Reviews

Colony was a gaming surprise for me as a young 'un - it's somewhat necessary to delve into the misty depths of nostalgia to explain how I came across it. As a kid I lived in a small village with no ready access to software so the majority of my games were borrowed from the public library, which had a few dusty shelves of 8-bit games. For your £1 a week you could loan one game and the collection of games on the shelf were pretty much static, so there was a sense of slowly working through the shelf week upon week. This meant that sometimes you took a chance on a game that didn't look particularly compelling. This, in a nutshell, is Colony. A budget game that was virtually ignored, but hides a compelling gem.

The game's premise is pretty simple - you are a robotic janitor on a mushroom farm based on an alien desert world. Your job is to ensure the mushrooms are safely grown and harvested, but there's a catch in that aliens are constantly attacking your farm from outside, forcing you to defend yourself and repair the fencing. Electric traps offer some defence, but these must be powered by solar panels and - if the base power drops - are rendered inactive. As a strategic twist, supplies can be ordered from the base's beacon and are delivered by dropship. This leads to some fierce tension as you desperately ensure a good harvest to get some money for a higher level of fencing or seeds, for example. Or the sudden realisation you've forgotten to even turn the beacon on as an inbound dropship strews its precious cargo for you to recover across the desert. Oh, and that remote droid helper you bought? It's broken. Time to order another.

It's this clever melding of accessible arcade play with depthier strategic goals that makes Colony satisfying to play. Although the alien attacks are relentless, you never feel entirely overwhelmed - by using fencing you can slow the attacks to a trickle, but this requires a solid farming infrastructure - nibbled mushrooms will not aid your cause. Approaching a balance between expansion, nurturing and defending in the game is vital and means although the unwary robot who ignores the mushrooms and attempts to stave off attacks single-handed with netted loops of barbed wire fencing will most likely fail horribly, but it's still a viable play tactic.

If there's a problem with Colony, it's the lack of an overall aim. The full replacement of the farm's fencing to super-duper steel and having a brimming-over mushroom export industry is the endgame, the attacks becoming only increasingly more vicious from this point. There's no actual ending. Nevertheless, it stands out as being a rather more thoughtful and tense arcade experience than most Speccy efforts and for a budget game offered unbeatable value.

This game is memorable to me for being a bit crap, to be honest, but very colourful and I still play it occasionally for some mindless brief entertainment.

The premise of the game follows the comic books by Hergé - "Destination Moon" and "Explorers on the Moon". You play idiotically bequiffed boy reporter Tintin who for mysterious reasons is asked to accompany a party to land on the moon, with scientist egghead chum Calculus and alcoholic shipping menace Captain Haddock. Erudite canine Snowy appears also in the game but only to bark, appalled, at the start of each stage.

The game is seperated into two stages, one which is a bit of a crap platformer where you must free your friends from the clutches of evil presumed-Communist Colonel Jorgen. This is achieved by blasting Jorgen repeatedly in the face with a fire extinguisher and er, touching your allies (ooer). For some reason fires break out all over the rocket as you do this. You must then put out the fires. Just for variety every so often you must find and defuse bombs that the suicidal Jorgen has secreted over the rocket. Hum. If you've ever played the spectrum game of TMNT the platforming is almost identical in feel. Big, bold, chaotic, but completely insubstantial and not very satisfying to play. The fact that your compatriots seem entirely happy to blunder into Jorgen all day and that the level isn't considered completed unless they are free is an annoyance. As are the seemingly randomly spawned fires. And everything. In fact, everything in this stage is an annoyance.

And then, oh boy! The meat of the game! The second stage is an "into-the-screen" asteroid dodge-em-up. You pilot the rocket into yellow fuel tokens and red point tokens. Aaaand, that's it. No really. No opposition except several hundred tons of rock and an ever-ticking fuel timer. Surely the programmers are just leading up to a moon-based climactic action sequence? Well... no. That's it. That's the game. A relatively irritating platform sequence, followed by one of the most simplistic and mindnumbingly irrelevant subgame. Repeat the levels a few times. Add a screen saying "You on the mooN". Job's a good 'un.

I have a curious relationship with this game (also known as "The Island of Dr. Destructo", at first glance it seems nothing very special - you control a biplane with rotational controls and shoot down enemy planes, which then change into debris that fall and hit a conveniently placed enemy ground target. When enough debris falls, a water spout is formed - enough water spouts and it's "adios enemy ground target". There's a cursory two player mode and a host of levels with differing targets.

