Reviews

Zaraks. By the name alone we know they must be evil. I should point out that this game is completely unaffiliated with "Zaraks Fibreglass", "Zaraks Recruitment" or the famed village of Zarak in Afghanistan for that matter.

This is another one of those simplistic arcade games from the early days which uses machine code to allow frighteningly fast speeds, yet retains UDG-like graphics locked into the standard character grid.

In Zaraks, you start near the top-left of a maze and must make your way towards the centre by shooting randomly appearing blockages and lethal Zarak guards. The guards are called "Monsters" in the instructions and "Zarak Guards" in the game itself, so take your pick! The guards shoot missiles at you so it's kill or be killed. When you die, the word "PLAY" appears over your corpse - I can't work out why this is. CURSOR keys are used to move around, with SHIFTed-CURSOR keys used to fire a missile in any of the four directions. You have a limited number of missiles, the total amount depending on the difficulty level selected. There's also a strict time limit, but you get essential extra time by picking up "Power pills" which look like small green disks scattered throughout the maze. The game is reasonably fast even on the slowest setting and on the highest setting (called "impossible") it pretty much is impossibly fast.

The design of the game seems not to be thought out too well. The Zarak guards erase the power pills as they move around. So that by the time you get halfway around the maze, there are typically no power pills remaining at all - meaning you can very often run out of time. There's just very little point having power pills placed near the centre of the maze in the first place - they invariably get erased before the player gets near them. The random element means that you can immediately get shot dead by a Zarak guard before you've even had your first keypress. I may be quick, but on the fastest setting I can't really beat getting shot dead on the very first iteration of the main game loop! Sometimes there'll be virtually no power pills available near the start meaning certain failure, whereas you can play again and there'll be about ten power pills laid out for you - making the time limit largely irrelevant when that happens.

So, due to the randomness and the speed at which you can get killed (due in no small part to the character mapped graphics) it's not a very fair playing experience. I have completed it once, but only due to a particularly fortunate distribution of power pills. You still need some skill to win, but quite a bit of luck too.

At least it's a game and it has some degree of playability in it, but the controls are a nightmare. I struggled to get to grips with them and that is what cost me. There's worse, but this is still not great at all.

1983 CRL (UK)
by Richard Taylor

You look at the game cover and you really want to play it. But what misleading advertising that cover is. This was 1983, so games were expected to be simple, most of it anyway. You play in a one screen maze, with UDG like graphics, similar to basic Pac-Man clones, and try to reach Zaracks, the evil doer. Along the way you meet his guards, they are not friendly. You get blockages on the way and energy pills to re-energize. Keys are weird, I must look like an idiot to anyone who enters my room while playing it. Anyway, the game is playable and even enjoyable, but can be very frustrating due to the nature of the programming, which can be called simple or just crappy.