Reviews

Barchou is not one game I would recommend to you. Its very fast, okay too fast, the enemies hit you in no time. As you play on you probably will get better at it, but that probably won't stop you losing a few of your lives in such a rapid pace.

Graphics don't stop flickering throughout and the sound is kept to a minimal except for an annoying continuing sound FX when you hold the fire button.

If you do happen to like a game with non-stop flickering and zero chance of actually playing through the game you might want to give this a give, otherwise don't waste your time with this game.

1984 Central Solutions (UK)
by Zafarullah Karim

Another fast paced game by Mr. Karim.
Both 'Handy Andy', the other game he wrote, and Barchou, remind me a lot the early Ultimate games.
And despite an year too late is it still welcome to whom enjoys this sort of games.
The game is well written and it is highly playable but very very hard and challenging.
So I cant imagine any kid of 8 to 12 years old enjoying this for more than a few plays unless rapidly resetting the computer and moving to 'Galaxians'.

Early Ultimate meets Ziggy (The Pyramid), but on speed. A 99p game that recievd 29% in Crash, Barchou comes at you in a psychedelic rush. First game you'll blink and miss, but it is marvellously responsive and collision detection fair and so you can go that bit further each go. Stangely addictive.

Now this on the other hand IS 1 material. Zafarullah Karim wrote just two games as it turns out, Handy Andy, a non-shooty Robotron-type game which I covered in my previous review, and this, which attempts to be Jetpac and absolutely fails. Handy Andy had the problem of enemies moving too fast and were hard to avoid, and this cranks that problem up to 11! In fact if you're really lucky you can lose all of your lives within seconds, yup it's that bad! It's only saving grace was it was cheaper at 99 pence, other than that it's a car crash of a game that should be avoided at all costs.