1984 Ocean soft (UK)
by Ken Farmer and Jon Mayers
A conversion of the arcade classic 'Moon Patrol' which myself and my best friend at the time spent hours and mommas hard-earned money over the arcade machines playing. At that time there was another classic game we were both hypnotized with called 'Pole Position', but that's another story. I can still remember the feelings both games gave me. Ah grreat times...
Moon Alert plays very well, the graphics are very nice and the games objective is quite compelling. It's different in looks from the arcade version but it plays similarly and it's fair to say it's a very good unofficial conversion.
Me and my mates never got further than area M, where mines start to appear and the game becomes harder. I must say I haven't played it for a long time now, so maybe it just doesn't seem as hard as it did when I was 12. But the difficulty turns into addiction very quickly, when you love a certain thing, so...
It's a pity that neither of both programmers wrote any other games for the Spectrum other than this marvel, which is a classic in my eyes.
4,5 points
One of those early unofficial conversions, in this case of a coin-op titled Moon Patrol [which I don't know] - automatically scroll from left to right driving your lunar terrain vehicle, while dodging rocks, jumping pits, and shooting alien spacecrafts floating over you: your shooting in fact goes simultaneously in vertical and horizontally, two laserbeam being shot at once.
Anyway, you're welcomed by a cool enough [for 1984] rendition of R. Wagner's The Ride of the Valkyries, or whatever it's called, after a tasty and promising colorful loading screen, I started to play and I think I died for almost ten minutes in the same one or two spots, not very far from the start. Let's say, the second rock, the first long pit. Somehow it was addictive enough, or promising enough, to make me insist, although I was thinking all the time about ARMY MOVES. I got past before those critical spots only two or three times before making the greatest discovery: the rocks can actually be disintegrated with your laser. I wasn't displeased with the game until that, so even more when the playabilty greatly improved implementing the greatest discovery, so I was able to go further and make close encounters of the shooting kind with some flying saucers and enjoying the game.
Anyway, I had tried before to destroy the rocks with the laser, but I didn't notice how short the scope of the laser was: you must be near enough to destroy them. Whatever. All well that ends well. This is the first real HIT in my travel back to 1984. Good one.
