Reviews

Drumtrochie Castle (like any old castle worth it's salt) was haunted. Ancestral ghosts had wandered it's halls for years...moaning and groaning, rattling chains, all the usual stuff...They had a rare old time of it..

All that is, until Red Laird McTavish decided he'd had enough! "Och! It's ma castle, and nae ghosties or ghoulies or long-leggity beasties are going tae spoil ma legendary Haggis Banquets!" he thought to himself. So he decided to take up ghost-hunting and rid Drumtrochie of every last spooky spectre.

Exactly 100 years have passed since he did just that, and the Head Spectre at the Ghost School has decided that Red's descendant and current Laird, Hamish, has bragged about his ancestor's antics once too often. And anyway, no castle should be without some spooks to scare things up a bit...

And so he sends his star pupil Blinky out on his first assignment..to recapture the castle for haunting! Blinky has only one night to succeed in his mission or he faces another 100 years at scare school! Yipe! Truly a fate worse than death! It is up to the player then, to help our sheet-like chum to accomplish his task and put the wind up Hamish's kilt!

Blinky certainly lives up to his name, fluttering his eyes as you bounce along the platforms trying to round up ingredients for a magic potion. These are scattered throughout the mansion, which although devoid of spooks has a nasty collection of rats, bats, insects and the like..all of which seem to be out to get poor Blinky! The old place is also in a bit of a state and pieces of it keep tumbling down, making it even trickier for our hero to travel unscathed...

Bouncing around on the platforms can be a bit annoying sometimes too, as you'll occasionally clip the edge of one, which sends you bouncing off in a different direction from which you intended to be travelling in...sometimes landing you in one of the castles many spikey trap pits! A bit of practice soon fixes this though, and before long you'll be zipping about over battlements and down the loos!

Oh yes...did I forget to mention the loos? Another way to traipse about is via the toilet-warps, which will flush you away to another part of the castle! You have to make sure you have enough bog paper though.....I suppose Blinky needs to wrap himself in something so he doesn't end up as a poopy poltergeist!

It's the little touches in Blinky that really make it stand out from the crowd a bit....the aforementioned eye-fluttering, the bits when you go into a dark room and can only see his eyes, the toilets...all of these give it a certain charm. The sound is a bit functional, but there's a nice tinkly tune on the title screen that sets it up nicely as a cutesy, colourful little adventure.

Ultimately, I found our pale little pal a lot of fun to hang around with, and although the spikes and falling masonry can get a bit annoying at times, the game has a definite one-more-go quality that saw me jump straight back into it for another attempt. Blinky gets his A+ from me at least.....

Your father was a great explorer, traipsing around Africa having spiffy adventures and staring danger in the face on a regular basis...you however, have been a bit of a disappointment to him. You prefer to stay at home and write his diaries and act as his biographer rather than follow in his footsteps. You had no wish to experience danger or horrible, icky insects...and sand would get in your undies and everything! No thank you!

However, 3 years ago, your father's mutilated corpse was found floating down the Turkwel River, skewered to a native raft...he had finally met his match. Whilst attempting to write his memoirs, you stumble upon his private journal, and reading through it you discover his life-long quest...to find the treasures of the Elephant's Graveyard ! 2 pages have been torn from the back, but there remains a clue that his last port of call was Nyahururu....

Suddenly filled with a totally uncharacteristic (but helpful for the plot) desire to find out what all the fuss is about, you decide to hurry off to Africa and pick up the trail....

Upon starting the game then, you find yourself stood in a desert, seriously under-equipped...maybe you rushed off a bit too hastily! You take a wander and find the place populated by Arabs intent on ending your little jaunt before you've even had a chance to get properly going...a swift couple of kicks to the groin should see them off until you find some weapons! You also have sandstorms to deal with and as they have no groins, your best bet is to try and avoid them...

Graphics are pretty good and a mix of colourful backgrounds and monochrome sprites, but your character does run like he's had an "accident" in his trousers and looks a bit on the portly side too! There's no music, and sound effects are never more than functional, but what is there is perfectly fine.

For some reason, when I used the joystick I found it incredibly difficult to connect any kicks or punches. It seemed like the game was having trouble receiving the inputs. It does appear to be difficult to hit opponents whilst they are hit you anyway, and can be quite annoying if they start really smacking you as there's nothing you can do to stop them. But having retried it with keyboard controls I got a lot further and found the game a lot easier! Dunno if that's maybe my Speccy's fault or the game in general, but if you have similar problems with the joystick give the keyboard a bash....

Clearly influenced by Indiana Jones, Tusker is filled with puzzles and traps and you'll need to really use your brain to work out a few of them. I personally even have difficulty getting off of the first level without a solution, but you can look forward to dealing with slug-type monstermen, witch doctors and monkeys...you'll have to hunt around for the right objects for the job.