Where the game shines for me is the variety of baddies and the different behaviour of the debris when planes break up which adds some welcome strategy to proceedings. For example, the spontaneously appearing/vanishing UFO is difficult to hit, but offers a much bigger chunk of debris for your money, some planes the debris will fall in haphazard diagonals, others will rise. Others still will emit wobbling torpedoes in an unsettling manner. The carnage in the skies is merely window-dressing to the real game of getting the damn debris to hit where it'll do the most damage. In a way the whole act of shooting planes down becomes entirely peripheral - it's possible to simply watch the ground target/spouts and falling debris with the firebutton nailed, looping a bit every so often - and be just dimly aware of which way your fuselage is pointing and still play the game, sometimes better than concentrating. It's a funny sort of zen.

I guess that's why I have a soft spot for Destructo. It won't win any awards for originality, but it does have its share of neat ideas and fun scenarios. Later on the game goes entirely insane and starts throwing nuclear waste ridden islands and floating castles and I kinda like that. It won't haul you back for more, but it delivers a pleasingly rounded game that is definitely worth a playthrough, particularly with a co-op chum.

I still remember getting a magazine (possibly CRASH!) with an advert for this and thinking they'd made a horrible mistake. Sim City? On the Speccy? Really? But.... Nahh.... isn't that THAT 16-bit game? The posterboy of the 16-bits? The "nyah nyah we've got Populous and SimCity and you've got a duff conversion of Golden Axe and your mother hates you"?

Even more remarkably, when I got my hands on the game (mail order, fancy double case, still somewhat in disbelief it was on the Spectrum...the SPECTRUM!), it was immediately clear that Probe had done a blinder with the port. All the features from the 16-bit machines were present and correct, except the graphically intensive Godzilla disaster. The aim, as if you didn't know, is to develop a booming metropolis starting with a handful of houses. You can zone out areas for business, homes and shops, build all the roads and powerlines, build police stations and hospitals. It's the sort of affair you can lose DAYS to, never mind hours.

And lose days I did. It was one of the few games I would save dutifully to Microdrive of all things (and that went predictably horribly wrong, of course) because I was loath to give up even a second of playing time with poppycock loading. It hooked me horribly, and no incarnation of Simcity since has had quite the same effect. Perhaps it was just because it was hugely original at the time, but Simcity really felt at home on the Spectrum for me. All I see with my Amiga version is chunky resolution, grating sound, that hideous default palette brown and green colours everywhere... it's aged, and badly. Weirdly, the Speccy version hasn't aged a day. Perhaps the very lack of glitz and the workmanlike sprites serves to keep the gameplay undiluted - I'm not sure - but there's infinitely more charm there. And what's more charming than a computer doing something that it wasn't intended to do and really shouldn't be able to? Marvellous.

Tie-in licences have an uncomfortable history game-wise. For every "Batman" there is a hundred "Basil The Great Mouse Detective"s, and probably a thousand "Beverley Hills Cop"s. But there is only one "Back To The Future", mercifully, and the reason for that is abundantly clear.

I like to think the scenario behind this was some guys in suits with HUGE SUITCASES of money walked into Electric Dreams's prestigious bedsit and said "We'll give you these cases if you make Back To the Future, but it has to have a unique hook, different from all those other film games, you have to really push the envelope on this one" and Electric Dreams couldn't believe their ears and immediately shovelled their noses full of high-grade brainstorming caffeine, in a 24 hour whore-fuelled design session and really pushed the envelope, the mailbox and basically the entire postal system. They emerged sweaty and triumphant, clasping the valuable spools of data to their chests, exhausted with their efforts. They were pioneers. Riding electric highways, chasing electric dreams (yuk). They had done it. The envelope was truly pushed and they made possibly the most desperate, heinous, monstrosity of a game the world has ever witnessed.

There's a good chance that you think I have an axe to grind with this game. Boy, do I. I paid for this game (budget! in my defence) almost 20 years ago and the purchase still ranks as one of the worst.

