Reviews

First things first. Mutan Zone is a game completely devoid of any sort of learning curve. Unless you enjoy dying rapidly and averaging sub-10-second survival periods, AVOID..!!

Secondly, if you don't read the instructions, you have absolutely zero chance of getting anywhere and will probably be playing this game for less than 5 minutes.

To be fair, just for those greater beings out there, once you've (a) figured out the point of the menu game (or worked out that there is a game and get good at it), (b) generally suss out what's going on with the radar and (c) regularly complete Army Moves with your eyes closed on one life, you might just get on OK. But for us mere mortals, the frustratingly unresponsive controls and continuous death will merely serve to drive you up the wall.

Loosely based on the Hanna-Barbera cartoon of the same name, this offering sees Atom Ant collecting bombs and dropping them into a bomb de-fuser at the top of a series of building.

The cartoons revolved around the theme of Mr Ant possessing phenomenal strength despite being a micro dot, though in this game he's a lot bigger and can be hurt by the flying and falling nasties on the nicely designed buildings. I couldn't quite figure out why he wasn't able to catch the falling weights/safes as it was the sort of thing he'd do in the cartoon, but I suppose it wouldn't be much of a challenge if he was invincible.

Anyway, it's a reasonably playable game, quite polished, though a bit repetitive. The background graphics are well designed, perhaps a spot of colour on the different levels might have been nice.

An offering from the not-so-illustrious IJK software, this offering has you playing an apprentice wizard trying to collect ingredients to unlock a spell, to remove the curse, to free the king, to... Well, you get the general picture.

Once you've got over the slightly disturbing sight of the main character moving shiftily around whilst using his hands to cover his (ahem) modesty, you set off on your task of floating around the castle looking for the required ingredients.

The nasties you encounter comprise a floating snake(?), a pacman ghost, and a Manic Miner-esque stamping foot. For some reason all objects and ingredients all look like small flashing clocks (fnar).

Controls are a bit unresponsive. Graphics are OK but sparse, with the odd glitch with some of the moving sprites. There's little variation between screens and, as only one object appears at once, the whole exercise becomes quite tedious.

With a small element of skill and practice you can avoid most of the nasties as they follow the same movement patterns, but the rest of the game is rather unrewarding. The storyline and objects have a hint of Magic Knight to them, and you get the feeling that, with a bit of imagination and a lot more polish, this game could have greater potential.

This is a relatively small but playable early text adventure by Peter Torrance, who went on to create the respected Subsunk and Seabase Delta. It's not too difficult for anyone worried about overcooking their brain cells. The setting is quaint, a future world populated by robots, all of which exhibit very human traits.

Given the Quill's limitations, the graphics are pleasantly constructed from the Spectrum character set. The location descriptions are short, but there aren't many of them, so you won't need to be reaching for your graph paper at any point.

One small criticism is that the HELP command simply suggests that you EXAMINE everything, yet doing so in the game yields very little. Nevertheless the puzzles aren't *too* difficult, and most people shouldn't find themselves stuck in the first few locations. The "annoying death" count is almost nil, which is also a blessing.

Overall, a pleasant and enjoyable offering. Give it a go if you want a not-too-taxing old skool adventure..!

An extremely playable little game. There are only 10 screens to get through, but it takes a bit of practice.

Screen 9, and part of screen 2, are big difficulty spikes. Fortunately once you work out how to do a screen you can usually do it most of the time. Unfortunately it does mean a lot of players may well give up on the second screen.

You only use 2 keys - left and right - to control the main character, so most of the gameplay revolves around timing and practice.

Overall not a particularly deep game, but good fun for a short time and quite enjoyable. Might possibly make a decent conversion to a modern platform.

It's practically impossible to review this game without mentioning Cybernoid, which it heavily resembles - the ship movement is very similar, and the add ons (bouncing thingies, homing missiles, rotating shield) are pretty much identical to Mr Cecco's masterpiece.