It does all add up to a quite enjoyable if flawed little adventure, and if you persevere with it you might like a game that feels more like Indiana Jones than any of the actual spectrum Indy games. For me though, it's just a bit too fiddly to control and difficult...the Effalump's final resting place can stay bloody hidden!

Many people credit Resident Evil as having invented the Survival Horror genre...others point out that Alone in the Dark came out before it, and so that has a better claim....yet more others point to Sweet Home on the NES and say that it is the real starting point! Well, for modern day survival horror games maybe....but if you look further back into history, you can uncover a few more titles you could arguably include under that heading.....

Upon loading, this game informs you that the world is on the edge of collapse, but in Britain at least we can look forward to the fact that if Nuclear War becomes a reality we get a 4 minute warning before the bombs are dropped.

This then is a simulation of those 4 minutes, and so you can see if you have what it takes to gather up supplies, store them in your bunker and get yourself safely inside before the explosion..and then try to survive the aftermath!


Controls for the game are a bit odd (you move around with 5,6,7 & 8....4 picks up items, 9 drops them) but you can use the arrow keys for moving which makes it a bit easier. You'll find yourself banging off the furniture, and find it quite difficult to position yourself though, as your little character zips round the screen at a manic pace! But this does help build up the tension, as you really do only have 240 seconds to gather up the supplies in your house and retreat to safety...

The first thing you have to do is get the key, and then drop it at the top left of the bunker which is located at the bottom left of the screen. Be sure to pack the other items in carefully, as by pressing 2 whilst you're in the bunker you have to collect the supplies from upstairs too! Once you've collected all the food, water and the radio, hurry back to the shelter before the timer gets to 240 and lock the door by pressing 3! Be sure you're done though, as once you lock the door, it stays locked until the bomb drops!


After the bomb drops and you're treated to some flashy borders and Speccy beeps, you'll find yourself in the darkness of the bunker with a few options...should you eat the food or drink some water? Is it safe to go outside? If you've managed to get the radio you can listen to the BBC and see what they're saying...If you fail to make the right choices and try to venture outside however, you'll die due to radiation poisoning.....

If you manage to get it all right though, you can pop out and see what carnage the bombs have brought down with them! Outside you'll find military men that'll kill you for looting if you touch them or other looters who'll murder you and steal your food if you bump into them!

Unfortunately, I've yet to make it past this screen, as it seems that the general goal of this game is to point out that if there is a nuclear war, you're pretty much screwed whatever you try and do....


At the time Magination Software released this game via mail order way back in 1984, it seems it upset the few games mags that reviewed it. They didn't like it's bleakness and political references..(it says at one point "That's what you get for voting for Thatcher" and tell's Ronnie to keep his finger off the button at another..)...and it only got low review scores. It seems however, that they didn't make it past the first screen and also, I feel they somehow missed the point...

Yes it's difficult to control, and almost impossible to survive...but every time you play you get a little bit further and see a little more of what it has to offer! It's fun and tense trying to gather up all the stuff before the time ends, and despite looking a bit rubbish it still manages to create a panicky atmosphere.

And, as I hinted at in the opening paragraph, given that the goal is to survive, the games shoddy controls and the fact that it doesn't get much more horrific than nuclear destruction, it could be argued that Survival Horror has been with us since at least 1984......

Cursed by a family of Gypsy yuppies, this game has you hunting down every last member of that family and killing them, in a bid to cure yourself of an evil, lycanthropic affliction that sees you become a werewolf by night! You have to munch your way through London to get to them..but be careful of the police as the more you kill, the more will be after you!

You can collect various items to help you in your quest and if you eat people as a werewolf, you can find some useful stuff like train tickets which will let you into the Underground, or keys to let you enter the park. Members of the family of fiends who cursed you can be found by keeping an eye out on the bottom of the screen. A cross will flash when they are near and they are easily distinguishable from the other randoms walking around as they are always clad in black.

Inevitably, you'll end up in jail before you find all eight of your enemies. The key to success is to store items in your cell that will help you escape, like a file to open the window or a torch to see in the dark sewers. A manhole cover lifter gets you into these smelly tunnels so best keep an eye out for that too!

This game is brilliant, and there's loads of fun to be had prowling around London's parks, sewers, rooftops and Underground, preying on helpless civilians and armed police alike! Finding a family member always induces a slight panic as you strive to get them before they escape and legging it from the policeman with the keys who locks you up can also be a right laugh ....

Unfortunately, the original release came with a bug which meant the game couldn't be completed. But thanks to the wonders of modern science, a bug fixed version can now be obtained from World Of Spectrum meaning you can finally be free of the curse after all these years! Hurrah!

Young Ned is indulging in a bit of smoochy-smoochy with his girlfriend in the back seat of his car, when it suddenly gets struck by lightning! But this is no ordinary storm, and the lightning brings with it an evil shadow creature...who kidnaps Ned's girlie and reveals plans to conquer the world with an army of zombies!!

