group Special FX. Someone's meddling with the distant past, altering history to suit their own ends. You'll have to go back in time and stop this conspiracy before the present day is disrupted.

Hysteria's a conventional-looking side-on view scrolling game. You run along left or right, collecting objects and zapping nasties on each of the game's three levels your aim is to collect the pieces of a jigsaw and thereby flush out an enormous monster. Do this vicious beast in and you're onto the next level, somewhere else in history.

You start off armed only with laser eyes, the weakest of the weapon types and usable only at very short range. As you run past the classical ruins which form the first level's backdrops, you'll come under fire from statues and gargoyles above you. Leap up, shoot the statues with your eyes and they'll turn into useful objects for you to collect: either lemons, of which more in a moment, or those jigsaw pieces you need to flush out that big monster.

While laser eyes are OK for knocking out the statues, they aren't really enough against the game's many mobile monsters. They'll deal with skeletons, the most numerous nasties, but you'll need something rather more powerful against centaurs, knights in armour and the like. Extra weapons are available, but you'll need to earn them - which is where those lemons come in.

Along the bottom of the screen runs a row of five icons, each representing a weapon or piece of equipment. An arrow above the icons points to the weapon you're currently entitled to select, every time you collect a lemon the arrow moves along one icon, offering you something that bit more powerful.

Up for grabs here are laser eyes, the default weapon; laser arrows, long range bolts with good hitting power; guardian force, a small ball of energy that orbits and protects you; jet pack, which gives you sustained flight instead of just leaps; and the handy electric balls, a series of energy balls orbiting you like tiny guardian forces. You can use some of the weapons together but the more powerful ones run out after a while, leaving you with laser eyes again.

Even with this extra equipment, nasties pile in so thick and fast that you're bound to take some hits. Collisions with monsters or their projectiles wear down your life energy - a disintegrating portrait of your character represents this process on screen. You have a shield to protect yourself when things really hot up, but this too has limited energy and you can't use it while you're moving. There are no lives: run out of life energy and it's game over.

The monsters can pour in on you so thick and fast that surviving to face the monster at the levels end is more a matter of luck than skill. Though the levels do get tougher, you could probably see all three after a couple of hours' play if you got lucky. Equally you might not be able to consistently complete the first level after weeks of practice.

Hysteria's certainly an attractive game on the C64, and the monster's very striking indeed. It's original stuff as well, but the gameplay's rather too tough for skill to outweigh luck. That and the game's limited size - three levels and then you're back on the first one with even nastier nasties - make it an interesting curiosity rather than an essential buy.

Reviewer: Andy Wilton

RELEASE BOX
C64/128, £8.95cs, £12.95dk, Reviewed
Spectrum, £7.95cs, Reviewed
No other versions planned.

Predicted Interest Curve

1 min: 70/100
1 hour: 75/100
1 day: 75/100
1 week: 60/100
1 month: 10/100
1 year: 0/100

MACHINES: CBM 64/Spectrum
SUPPLIER: Software Projects
PRICE: £8.95
VERSION TESTED: CBM 64/Spectrum

The Software Projects revival continues. Dragon's Lair (ok), Star Paws (getting better) and now Hysteria (great).

And yet it's quite a strange game. Not particularly original in concept or execution but with a very high playability factor, excellent graphics and neat sound.

Now for the plot. The future has been changed by altering the past. A previously extinct primeval entity has been summoned forward through time by a fanatical sect, whose aim is to disrupt the future balance of power.

As a sole survivor of the once elite "time corps", you have been chosen by the federation of law and order to defeat this evil and are transported by molecular disruption to combat the entity closer to our destiny.

However the locals are not keen on time warriors and evil monsters popping up out of nowhere and they tend to get a little bit upset.

Destroying certain hostile characters and objects may leave behind a clue as to the identity of one of the conspirators (symbolised by a jigsaw piece) which must be collected. Once exposed the entity will be forced to make an appearance in that time zone in order to destroy you and the evidence, you must weaken the monstrosity and force it to retreat whence it came and continue your task in another era.

You only have a limited energy supply which is depleted each time you are hit, but is restored each level.

The lemons and worms are collected by walking or flying over them, this will enable you to select a different weapon if you so desire. To activate the current weapon type (indicated by an arrow above the icons), pull down and press fire.

When the entity finally materialises, it will take all your fire power to destroy him. But when you defeat him he slips through into another time zone You follow and battle once again commences.

There are three time zones. The first has a Greek feel to with temples, minotaurs, skeletons, flying things and statues that chuck rocks. The second is quite medieval and the third futuristic.

The game was programmed for Software Projects by Special FX, set up by ex-Ocean man Paul Finnegan. Hopefully they'll be more good things to come from this partnership.

As the Crash annuals are still for sale ZXSR has taken the decision to remove all review text, apart from reviewer names and scores from the database. A backup has been taken of the review text which is stored offsite. The review text will not be included without the express permission of the Annuals editorial team/owners.