Okay, let's be fair. The positives. It loads. Actually that's maybe not a positive. Er.... it *does* follow the plot of the film fairly closely, in that you are the youthful Marty Michael J McFox (in the game) and you must stop your parents changing the course of history. This is achieved in the film by making Lorraine McFly fall in love with George McFly instead of creepy future-son. In the game this is achieved by pottering around a drab 2d side-on environment and being ignored by characters. I'm serious, unless you have whatever arbitrary object they desire, they won't function. This leads to the feeling of jaunting around a town of road accident victims or especially oblivious zombies. George McFly becomes some sort of bilious loping Frankenstein. Delorean-ricing nut Doc Brown is recognizable by the white hair and spasmodic lack-of-recognition of Marty unless you present him with a cup of coffee or something. Biff is a memorable character in that he hits you instead of ignoring you. All the characters move like they were wired with canes for limbs. If by chance Lorraine and George hobble into the same area, the game decides you are "winning" and starts giving you pieces of a photo of your siblings back. This makes a lot of sense in the film but its hardly compelling stuff to entice a player into playing with, and certainly not enough to force them to perservere with this garbage. But hey! There's a skateboard, which incredibly manages to be an even worse experience than simply walking around because of its erratic speed and the presence of inconvenient walls.

In case you didn't notice, I did not find any redeeming qualities in this game. The only redeeming quality it has is that no other game will be Back to The Future.

Bruce Lee is probably unique in platformers in that it's the one your grandparents could play. A simple 20 screened platform collect 'em-up with two (count em) pursuing enemies. Add two-parts static electricity, an unexplained christmas-tree-like being, weird ethereal transporters, a baffling animated mouthing bull, irksome "floor pellets" and allow to simmer.

It's also unique in that its probably the first game I play on any new PC, replacing the tried-and-tested but sadly outdated "how fast is the bouncing card sequence in Solitaire" method. Why, could it be that Bruce moves even more silkily on an Athlon BZP Bristlethorn 5.7? I think so!

It's also pretty much unique in that I haven't got bored of it, ever. Once. It's just twenty screens long, but revisiting each one is like seeing an old friend. Hello, mysterious christmas tree, don't ever change. Hello strange oriental barbecue that plugs that hole. Hello exploding floor pellet. How's the family? Oh, there they are. Hi! Seen the flashing yin-yang lately? Oh really? It's the gaming equivalent of watching "It's a Wonderful Life" for me.

Except the "floor pellet conveyor" screen. Though not especially hard, the timing of it was slightly beyond me as a child and as a fully matured adult with carpal tunnel disorder from using Sinclair 2 keysets I still lose a life or so on this screen, ruining my chances for glory in the Bruce Lee speedrunning stakes. Alas!

In case you hadn't gathered, Bruce Lee is one of my favourite games of all-time. Age hasn't dulled the playability a jot. Graphically it's simple but effective all the way. It doesn't disappoint me the Green Yamo (the pudgy sumo) is white. It doesn't jar that Bruce appears to be black with white hair and a big nose. The use of colour is restrained but effective, and the characteristic "Datasoft blockiness" somehow works with the scenery.

The controls are silky-smooth and satisfyingly fluid, the intro music is jauntily oriental, the various clouts and thumps sound agreeably chunky, the lanterns emit a satisfying "chink!" noise when collected, it's even got a potentially friendship-destroying 2 player vs option (stick-bloke uncontrollable, alas). If Bruce Lee is missing one thing it's another six chapters and a hujillion imitators. And an end boss/sequence that isn't bobbins.

It wasn't often that an owner of the humble rubber beast could smirk over their 16-bit owning chums, but the release of Chase HQ heralded such an occasion. The blistering pace, crisp graphics and entirely-intact immediate playability of the coin-op was intact, and to rub salt further into the festering wound, every other conversion on every other platform was uniformly awful. Sprites like wobbling blancmange, hideous blocky roadside objects, flickery horizons, obnoxious brass band synth music, horrible controls.. you name it. It's become a masochistic passion of mine to play terrible ports and Chase HQ for the Amiga, C64, Amstrad, ST, NES, PC Engine are all uniformly abysmal.