What the shadow doesn't know though, is that in times of great danger Ned receives the wondrous "Moonshine" power, gaining energy and power bolts from the moon's rays! Off he goes to stop this evil fiend and get back his lady....

Presentation in this game is excellent, and if you didn't know any better you'd really think you were playing a big-budget release from back in the day! A funky tune and cool intro sequence start things off, and when you start the game proper you can expect colourful graphics and some great gameplay too!

It owes a lot to Capcom's Ghosts 'n' Goblins series, but is no worse for that! You traverse the platforms and pitfalls, battling zombies, monsters and killer plants and at the end of each level you'll face a boss, which you'll need to beat to progress to the next groovy level! Your bolts of energy can be made more powerful by picking up power ups along the way, of course...

Do yourself a favour and give this a go!

Everybody likes a good dream! But, if you're anything like me, chances are that any dreams you do have will quickly be corrupted by the gruesome sights you've been witnessing playing too many horror games..and will become bad dreams! This is exactly the type of predicament you find yourself in at the start of this platformer....

This particular nightmare is filled with all manner of spooky specimens. Werewolves, ghosts, skeletons, vampires, mummies...all these and more are after your soul! You must advance time to try and wake yourself up from this deadly dream, otherwise you might just find it to be a bit more dangerous than your usual night terrors!

This game has always confused me! On the one hand, it asks you to wake yourself up so as you don't stay stuck forever inside your own horror-filled head, and on the other it tasks you with increasing the terror that you're enduring to get a better score by elevating the Bad Dream to a Nefarious Nightmare!

Ah well, it's a great little game anyhoo, and you can pick up guns with silver bullets and crosses and things to help you achieve these goals...and it should keep you awake into the wee small hours if you're too frightened to go to sleep in case of suffering a similar fate!

We can thank George A. Romero for starting off the whole brain-munching-zombie epidemic witnessed in cinema and games for the last few decades...and in his 1978 film Dawn Of The Dead he also made sure that we'd forever associate the undead flesh-fiends with shopping malls! This Ubisoft game is basically a cheeky homage ( read "blatant rip-off" ) and as close as gamers would get to recreating the movie until Dead Rising came along....

The wonderfully awful comic in the instruction manual tells how our four heroes have managed to nab a helicopter from a hospital roof, but are now severely lacking in petrol. Deciding that the shopping mall might have loads of the stuff, they head there and find the undead have decided that it's the best place to pick up a quick snack....

Using on-screen icons to move around and click on things, you start to explore the mall and can switch between characters to use their different strengths. For instance, the chaps are supposedly a bit handier with the weapons...which is probably seen as being a bit sexist, but if they're following the movie they're probably supposed to be members of SWAT or something....

Anyway...as you search, zombies keep popping up and trying to get access to your yummy brains and you have to batter them with whatever's at hand...or just, well...your hands....by clicking furiously on their head! You'll find guns lying around too which are obviously a bit better for dealing with the hungry horrors..

Items are picked up by clicking on them...Cupboards also reveal their secrets when clicked upon, although sometimes it can be difficult to work out what exactly you're picking up, as the item graphics aren't the best....and with minimal instructions, you're pretty much left on your own when it comes to working out what to do with an item too, meaning you'll probably need to seek help from a walkthrough at some point!

Despite all this, the game is a lot of fun and you should definitely check it out! It'll keep you happy as you recreate scenes from Dawn Of The Dead such as blocking the doors with trucks, throwing dead bodies down garbage chutes to keep the place clean and eventually having to deal with a bunch of scary bikers who have come looking for food!

A game by my very own brother and created using the 3D Construction Kit!

Fans of The Evil Dead series of films might have guessed from the title what the source of inspiration was for the game's design, and once you start playing it becomes fairly obvious that it's a not-very-subtle homage to Sam Raimi's horror hits...mainly the second movie, which had Dead By Dawn as it's sub-title...

Playing as Bruce Charcoal you've awoken an ancient evil, and must find 12 pages of a spellbook so you can find the right spell to send it back to wherever it came from...You'll find a few enemies along the way, and get access to a couple of weapons too in the shape of a shotgun and chainsaw...the chainsaw being required to deal with one particular nasty! There's a surprising amount of easter eggs and nods to the film too!

Anyway, being that it was made by my brother. it would probably be wrong for me to tell you how groovy it is and how you should go and download it and play it straight away....but I still will anyway! ;)

A game based on the film that was based on Bram Stoker's Dracula! Not the 1922 original but the 1979 Werner Herzog remake....

