A lightcycles game that surprisingly came out as a commercial title in 1990. I say surprising as we all know that these games were ten-a-penny by that late stage and this to my mind would have been more understandable as a PD title or even on a magazine cover tape. The fact that there are more than a dozen games in the archive called "Tron" or "Tronn" alone suggests that this genre is an easy target for developers to aim at.
In any case, I do have a sneaking admiration for the game which is cheap'n'cheerful. The border around the screen is nice and colourful, but not the lightcycles themselves which are monochrome presumably due to potential colour clash issues. The game supports one or two players. What this one offers above and beyond most lightcycle games is the ability to introduce obstacles in the form of crates and also for the player(s) to manually place any number of them on the screen wherever they want, before the game begins. Truthfully though, you may spend more time placing the crates than actually playing the game, which doesn't really last too long.
The game falls short of average for several reasons. Firstly, in single player mode, the CPU AI is just too dumb. It is trivially easy to defeat. Causing it to get trapped in an ever-decreasing rectangle of its own making shouldn't be quite as easy as it is here. Alternative routes which would have avoided this fate of the CPU player are seemingly never chosen by the AI. Even adding a small random element to the CPU AI behaviour would (I have no doubt) drastically improve the game. Once you have learnt how to defeat it, you can just take exactly the same route four times in a row, winning the game in a rather predictable and boring way. This all sort of undermines the need for the aforementioned crates. You can just as easily win without any crates, although you may still wish to use them in order to make the game more difficult for yourself, or to make a two player game more interesting.
Second problem is that although you may well select Kempston joystick to play the game, you still have to use QAOP keys to place the crates at the beginning. Why not Kempston here too if the player is using a joystick? That would have made much more sense I think.
There are two options available at the beginning of each game, one to allow obstacles and the other to position obstacles. Each option is answered with (Y/N), but the keyboard handling is such that you may inadvertantly answer Y or N to both questions with a single key press. Should have really been fixed by making sure the player actually pressed the key twice IMHO.
In-game sound is a bit like a demo sound routine from an appendix of a type-in book and the in-menu sound is a bit of an assault on the hearing.
On the plus side the game offers a plethora of options - speed settings, screen size options, and the evil "Magic Line" which flashes a vertical line obstacle on and off down the middle of the screen. So, well done to the developers for adding these additional things. You can also change the start position of each player. No doubt there's an exploit in there somewhere making the CPU player crash even quicker than usual although I did not pursue this avenue of investigation any further.
Overall though it is a flawed game that seemed perhaps anachronistic even at the time of its release. Although maybe you can't resist playing it like I did? A guilty pleasure.