Meanwhile we have the Speccy version, which is fortunately ace. You play as the guys from "Miami Vice" who are not actually the guys from "Miami Vice" for tax reasons, but actually friendly talking avian pursuit drivers. Or maybe just pursuit drivers. Anyway they predictably pursue a bevehicled baddy, who your Auntie Nancy conveniently shows you a nice snapshot of before you start. You must navigate the treacherous byways of Yorkshire (probably) until you catch up with the enemy vehicle, at which point you must pound him into submission! Just like the real police! Your reward for inflicting this insurance-inflating misery is to then pursue another car, to which you do the same thing! Hurrah!

At it's heart Chase HQ is just distilled fun - it's ludicrously short and the chief challenge comes from doing enough damage during that bastard of a time limit. The car-rending destruction is suitably graphically agreeable, with sharp sprites, classy little spot effects like the hand putting the police light on your car's roof when the enemy is sighted, shards of car flying all over the place, wodges of roadside objects. The impression of pure speed when using the turbo is seriously impressive. I don't think there's a game yet that feels that quick to me. Maybe Wipeout or something, but it's still a close-run thing. Soundwise it's also not bad, with a funky percussion led number to open and parpy noises when your car corners.

There's not a lot else to say - the closest the Speccy came to arcade perfection, and a high-water mark in its fortunes.

In this off-beat little management game by Codemasters, the aim is to take your washed-out Z-list rock star (or group of them) to the lofty heights of the pop charts with the final goal of obtaining 4 mysterious speaker-shaped awards. Quite how you do this is unclear (I only ever managed one) and the Mel Croucher-scribed instructions don't exactly aid matters, though they do provide nifty loading instructions for CRAY IIXMP and HAL 9000 formats.

The game begins with the player selecting up to 4 hapless muso-wonks from a provided selection of parody 80's pop stars, each with varying pricetags. Once this is done, you are presented with a menu of possible options for your band to pursue - book a practice session, book a concert, work a publicity stunt and buy gifts. A Record Single/Album option appears if your band lands a record deal.

The meat of the game is boringly authentic - you book concerts, and then sit in the band bus counting the money or lack of. Occasionally unlikely tragedies will occur and you must use your skill and judgement (or most frequently sheer guesswork) to overcome them. Bill Collins demands a huge inflatable robot at the gig. Dorrissey dies in a nuclear holocaust. But the show must go on. The annoyance here is that there's a certain inevitability and pot-luck to the game's smackdowns. You can be virtually assured from the outset that half your band will die in horrible ways, or that one will eventually make a ridiculous demand that you can't satisfy. Unfortunately the game's just too random to actually play properly, so the sort of gleeful carnage the instructions prophecise never comes to fruition, because all your rockstars are dead and you didn't even chart.

It's a similar story with the recording options. There's a wide array of them, but they function pretty much identically. Okay, you hired the best engineer, and the best studio, but you're still screwed by the random event that scrubs all your recorded tracks, for example. You may decide the video for your single will feature lusty vicars or exploding rodents, but there's no feedback indicating which option is likely to have a good or bad effect.

It's this crapshoot nature that lets Rockstar down as a game. Though perhaps blundering through the years as best you can is an accurate portrayal of life on tour, it hardly makes for compelling playing knowing that somewhere inside that rubber brain a counter is ticking and when it reaches critical mass, something punishing and unfun will happen.

And it's a shame, because the presentation is great (though static through the nature of the game), the sound is suitably cacophonic (though the much vaunted "Hear your Rockstars Get Better Through Practice" tagline was, one suspects, typical Darling hyperbole) and there's a lot that could be done with the idea, even today. I just have the sneaking suspicion that it is, at heart, a reskinned Mugsy with rock trappings. But it's not as good. And eight times harder.

Cyclone is a sequel of sorts to the excellent Tornado Low Level by Costa Panayi. The premise reads like a job application for Parcel Force, only actually exciting. A series of ultra-important cardboard boxes have been clumsily discarded over a chain of little island clusters and you, as awesome helicopter pilot #34993742U, must collect the boxes with your handy winch. Unpleasantly, however, a large invisible tropical cyclone roams the selfsame island chain, disrupting aircraft and well... disrupting YOUR aircraft. An indicator on the screen flashes excitingly when the storm is near, so the race is on to land as quickly as you can and wait it out, then zoom off in search of the next box. Sure, you can pick up human trash for bonus points but who gives a damn? Those boxes won't deliver themselves!