Despite some colourful and smooth-moving graphics, there's something not quite right in its gameplay and lastability. The game area can feel very cramped, and despite your spinny-roundy shield and assortment of weapons, it can be very difficult to avoid some of the enemy shots, which are fired at very close range. The lack of sound or other effect makes it even harder to tell when your energy is being drained, until suddenly you see your ship exploding into a thousand pieces (quite a nice little effect, as it happens).

There's even a mini-game - remember that pyramid game where you have to move bits of a pyramid from one 'spindle' to another? It's a nice idea, though the controls feel somewhat heavier in this section which means that even if you know exactly where to stick the pyramid 'slices', it's quite easy to run out of time and lose a life.

It's clear that quite a lot of effort has been put into the presentation of this game, including some nice 128k music, which has boosted the rating slightly. I think if the frustrating gameplay niggles had been improved, this might have been one of more impressive Players games, albeit an unoriginal idea.

A Frogger clone, with a couple of extra touches such as parked cars on the road and a maze in the central section, neither of which really adds much to the game.

The keys are slightly over-responsive, meaning that it's frustratingly easy to die even when you're being particularly careful. You can even die by moving into one of your other froggy lives at the bottom of the screen.

The repetitive high pitched beepy sound is a bit grating.

Not the worst Frogger attempt, but with a couple of small gameplay tweaks this could have been a lot better.

Quite an impressive looking game. Or 'games' in fact, as you get three in one.

Part one is a running scroller, with lots of colour and big graphics. It's quite hard to figure out what's going on in this section, and having your energy drain constantly makes it quite unforgiving. I was going to try to talk about part two without mentioning its similarity to Deathchase, but I can't really. Part three is where you guide a bird around a claustrophobic, scrolling maze, trying to avoid the enemies and grisly traps, which tends to be extremely difficult. Personally I found part two the best, though I'm aware I'm probably in the minority.

This seems like a good game on paper, but I found something missing from the gameplay for parts one and three. So I'll give those parts 2.5/5 and part two 4/5. So that averages out at 3.Fair enough really.

A grid-based adventure with an Aztec theme (no **** Sherlock..). Your quest is to rescue the sun god, who has been kidnapped. Not strictly a text adventure in the purest sense - there are just a handful of commands you can use, so there's no struggling for the right vocab to solve puzzles.

Bit of a slog to get through overall; it's not actually all that hard to complete as long as you (a) make a complete map (there are 8 areas of 10x10 'locations') and (b) explore EVERY SINGLE square on the map. There are quite a lot of slightly unfair insta-death occurrences, but they're location specific so you can easily avoid them the second time around.

The other negative point, and without giving too much away, is that it's easy to miss locations because you don't know they're there. The areas are occupied by a number of solid objects that form the walls of the maze - however, some of them aren't solid, which you only find out by moving into every single one of them. If you can overlook that, and have the patience, not a bad game overall with a nice atmosphere. There's a decent amount of content and some nice graphics, though moving around can be a little sluggish. 3/5.

Played this as a WoS game challenge. Never played it before or realised it had been released on so many other formats.

Anyway, essentially it's in 3 parts. In part one you have to get your force into position - side scroller, and you have to jump, crawl and hide from the moving searchlights. This section is OK but not too taxing.

The next section involves switching between 2 teams; the first is your snipers, who can keep an eye on the building and take out the odd silhouette. The second can abseil down the outsides, and break through the windows.

Once in the building the screen turns to a 1st person view. This is probably the most exciting part of the game, as the terrorists are always on the move. Taking out lone terrorists is fairly easy, but some move around with hostages, giving you a short time to accurately take them out without killing the hostages. This is by far the most difficult part - unless you're very precise, your man can be shot. One stray bullet and you can no longer get a complete victory. The good thing is that you get to repeat this section if it happens, rather than go back to the start again.

For me this was a bit of a hidden gem, with difficulty ramping nicely to the end section. Giving it a nice 4.5 out of 5. Suggest giving it a go if you haven't already.

Not a bad little adventure written with the Quill. You're a secret agent on an enemy ship - your mission is to escape to earth and shoot it down out of space.