Unfortunately, it's one of those isometric 3D wander-a-round-a-thons that there seem to be approximately 7 kajillion and 1 of on the Speccy. I've only played it briefly though, and it does seem to be a pretty good example of one. I did manage to get stuck fairly early on though and couldn't work out where I was supposed to go, and my interest really wasn't held long enough for me to continue.....

It all looks suitably creepy though, and has a nice day-to-night lighting thing going on and is probably really good once you get into it..I'll need to revisit it some other time though, when I get the urge for isometric stuff..which does happen every now and again actually!

Anyway, if you're looking for exactly the same sort of thing, why not give this a try and see what you make of it? If you find it to be the most amazing game ever you can always write your own review and tell me and then I might be persuaded to give it another go....

I loved the movie Nightbreed when it appeared in 1990! Not only did it have a whole underground community of weird and wonderful monsters from the brain of weirdo Liverpudlian horror writer Clive Barker, but it basically portrayed them as the good guys, which made a nice change to having them preying on innocent victims and the like! So when a conversion of the film came out in game form on the good old Speccy, I knew I'd have to get my hands on it.....

You take control of Boon, the film's hero, as he trys to find the entrance to Midian, the underground lair of the Nightbreed, all the creatures us nasty humans have tagged with the collective term "monsters"! Believing himself to be responsible for a series of murders, Boon wants to be accepted into Midian to live among the other outcasts....

Boon is unaware that actually, the murders have been committed by his very own psychiatrist Doctor Decker! And to make matters worse, Decker has teamed up with a bunch of crazy neo-nazi style cops calling themselves The Sons of The Free, and they've all come to Midian too to destroy Boon and the Nightbreed! And to make things even worse-er-er, Boon's girlie Lori is also running around looking for Boon, unaware of all the weirdness.....

And so you wander around the game avoiding or shooting at the Sons Of The Free and various Nightbreed of the more stupid variety that can't tell the difference between you and the cops, and try to enter Midian...which you eventually do, and then you have to do other things which will reveal far too much about the plot of the film and/or game for me to go into here!

Anyway, it's a fairly tricky but decent enough romp through a pretty colourful maze of screens, with the baddies and yourself as monochrome sprites against the background... Various traps, pits and ladders are scattered around too for you to avoid or use, and you'll get three lives to do stuff with...which you can keep an eye on at the top of the screen, as your face slowly melts off the three skulls depending on how much damage you're taking.

All in all, not too bad...although if you're playing via cassette on the original Speccy, the multi-load can be a nightmare..and it also makes it pretty tricky to emulate too, unless you have a decent emulator that lets you rewind to certain parts of the cassette! And as I say, it can be fairly tricky and hard to see what's going on sometimes, but other than that it's quite a good conversion of the movie!

Another game that was recommended to me for my blog, but it's one I feel I may be trying out about 30 years too late...

From Sandy White, the creator of the Speccy classic Ant Attack, this game also uses his famous SoftSolid3D isometric graphics. It sees you in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, and gives you a helicopter which can drop blocks to create new terrain, and a gun which fires a sort of zombie deterrent to keep back any flesh-eaters that start rushing towards you as you traverse the landscape...

Unfortunately, I found the game to be rather boring. All you do is wander around a rather empty set of walls, with the occasional neon-green zombie turning red and charging towards you, almost inevitably killing you instantly as you try to work out the old isometric control system! And the helicopter is also very confusing to begin with, as pressing fire either drops a block or makes you exit it, meaning you can leave it parked in some very difficult to reach places.

I can see how back in the day, being able to create new landscape with the helicopter could be fun...and the graphics would still have been pretty revolutionary...and having zombies rush at you suddenly was probably terrifying! But as I said at the start, I think I maybe arrived at the Zombie Zombie party a little too late to fully appreciate it, and just ended up finding it all a bit frustrating and pointless....

With this game we take a bite at life as a vampire! And not just any old sucker, but Dracula himself! He's on a mission to gather up some old parchments and thwart Van Helsing's plan to put him into a daisy-pushing position for good.....

These parchments are lying around all over the place, and taking control of our old bloody...sorry...buddy...you'll have to find various keys and objects to help find them all.

Trying to put a stop to this are various helpers of Van Helsing. Well, I say trying to put a stop to it....the men will come along and give you a punch in the face every now and again, but the women just seem to run around not doing much at all really. Still, they all provide a rather handy source of blood and health for Drac at least!

Not like the witches who are flying around all over the place...no, they seem to have something against vampires and will also bash you around a bit. Luckily, being a vampire has other perks which come in handy, and the ability to change into a bat or a werewolf for a short time helps you avoid these hags and also the various pits and holes which also litter the landscape. It takes a while to work out how best to use these other forms though, and I spent a good deal of time falling through holes and getting confused to begin with.

Once you get used to it though, the game is really quite enjoyable! Nothing startling by any means, but it's nice to play as the baddie every once in a while! Worth a go as something a bit different, then!