Producer: Bulldog Soft
Retail Price: £1.99
Author: Icon Design

Man versus pest - the eternal battle for survival - threatens a far-off colony. It's a continual struggle to keep food supplies from being consumed by voracious creatures.

A fence is built to keep them from the human compound, but still they get through. A maintenance droid patrols the compound, consisting of seven storage and control buildings. Moving between all the buildings, and able to carry up to four items at a time, the droid's job is to fix fences, destroy pests that get in, harvest the crop and store it, and use the planet's homing beacon for the safe arrival of supply ships. Fences are repaired with wire mesh, wood or barbed wire, all taken from their respective stores via an option screen, and carried to the damaged site. Anything removed from a store must be paid for.

Portable death traps can be used to block off galloping gourmet paths, but the creatures can be predatory, even lethal if the droid's shield energy is too low. It's equipped with a laser of limited charge, although time must be taken to recharge shield and laser levels in the droid charger room. Most operations use power, and if too much is consumed things switch off, use too little and the generator overloads. The compound's supply is expanded by increasing the number of solar panels, available from the general store.

Credits are awarded for harvesting crops, but to generate a future yield, seeds must be taken from the stores and planted on the compound's grassy sections. When the colony's supplies run low, more are ordered from Earth. The droid activates a homing beacon as the ship approaches, but the longer it's switched on, the more power is used. Even then, the job isn't over. The supplies must be unpacked from crates in the appropriate buildings - and all the while, the hungry horrors are breaking in through the fence.

COMMENTS

Control keys: definable
Joystick: Kempston, Interface 2, Cursor
Use of colour: basic and oddly defined
Graphics: simple forced perspective and average definition
Sound: average
Skill levels: one

Colony is annoying, not just a little bit infuriating you understand, it's an inducer of full blown 'screaming blue tearing out hair syndrome', and it's great - for a bit. Appeal will be short lived once you've memorised the map and discovered the various problems. After an afternoon's play I'd just about had enough of it, but I dare say I'll come back to it after a couple of weeks. For two quid you can't really go wrong.
BEN

After starting with the great Feud, I would have thought BULLDOG would know what a game needs to be appealing! Here the graphics are badly drawn, showing little thought of where the colour should be used, and character detection is mediocre. Colony is no fun to play at all. The game's idea is boring and repetitive, so its attraction wears off fast.
PAUL

There is an element of playability here, but unfortunately the poor implementation means it has to struggle to make itself known. Resultingly, Colony isn't much of a fun game.
MIKE

Mastertronic
£1.99

This is a classic case of the 'if only' syndrome - as in, 'if only they'd spent the time and that bit of extra effort, this could have been great.'

The idea's novel, at least. You control a service droid on an outer-space outpost, responsible for a multitude of tasks, from planting the mushrooms to summoning supplies. This would be a nice cushy number for your android Percy Thrower, if it wasn't for the dreaded alien plant pests.

Outer space may not be inhabited by little green men, but it's swarming with galactic greenfly... and ants, ladybirds and other mushroom-munching parasites. They're not even too choosy about their diet, so watch out for your solar panels! if they eat enough of those your bulbs won't even light, let alone grow (ho ho!)

To combat the menace, you can swop your green fingers for something far more deadly, but beware, because the laser runs down very fast, forcing constant trips back to an outhouse to recharge. You'll need to locate this pretty quickly among all the other buildings which contain seeds, solar panels, fences and traps.

You can hold four objects at once apart from your gun, so stock up with some of these basic supplies. That way, when you find that a beetle has nibbled through the barrier, you can replace it instantly. The strategy comes into play when you're forced to cut back on the size of the compound. As it shrinks, you grow less produce.

Now the whole thing becomes something like A-level Economics. You trade your mushrooms for further supplies with a visiting spacecraft, which you can summon at any time. But to get the best bits you need to have a good turnover, and that means you must maintain a healthy economy. So don't get into siege mentality too early!

Sounds fun, doesn't it, but what could have been a frantic exercise in land management is let down by a lack of playability. Objects must be placed precisely, which can make it extremely difficult to drop a fence when theres really no time to lose. Accuracy isn't helped by the sloppy pseudo-3D graphics. The playing area also feels wrong, as if there's too little on a single screen, and too much outside.

It's a pity, because at heart this is a clever arcade-cum-strategy game. But strangulation of the roots has stopped it blooming.

BUDGET GAMES ARE ACCOUNTING FOR MORE SALES THAN EVER. ZX LOOKS AT THE LATEST RELEASES.

If the computer press is anything to go by, budget software is taking over the world. Nobody is buying full-priced games apparently (unless they're conversions of coin-op titles), and certainly Mastertronic, if they're not taking over the world, are taking over Melbourne House.

There are a number of software houses competing for the budget market but for the most part it's a three way fight these days. Mastertronic were the first in the field, closely followed by Firebird's Silver range, and these two have been slogging it out enthusiastically for a while now. Recently though, Code Masters, the label founded by a couple of ex-Mastertronic programmers, has made quite an impact with games such as BMX Simulator and Terra Incognita.

This month we've received some new releases from all three of these companies, giving us a good chance to compare a Super Robin Hood variety of products and take a look at the state of the (budget) art.

MASTERTRONIC

There were quite a few Mastertronic releases just after Christmas, but they've been a little bit quiet lately (probably busy planning to release Melbourne House's back catalogue as budget titles...)

They recently added the £2.99 label, Bulldog, to their stable and got off to a flying start with Feud (reviewed last month). Colony, the latest Bulldog game isn't quite so good. It's basically a maze game set on a distant planet in which you have to control an android and protect the crops planted by the human settlers.

Colony is very much in the mould of Mastertronic's £1.99 games, and graphically bears quite a resemblance to many of their other maze games, though for the additional pound the presentation and control options have been made a little more sophisticated.

Meanwhile, back on the £1.99 label, Rasterscan is a bit of an oddity. It claims to be an animated adventure requiring no arcade skills at all. This isn't strictly true as the game puts you in control of yet another android (this time known as MSB), one which looks and moves like a beach ball, so you'll need a little bit of arcade skill to control its movements. Your task is to move MSB around a damaged spacecraft and repair its engine and scanner systems. Along the way you'll be presented with a number of logical puzzles, but as well as solving these you'll actually spend a fair bit of time figuring out just what the point of the game is (at least I had to, anyway). It's not the sort of game that will appeal to arcade addict, but it you're into games that require a bit of thought then Rasterscan could prove quietly addictive.