This is a great maze/puzzle/shooter from Hewson's budget Rack-It label, converted by Dominic "Zynaps" Robinson from the original C64 version by Michael Sentinella (which itself seems to be based on obscure Japanese arcade game Raiders5).
You control a tank which has to blast all the blocks on a screen to progress to the next level. Sounds simple, yes? Nope... first of all there's the baddies, which blend into the scenery, have a nasty habit of following you around and which cannot be destroyed, only temporarily disabled. Secondly, you can only shoot a block if you're more than a square's distance away from it, which in practice means the blocks have to be destroyed in a certain sequence, giving the game a puzzle element. There's also a time limit, and once you've blasted the blocks and the exit appears, your gun stops working!
For me though, the real innovation in this game is the half screen scrolling. Each level is about 3 screens wide, and the C64 version had full scrolling, but as we all know this doesn't translate too well to the Speccy. So when you get towards the extreme left of the screen, rather than scrolling, the screen flips half a screen and the tank appears in the middle again. It's a simple yet effective trick and I can't recall any other games using it. This also makes the game more tricky than the C64 version, as you never know when a baddie might pop up!
The graphics are blocky yet colourful (each level is a different colour), there's some nice sound FX and a cool tune on the title screen, and best of all the whole thing was a budget game - the best three quid I ever spent!
This is an interesting take on the platform/collect-em-up genre. You need to collect the pieces of skeleton to make Frankenstein's monster. There's the usual baddies and hazards but instead of the jump key there's an "activate" key which works only when you stand over certain objects - a springboard to jump to the next platform, a pole to slide down. This combined with the skeleton collection (each piece has to be collected in a particular order), gives the game more of a puzzle element than other platform games.
The skeleton-collecting levels alternate with a harder level in which you have to get from the bottom left to the switch on the top right of the screen while dodging more nasties, including a lethal spinning disc thrown by the monster himself.
All in all a deceptively simple but very absorbing game.
Not a game, but a nice little utility where you can design the loading of a screen (similar to the Alkatraz loader used by The Edge and US Gold). Once you've designed the loader, you can save the whole thing using the standard SAVE commands, meaning you can use any emulator that can save virtual Spectrum files to tap or tzx. Perfect for those CSSCGC entries!
