Producer: Imagine, 16K
£5.50

With a wicked glint in their teeth, Imagine invite you to take part in the fight against the DK (Tronics) menace. Your weapons are a toothbrush and some Imagico toothpaste. The screen opens (literally) with a gaping mouth and lively clean white teeth. Toffees and other gunk appear at the centre, exciting the interest of the horrid DK bugs, and in seconds the teeth are beginning to yellow, purple and black out all over the mouth. The trick with this game is manoeuvring the wretched toothbrush into exactly the correct position for the toothpaste to be squeezed from the tube. An excellent game with wonderful graphics, but so depressing to watch! I'm afraid it left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, but I have to say it's good value. Joystick: Fuller.

Producer: Imagine, 16K
£5.50

With a wicked glint in their teeth, Imagine invite you to take part in the fight against the DK (Tronics) menace. Your weapons are a toothbrush and some Imagico toothpaste. The screen opens (literally) with a gaping mouth and lively clean white teeth. Toffees and other gunk appear at the centre, exciting the interest of the horrid DK bugs, and in seconds the teeth are beginning to yellow, purple and black out all over the mouth. The trick with this game is manoeuvring the wretched toothbrush into exactly the correct position for the toothpaste to be squeezed from the tube. An excellent game with wonderful graphics, but so depressing to watch! I'm afraid it left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, but I have to say it's good value. Joystick: Fuller.

Producer: Imagine, 16K
£5.50

With a wicked glint in their teeth, Imagine invite you to take part in the fight against the DK (Tronics) menace. Your weapons are a toothbrush and some Imagico toothpaste. The screen opens (literally) with a gaping mouth and lively clean white teeth. Toffees and other gunk appear at the centre, exciting the interest of the horrid DK bugs, and in seconds the teeth are beginning to yellow, purple and black out all over the mouth. The trick with this game is manoeuvring the wretched toothbrush into exactly the correct position for the toothpaste to be squeezed from the tube. An excellent game with wonderful graphics, but so depressing to watch! I'm afraid it left an unpleasant taste in my mouth, but I have to say it's good value. Joystick: Fuller.

As I make no secret of the fact that Arcadia is my favourite game, I was naturally pleased to receive Imagine's latest Spectrum offerings, Ah Diddums and Molar Maul. Both cassettes are very attractively presented in very imaginative (no pun intended) cassette covers, and both packages come with a lifetime guarantee, something which few other software houses offer. Instructions supplied with the tapes give detailed instructions on loading and playing.

I loaded Ah Diddums first, mainly because the cover appealed to me, plugged in my joystick and prepared to fight off the other toys in the toybox. Ah Diddums, as you will have probably guessed, is rather an original idea, concerning a tubby teddy and his mission to comfort the baby. What Teddy must do is take some toys to Baby so she will stop crying, but it's not as simple as that - you see this game has many sub plots going on. If Teddy comforts Baby then the mother will quite sensibly put the lights out. 'What is wrong with that?' I hear you cry. The trouble is that the toys in the toy box can only play with the light on, so they will do all they can to stop Teddy comforting the baby.

Sounds confusing - well, there's more! Teddy is in a set of 99 nested toyboxes, and to escape from any one of them he must pile building bricks up in a certain order. Also in the toybox (well most of them, I've yet to get out of the first) is a Jack-in-the-Box. This bouncy little fellow takes the pressure off any sticky situations you might have got yourself into. Amongst the toys you can pick up is a peashooter, which I'm still trying to work out what to do with. I tried shooting the soldier who was in the box with me, but all I ended up in doing was making it turn more vicious.

Ah Diddums uses amazing high resolution graphics and sound. It even uses colour, something I dearly missed when they brought out Schizoids. Also Teddy has one amazing walk! I think this program has the edge over Arcadia, but I will not definitely give this the accolade of 'My favourite program' until I have mastered it.

Moving rapidly on, I then loaded Molar Maul. The way the title page was built up was quite fantastic.

I pressed a key and a large set of teeth were displayed on the screen - they then opened and the play area, the inside of someone's mouth is, if not very convincingly, displayed in full gruesome colour. The idea of the game is to fight of the dreaded 'DK's (de-cays - get it?) with your trusty toothbrush and supply of Imagico toothpaste. The game is very fast, and no matter how quickly you can brush one tooth, another is being attacked. The teeth are colour coded so you have an idea of how long they will probably survive.

You have three toothbrushes per game, and you can easily lose these every four cavities you get. You are not helped by the sweets which appear on the tongue, the 'DK's rush over and their power is increased. Altogether, I think Molar Maul is the most original, addictive game for the Spectrum I have played in a very long while.

Both Ah Diddums and Molar Maul are available for £5.50 from Imagine Software, Masons Buildings. Exchange Street East, Liverpool L2 3PN.

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.