It's quite short, and has a slightly 'unfinished' feel to it - I managed to complete it but only scored 45%(?). It's fairly easy, apart from a couple of occasions when you have to use some very specific verbs.

One final thing - it's nice to see an text adventure that makes decent use of the 'HELP' command, giving generous hints pointing you at the right solution.

Quite a pleasant homebrew style Quill'd adventure. In Eureka/Lords of Time style, you visit different time periods (3) in an attempt to save the world from a loon with a load of weapons.

Graphics are done with the Speccy's character set (rather than graphics), and are fairly basic, but help to break up the text a bit.

I'm generally crap at adventures but this one seemed quite easy. The puzzles are quite logical and there are generally no annoyances (apart from the odd spelling error).

The author has taken a bit of care to include clues and responses to the player's input (such as decent EXAMine responses), and where the player has died hints are often provided on how to avoid it next time.

I was going to give it 3/5 but I decided to boost it up to 4/5, because it's one of the better Quill products I've played.

I quite liked this game. It's got a 1982 BASIC-y charm to it. Richard Shepherd software hasn't brought us some of the best software (bit of an understatement there) but this is surprisingly playable, probably because it's fairly simplistic when I was expecting a proper strategy game.

Overall, it's slightly ridiculous though. As you sail around, you lose men, ammunition and rations to sunstroke, carelessness and general idiocy, in a sort of "Inspector Clouseau-esque" way. It's got a Cassette 50 'Fishing Mission' feel about it (you know, where you keep tripping over outside the shop and dropping all your fish hooks).

Anyway, as you progress through the ranks, the ships you encounter don't seem to get any stronger. So you can sail out with your enormous crew and pretty much steamroller any ships you encounter.

The only challenge in the game is the completely bizarre 'promotion test'... I'm not going to spoiler it, but if you manage to progress past 'Admiral' without cheating, you must have some sort of idetic memory or superhuman brain... After three attempts I decided it was never going to happen and gave up.

My all-time favourite Speccy game, and probably in my top 5 of all-time games on any format. Surprisingly, its release at the time completely passed me by, possibly because it was relegated to minimal column space and small B&W screen shots in the magazines. I eventually started playing it after discovering it in the late 80s.

Why do I rate it so highly? It's the only game that I've played for decades, and still play today. If you don't like elements of luck in your games you may not like it, but unlike a lot of strategy games of its time, the random selection of spells that your wizard gets makes every game unique and gives it chess-like levels of variation.

It takes a bit of time to become acquainted with what all the spells do (there are quite a lot), and the strengths and weaknesses of the monsters you can summon. As you further master the tactics of the game you get to learn movement limits and aiming methods. Everything you can learn helps to push that percent-of-success needle slightly higher.

Plan for a defensive war of attrition, and let the other wizards slug it out, or exhibit a display of power against your nearby rivals? Risk a mis-summon, or opt for an illusion? If you're getting overpowered, do you play for a draw or go for a risky wizard vs wizard attack?

Look past the basic graphics and try to master the spells and tactics, and you'll uncover a game with incredible depth.

I'm not quite sure how this game got a Crash Smash. My first suggestion might be to point at the four months of advertising revenue that Micromania paid for. Similarly with Big K, another four months of advertising and 100% scores across the board. But hey, that'd just be cynical, right?

Anyway, the game's premise is on the whole OK - you control a kangaroo leaping from platform to platform across a scrolling landscape, picking up objects that increase your score and avoiding moving enemies. Graphics are fairly colourful and it's got the look of a well-presented early 80s simple but playable arcade game.

The issue I have is that the game's challenge, and its unique selling point (USP) is based around the fact that your marsupial is horribly uncontrollable. The programmer is obviously competent - I'm sure they could have changed the controls so that you could change either your lateral movement or the height of the jump while you're in the air. Or at very (very) least, have some sort of indicator to see how high your next bounce is going to be.

But hey, perhaps they did that and thought the game was too easy. As a result, you end up watching on as your erratic Kanga slowly and painfully leaps towards an enemy that has just emerged on the screen, knowing that because you're in the air and mid-jump you have no chance to avoid it.