Reviews

What great memories!

My father Sidney Corbett (1954-2012) wrote this game which took him two months to complete. He done everything except the loading screen, I can’t remember for sure who done the screen, perhaps it was someone at Daton who done it after they got a hold of it. All I remember is my father wasn't planning to have one until we bought Cobra and he thought of doing one then. But then he couldn't be arsed with it and so he didn't make one himself.

About the game itself, it’s just a standard wordsearch game and nothing else, my father loved them and thought one day he’d write one for the Spectrum. He wasn’t completely satisfied with the end result and wished he had put more time into it to improve it, but he was afraid of going back to the program in case he broke it, so it had to stay as it was no matter what.

I gave this a 4 which I think is fair for this game. I can be a pest and give it a 5 but my father wouldn't approve of such folly! It's not a classic but it’s nostalgic to me and it passes time by, well of course it passes my time by with pride, knowing my father worked hard on it. The ability to create your own puzzles was very appealing and great fun. We done family members, football teams, singers, and a lot more. It was a good, fun game and he enjoyed making and we enjoyed playing with him and now it's great fun showing my children their grandfather's work.

As for my father, he had two other Spectrum games in the works, The Keys of Life which was a Boulder Dash game with keys and The Newark Connection, a text adventure written with Quill, but they were never finished as he grew tired of the demands of computer programming. Some years later he decided to have another shot at programming and attempted to write a scrolling shoot 'em up for the Amiga called The Line of Fire, completely unrelated to the Sega arcade game. But he suffered a hard drive failure and lost all the work. This ended his tenure as a programmer, he had no desire left.

He would remain as a newsagent and most importantly a husband and a father. He was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2009 and passed away on the 12th of September 2012. I’m glad this game is here so that his memory is kept alive and if anyone’s asking for distribution rights, as his son, I’m in agreement.

If you haven’t tried this game and love wordsearch puzzles I recommend this. I'm sure there are better attempts on the Spectrum but this was a fair effort and it's good fun, especially creating your own puzzles.

If you enjoy word searches, I'm sure this will provide hours of fun. I don't however. The game is nicely put together and the ability to enter your own rude words to search for is most welcome. Or at least it would be if I was the kind of immature person who laughs at the word bum. Which I assure you I'm not!

Fabulous story concerning this, thanks for sharing Alex. It is a nice little game but as Alex says his late father wasn't all happy with it and I can see at least one problem as you can only enter words up to 8 letters long, so with the football teams you can't put in Liverpool or Newcastle for instance. It also feels a little brief. However it is a good attempt creating word search fun on the Spectrum, the author knew it wasn't perfect but couldn't face fixing it in case he made it worse which is understandable.