Reviews

An early example of a first person shooter, Zzoom pits you against a never-ending army of aircraft, tanks and battleships. As well as taking these down, your job is to protect the refugees that stroll sedately along the horizon, an action which does terrible things to the illusion of 3D. In fact, so endearingly poor is the 3D effect, this gamer initially assumed it was just a move-the-cursor-and-shoot kind of gig, resulting in much crashing into the ground and complaints to the gamer's dad that "up and down are the wrong way round".

Once you get the hang of the curious physics, the game is an enjoyable enough blaster, especially in later levels when ground and air troops combine forces. Other nice touches include enemy planes appearing in the distance (and out of range) before diving in to attack; the dramatic end facing refugees who get clipped by the enemy (or the bored player); the extensive dashboard, without which the weeny viewport would be rather lonely; and the combined musical influences of The Dambusters and Queen.

This game taught me an important lesson about politics: keep taxes low all year, then jump them to 20% in late December. Once you've collected, drop them to 1% again. Repeat. Sheeplike humanity will love you, your coffers will swell, and your cities will span the entire landmass.

Actually this game is full of useful life lessons: the need to plan ahead for big projects; the importance of keeping people happy in order to get the best out of them; and that you needn't bother with a fire department if you've turned Fires off.

Once the big money is rolling in, you can amuse yourself by creating elaborate suburbs that, when viewed from a high elevation, appear as rude messages and personal slurs.

The graphics suit the Speccy perfectly, the only noticeable thing missing from this conversion is the "Godzilla" disaster. Sim City is a thing of beauty.

Squandering a license by turning out a largely unrelated, substandard product is a grand gaming tradtion, and one that Activision firmly adhered to in bringing ITV's top Chromakey roleplaying laffs to the Spectrum. Given the TV show was inspired by Atic Atac and Dragontorc/Avalon, it might seem logical to bring Knightmare to home computers, but in failing to address what was unique about the show, the programmers turned in garbled nonsense.

In the show, the hero is blindfolded and must be guided through a dungeon by his team, using their wits and brains to solve the puzzles and games that lie in their path. In the game, conversely, the hero runs around a dungeon throwing bricks at ghosts. Everything about the game exhibits a "Will this do?" attitude. The famous lifetimer of the show is represented by... a candle. This title is currently distribution denied. Long may that continue.

Having done a stellar job of converting Renegade to home computers, Ocean bid for the rights to convert spiritual successor Double Dragon. They were outbid by Melbourne House for those, but (perhaps because Double Dragon was not the official sequel to Renegade) their contract allowed them to release a Renegade 2. Imagine everyone's surprise when it turned out a bit like Double Dragon!

Ironically, faced with Double Dragon's plethora of moves, throwing weapons, climbable scenery, big fellers called Abobo, etc., Melbourne House turned out a garish, sluggish, buggy mess, whereas the Target Renegade team were able to cherry-pick the advances they wanted to work into the game, and dump things that didn't suit the hardware or the visual style established in Renegade. So we got the two-player mode and the crucial ability to nick the enemy's weapons... who cares about scrolling? And the opening motorcycle attack is far more thrilling than DD's first wave of grunts.

In retrospect the gameplay is rather unbalanced, which prevents me from giving this game a 5 - the jump kick is overpowered and you can complete the first half of the game with it alone. The graphics, by Ocean regular Dawn Drake, are lovely and full of character - level four probably being the high point, for gameplay as well as looks, as enemies who can duck are suddenly thrown into the mix (along with an adorable but deadly doggie). Although the prequel is the more balanced one-player game, you can't beat Target Renegade for Speccy-based co-operative pummeling.