Publisher: Gargoyle
Price: £9.95
Memory: 128K
Joystick: Kempston, cursor, Sinclair

Gargoyle's contribution to the great 128 bandwagon/beanfeast is a new version of Sweevo's World, reviewed in the February issue.

Retitled Sweevo's Whirled, which just about sums up programmers Greg Follis and Royston Carter's idea of verbal humour, the game now contains 250 different rooms in a Knight Lore lookalike of great wit and style.

All the energy has gone into creating new rooms and the differences which that makes to the gameplay. There's no added music, alas, just the same old beeps, now amplified through the TV speaker. Whether you reckon that makes it sound twice as good or twice as bad is a matter of personal opinion.

For those who don't know the original, you must travel around the interconnected levels of Knutz Folly, an artificial planetoid full of rubbish and weird genetic experiments. These must be cleared up in order to win.

Sweevo himself is a delightfully animated creature of extraordinary clumsiness. He parachutes into rooms, curls up in a ball when rocketed up lift shafts, and see stars when he hits objects. Recurrent themes include deadly fruit, horrible fingers which stick up through the floor at a moment's notice, little Hitlers, nasty girls, the Goose which lays the golden egg and other strange creatures and traps.

Additions to the 128 game include sets of upturned nostrils, which seem to be just waiting to suck you into snotty oblivion, and strange Victorian style streetlamps.

Although you can't push objects around as in the 3D Ultimate games, Sweevo's Whirled contains much more intricate routing problems as there may well be hidden exits and entrances to rooms via unseen transporters. Greg and Roy have a nasty habit of leaving important objects or places hidden behind towers of blocks so you only find them when you're on top of them.

The other side of the game is its insistent mockery of the rather serious Ultimate classics, Knight Lore and Alien 8. This lifts the game from lookalike status to a class of its own, as its quite clear what Gargoyle are up to from the start. The old boot from Knight Lore lurks around, and the continual picking up of tins upon which to stand to reach other objects is a sort of high energy version of all that ferrying around of objects in the Ultimate games. Full marks for fun on that score.

Other additions to the game include an extra two start positions which you can choose in addition to the original four. Many of the new rooms have been distributed around the maze fairly evenly, so that players of the original will find it's not just a question of solving the old game and then moving to a new section.

The original version won five stars for its original humour and sheer scale and chutzpah. While Sweevo's Whirled is clearly better, by virtue of being much more complex and vastly larger in size, the lack of good sound and anything really new and noteworthy leads up to knock a point off for not trying as hard as possible. It's also £2.00 more.

I'm sure Gargoyle's programmers - possibly the best in the business - can do better with their next 128 release.

Gargoyle Games
£9.95

The original version of Sweevo's World would probably have gotten a ZX Monster Hit if they had existed at the time the game was released, so the 128 version starts off with a good pedigree behind it.

The basic plot of the game remains the same; you must guide Sweevo around the rooms of an asteroid inhabited by all sorts of insane creatures, geese and brownies, Horrid Little Girls, deadly fruit and collapsing weights. The humour and strangeness of the obstacles were what made Sweevo's World stand out from the recent spate of Knightlore clones, and of course with an extra 80K of memory to play with it's all still there; plus lots more. The game now contains 250 rooms as well as having enhanced sound.

The number of sections in the game has been increased, so that instead of starting in places like Lonesome Pine and Really Free, you can now add to that list Nobody Nose (a group of rooms inhabited by deadly noses!) and several others. It would have been nice to have continual music rather than just the tune at the beginning, but Sweevo is still one of the most enjoyable games currently available on the Spectrum (48 or 128K).

128 GAMES

And so they came - the first trickle of 128 games. Sinclair cleverly made sure that the software was there, ready for the new machine. But most of the first releases have been expanded versions of existing titles, and we all know, don't we, that bigger doesn't necessarily mean better? After all, it's what you do with it that counts. So here it is - the highly personal, Rachael J Smith guide to those first ten releases.

Gargoyle Games
£9.95

Now this is more like. If the silliness of the original wasn't enough to drive you to distraction, this'll do the job. The addition of extra rooms - extra levels even - has led to increased lunacy. The noses that spout from the floor are not to be sniffed at, unless you're being picky. This is a must for new Spectrum owners and even upwardly mobile ex-48K-ers may feel tempted by the thought of yet more fruit. One of last year's ten best goes to the top of the 128 tree.

So there they are, ten offerings for the 128. All benefit from having their amplified sound blasted out through the TV, and where the new sound chip has been used to full effect it's like suddenly being able to hear after years of deafness. But while there are things here to appeal to the person who's never owned a Spectrum before, I can't see much point in duplicating a game unless you were a big fan of the original. And that means that we're not yet in a position to say whether the 128 itself is worth buying. We'll have to wait until games that make full use of that extra memory - that do things that can't be achieved in 48K - appear before we all decide to trade in our old machines.

ALL THE LITTLE EXTRA BITS

Julian Rignall, for it is he, puts down the joystick attached to his Commodore 64, wanders into the CRASH office and has a quick look at the game we've received for the 128K Spectrum. Between thee and me, he ended up well impressed - a diehard Commie 64 man, Jaz left the office muttering about buying the new Spectrum. Can't be bad news for Sinclair, that....

Hmmmm, a Spectrum with added bits? What would they be? I wondered. Wheels, a bit of whoosh, twiddly things? Nope, none of these - just extra RAM and an on-board hot plate to keep your coffee warm as you bash the baddies through the night. Well, it's not really a hot plate, but it doesn't half act like one. Anyway, what do these extra features mean to yer average gamesplayer on the street?

ALL A BIT OF A WHIRL

Gargoyle Games have also taken a tentative leap upon the 128 bandwaggon and whizzed out Sweevo's Whirled(sic) which is available for £9.95 - no increase. Capturing all those horrible Wijurs has now been made an even more difficult task with an extra fifty rooms to confuse and confound all you budding androids. There are some new images too - ginormous noses stick up through the floor (but luckily there are no huge bogeys to foul up our intrepid android's workings), fingers which make strange indecipherable (LMLWD) signs and there is also a curious lampost... I don't know what it does because I haven't seen the light (laugh, you philistines).

Obviously there are no musicians at Gargoyle because there is no three channel sound, but the tune does sound better because it comes through the telly.