Reviews

1984 Terminal Software (UK)
by Simon Cobb

Some games are popular not for their purpose but for their novelty or for appearing with the right idea at the right time. I think LJ is one of those.
You control Jones, a lazy cleaner who works in a hotel, but tries to escape its duties whenever he can.
Each time he enters a room, he finds an arcade game ready to be played. Almost every room has a game, except Jones dormitory, the cleaning room and the WC.

Basically you step from one room to another playing different games, almost all based on classics such as Space Invaders, Frogger or even Chuckie Egg!
When you are not playing y're running the hotel corridors escaping the manager, the cleaning trolley or the last owners ghost...
The overall game's purpose is almost non existent, there are no levels to overcome, and your only goal may be playing every single game in each room and scoring the highest you can, while the speed and time limits get harder each time you complete a circuit of games.

The real appeal is discovering every room and playing every game and trying to complete the skillful ones, and of course struggling not to get killed while in the corridors. Then you have scores and time limits to beat which is a minor appeal. Personally I always loved the game, i t's difficult to remember exactly every game, so you always get a bit of a surprise, but overall I have to admitthis is a mediocre game.

Q. Why play one game when you can play a game that links 15 sub-games? A.Because the 15 sub-games will inevitably be 15 sub-par games.

Lazy Jones, created by Dave Whittaker and converted to the Spectrum by Simon Cobb has strong nostalgic resonance for most players who had a copy in 1984 because in 1983 people were taking a bow for writing Space Invader clones and here it was as just 1/15 games. Sadly in Lazy Jones the aliens don't shoot back rendering it meaningless and all of the other 14 games - played in a cramped mini-window - are equally pointless and badly presented. So 15 terrible Cassette 50 style games all loaded in 48K and no real object or challenge bar high scores...
Sub-game success finally arrived on the Spectrum in 2006 with Gamex, a J Cauldwell special where the game challenges were linked to a bizarre twist on the stock exchange.
Lazy Jones is highly rated on WoS, clearly a nostalgia score.

Last review of 2017. One of the most famous games in the home computer era but that was because of the Commodore 64 version rather than this. In short one of the tunes in the C64 version of this was nicked by Zombie Nation for their song Kernkraft 400 and became a massive hit, but David Whittaker complained, rightly so, and they paid him to use the tune. But the Spectrum version has no music so we're missing out. This is a strange one in the the concept is nice in that you have mini-games to play throughout the game, the problem is out of the 9 mini-games I played only 2 were actually good, Res Q in particular was just nasty, Stack mentions that the mini-games are Cassette 50 quality and Res Q has Cassette 50 written all over it, absolutely dreadful, as well as that it has clones of Frogger, Breakout and Chuckie Egg and all of which are terrible. Also his jumping is awful and the elevators are slow and a pain, most of my lives ended because he couldn't jump over the enemy properly, he didn't get in the elevator in time or the elevator opened right next to an enemy. This could have been a quality game with its mini-game fun what not but in truth it's poorly executed in that getting to the mini-games is a pain in the arse and then most of the mini-games are crap anyway.

Happy New Year everyone.