1986 - Imagine
by John Gibson and Karen Davies
You play the role of the last surviving member of The Cosmo Police.
Your job is to neutralize all the defences of the vile Cynep, that has taken control of the galaxy and end his evil reign.
A simple game in plot and gameplay.
The controls are not responsive enough and the scrooling seems to drag making the game quite irritating.
Conversion from the Nichibutsu coin-op of the same name. You are a member of the Cosmo Police, and your task is to defeat all the androids and outlaws which populate the underground Techno Caverns of the planet Cynep.
Playing area is small and unusually enough it its limited to the central vertical third of the screen; graphics are colourful and rather detailed - this is a Denton Designs game after all, and their games never look lousy! At the end of the maze of platforms lies a monster you must shoot several times to destroy. Then it's back to the caverns, but with a slightly different layout and more enemies. You start unarmed but can find other weapons by collecting triangle-shaped tokens.
I only played the arcade game a few times and found the Spectrum conversion is pretty close to it although the restricted playing area certainly does seem odd when considering that the original has a whole screen for you to play with. It might seem simple and not very varied, but it's wide - you will have a long way to go before reaching the end of each level - and competently done. The only really noticeable fault I can find in Galivan is the jerky scrolling, but apart from this I believe, in the end, that it's pretty good.
by John Gibson, Karen Davies
Galivan is the conversion of a multi-directional Japanese coin op, fast and looking like a manga and with continuous music and sounds. Once loaded the Speccy version, you're welcomed by a grumbling tune that somebody on YT described in this way: "The title music sounds like it's trying to poop, but having a rough time of it!"?. The game begins and you find yourself in something much more weird and psychedelic than the arcade it is based on. And much more shaking and flickering, scrolling-wise. When you descend a slope or stairs it looks like an earthquake is going on. The sound is a costant droning trying to hypnotize you. Small waves of alien spacecrafts swirl around you stupidly. Grapes of multi-coloured spheres wait on a cyan background. You punch some bad humanoid until his head jumps to the ground turning red. You wander and wander through different sections, finding routes that lead you deeper and deeper, without being able to die. Everyone smiles as you past by the flowers that grow so incredibly high. Eventually, you find the end of the level monster, that owns a couple of heads and arms more than the law should allow. The other levels are pretty much th e same, while the monster is always identical. It's playable and strange, it's got its own atmosphere and pace compared to the original coin-op [judging by the video I saw], but it's even repetitive, not easily controllable and not so terribly challenging.
3,25/5