Cyclone is unique in that it turns conventional game design on its head and makes a fetch quest that actually doesn't suck. The boxes are carefully hidden, sometimes necessitating the nifty view-rotation key, but they're clear enough upon close enough inspection and I haven't had many that required tricky manouevres to get (although a couple have spawned very near sheer cliffs which results in a few heart-in-mouth moments when the cyclone approaches). The fuel limit that ticks down from the moment you set er... blade.. to air is more of an irksome annoyance than an obstacle, as landing at any one of the game's helipads jauntily refuels your craft. Ironically the only time I really felt in danger was from the game's lethally quick horizontally scrolling suicide jet pilots. These idiots set a furious pace jetting usually directly across your intended route and the wise pilot will keep a close eye on the "DANGER AIRCRAFT" indicator. When a full-blown natural disaster feels less intimidating than the mildly psychotic cabin staff, you're either flying RyanAir or playing Cyclone.

Graphically the game impresses. The islands and buildings- though blocky and simplified - ooze variety and character, the pleasing little dances of the islanders (what humanitarian crisis? I'm on a delivery, guv), the idyllic beaches, everything has a wholesome clean look, like Camberwick Lagoon. The scale of the game is not enormous, but distant islands are enough of a hike that you think twice about your islandhopping route before taking it. Sound is perfunctory - eardrum-rending pitched squeal for helicopter, throaty bork noises for the inevitable crashes. Rinse, repeat.

It's hard to say what makes Cyclone so satisfying - perhaps its the "Bruce Lee" standard of achievability - its hardly challenging and yet perfectly paced to pick up and blast through in less than 10 minutes. As I found TLL pretty tough going at times this is a welcome development. The controls are sharp and unlike pretty much every isometric game at this time, entirely intuitive. Add to that its non-linearity, its open world and its pacifistic gameplay and you have a game so ahead of the curve that it wasn't topped in the genre it defined until Maxis' SimCopter in 1996. And that's doing pretty good, I think.

Chaos is a milestone in gaming. If you've ever enjoyed Jagged Alliance, X-Com, Terror From the Deep, Silent Storm, Laser Squad, Lords of Chaos, Commandos or pretty damn much any game with turn based tactical combat, this is where it all came from. The premise is a battle of wizards - you are cast (arf) into an empty arena with a bunch of other frothing reprobates, to do battle with conjured beasts and enchantments, various spells and delicious spices.

The game is divvied up into turns, so each player chooses a spell at the start of the turn, then each casts their spell and finally move their units.

The spells have casting difficulties and can only be used once, so deciding when to use them is key. Certain spells can boost your chances of casting, others can give you wings or enchanted armour. There is a huge range of spells - but the most fun one is the ability to create beasts and animals to wage your wars with. A typical game could begin with some bast casting a gooey blob (a perilous fast-spreading fungus that can quickly overrun the screen and spells doom if it surrounds your wizard), the second bast casting an illusory spectre (which can and will be dispelled by other players the next turn using the DISBELIEVE spell), the third player failing to cast a rare golden dragon because he's an utter twit and the fourth player casting a magic castle and attempting to hide in there for the rest of the game. You get the idea -because there's no set layout beyond the arena limits, players can face some interesting situations created by other players.

This becomes infinitely more fun with other people controlling wizards, the random destructive nature of raging pits of magic fire and copious quantities of beer. Is GaNDaLF's Wraith an illusion, or did he maybe hope to create a subterfuge of illusory low level animals and is saving his potency (ooer)? Will PiGSWiLL greedily quaff the potion that grants his wizard flight, or will he attempt to flee the magic fire you cast? Which way will the flames blow? Is that goblin looking at me? Is it my round again already? It's testament to how engaging the gameplay is that the primitive sprites and laughable animation is completely irrelevant. It perfectly conveys what you need to know, and that's all that matters.

Having Chaos on my netbook has given me the opportunity to play Chaos in some very strange places with some very strange people, and not one person I have started to play it against has been satisfied with the outcome of just one game. If it was transplanted to Facebook - even as is - I guarantee the world's GDP would drop to minus figures within hours. Perhaps that's a bit drastic, but there's certainly something charming about how stark and basic it looks and yet how deeply the claws hook you - and that applies from the university lecturer to the postman, from the white van man to the scary drug dealer, from the skeptical GP to the smelly pickle salesman from Bournemouth. I can't name another Speccy game that I'd rather play. It's ace.