Producer: Ocean
Retail Price: £7.95
Author: Denton Designs (from an idea by Simon Butler)

Deep within the bowels of the Castle Rygellian, far below the Holy Torture Chambers, is the Slime Beast's Department of Abduction and Foreign Queen Abusement. Here lies the Queen of the Cosmic Wartoads, the leader of a brave and truly cosmic race of honest and good-some toads dedicated only to truth, justice, mom's fly pie and the toadican way of life. Kid napped by the Rygellian Slime beasts, she has been transmuted to the ghastly (to War-toads) form of a human female.

Understandably, the War-toads are incredibly narked by their brave leader's demise, so a crack toad is sent off on a rescue mission. Time is not limitless, since the queen is tied beneath a murderous SLUDGE SAW that descends slowly but surely towards her helpless form. It has fallen upon you to rescue your queen, since you are the the bravest of the cosmic wartoads - a Toad among toads.

The path to the Slime King's lair is not a mere hop across the lily pad: you have to cross the perilous RYGELLIAN TIMEVOID. In the void are the-eight pieces of the COSMIC TOOLKIT, a menacing compilation of deadly machinery capable of dismantling the sludge saw if you get to your Queen in time. The kit is most awesome and contains an assortment of amazing goodies including an Intergalatic Whisk, a Chronosynclastic Stanley Knife, a pair of X Ray binoculars, a Stellar Fish, a Death Ray Smutt Gun, a 3 Million Megawatt Light-bulb, a Cosmic Axe and a Zippo Lighter.

Whilst in the time void you take the form of Cosmic Willy, a tadpole creature that acts as a cursor. Each square within the eight by eight grid which comprises the timevoid is a time node. Your journey starts in the top right cell of the void and the idea is to reach the Queen at bottom left. You can only move to adjacent nodes in the grid - it's no good trying to make a mega leap straight for the Queen's location.

Each node has to be travelled through before you may use Cosmic Willy to transport you to the next. To get through a node all the nasties that live in the time vacuums that lie behind the node must be killed with your Constant Recoil Alpha Pellet gun. A node may contain up to four time vacuums, each one full of nasties which have to be defeated before you can re-enter the time grid and move to another node. There are three different types of nasty to be found within time vacuums, with each vacuum containing just one variety. You get to pit wits with Slime Masters, Sludge Slugs and Frenzied Flies during your travels and when you enter a node a window opens on the screen and you enter a sub-game in which you do battle. As you inflict damage on the nasties, your Toad Points increase. Conversely, as the Rygellians score hits on you, the Slime Points tally rises.

During battles with the nasties Wartoad may be assisted by Ultrasonic Robot Defenders. Each time you clock up 1,000 Toad Points one of these beasties appears in the playing area automatically and can delay some of your enemies by seizing hold of them for a while - how long a while depends on the difference between Toad points and Slime points. Toad must stand still to shoot, and he can only fire forwards, so you must move him to the appropriate location before blasting away.

Status displays on the border of each game screen indicate how the battle is progressing, and the nasties themselves change colour to let you know how close to winning you are. The most powerful nasties are the red ones. Then, in descending order, are the magenta, yellow and white versions. To defeat the nasties you must keep shooting until they go white, and then shoot some more! All they have to do to win is score enough hits on you to move them up a colour whereupon you lose a life and have to start that node again. Toad has three lives when he loses all three he is reincarnated at the top right node and effectively restarts his journey. Meanwhile the Sludge Saw has got even closer to the Queen…

The Slime Master homes in on you and his touch is deadly. Escorted by his fawning minions, the Slime Pawns, the Slime Master himself is loathe to attack a Cosmic Wartoad preferring to send his cohorts on the attack. Wartoad can move within the playing area in the four basic directions, followed round by the nasties. Each time you despatch a cohort or score a hit on old SM himself, you get closer to victory.

Sludge Slugs come mob-handed and cling to the top of the playing area, out of range, dribbling slime at you. Every so often a slug for two) lets go and falls to the floor. You've got to zap the slugs as they fall and avoid being slimed or hit by a falling invertebrate. In this subgame Toad can only scamper left and right but he can protect himself from falling slime and slugs by shooting them.

Frenzied Flies appear in a swarm, bunched together in the top left hand corner of a time vacuum. Attack squadrons of four insects leave the main mass and go for Toad, who must blow them away before they drain his energy. Once again, he can move in four directions.

Parts of the Cosmic Toolkit can be found in time vacuums - all Toad has to do is walk over them and add them to his collection. Keys which give you access to the Roads to Nowhere and Somewhen can also be collected in a similar manner. These roads provide a means of hopping from one time vacuum to another (and hence travelling between nodes which are not adjacent). Four pairs of nodes are linked together by the roads, and they appear as red squares on the timegrid at the start of the game. When you collect a key, one of the pairs of linked nodes unlocks and changes to white on the grid and you can 'jump' between them.

Other squares within the void are also colour coded. Green shows the node currently occupied while purple means that a power node sits at the end of that node's time vacuums. Once the nasties lurking the vacuums behind a purple node have been eliminated, Wartoad will automatically be transported to the LILY POWER WINDOW where the Constant Recoil Alpha Pellet gun may be recharged. A bar at the bottom of the screen show the gun charge remaining if it reaches zero three lives are lost, and it's back to the start node, toad.

After completing a node, a scene showing the queen held mercilessly below the sludge saw appears with the saw moving just that bit closer. The sludge saw takes an hour and a half of real time to complete its descent, during which time you need to collect the Toolkit and arrive in the node where the Queen is held captive. Failure spells death for the Wartoad Queen and a'Nice legs, shame about the face'message reveals itself. So, there it is. Are you Toad enough to take the challenge?

COMMENTS

Control keys: defined at start of game
Joystick: Kempston, Interface 2, Protek, AGF, Fuller
Keyboard play: responsive
Use of colour: bright and cheerful, avoiding clash
Graphics: large detailed Toad sprite, some excellent animation
Sound: minimal, odd noises for shots and screen changes
Skill levels: one
Screens: three sub-games, plus time grid and Queen Screen

After Frankie this has to be Denton's best to date, Though markedly a Denton product, with windows, icons and other such paraphernalia, it wasn't actually their design. The game itself is very neat indeed and though many of the sub-games are quite mindless they're great fun. The scenario and instructions on the accompanying inlay provide nearly as much entertainment as the game itself. Whoever was responsible for these certainly has a slightly unstable sense of humour. Graphically Cosmic Wartoad is very nice, and the main sprite is cleverly animated, though a little colourless. The windowing system works very well and isn't as obtrusive as Denton's previous attempts. Cosmic Wartoad is a very good release indeed and is well above the usual Ocean standard. Denton fans will love it but it's appeal should spread to many other gamesters.

Yet another game by Denton Designs and boy is it good! The only way of describing the game is by comparing it to Frankie - if you can imagine a load of totally original sub games all combined to make one game then that's the nearest you'll get to Cosmic Wartoad. The graphics are generally big, colourful and very detailed, as you would expect of Denton. There is very little sound besides a sort of tune on the options screen. This is one of those games which proves quite difficult to start off with but if you persevere with it then it doesn't take long before you're hooked. My only real gripe with the game is that the instructions are not that good. One of Denton's best!

There's an awful lot of instructions to this game and the scenario is well complicated. It took me a while to read and digest the inlay and I still had to play for about half an hour before I fully understood what was going on. Maybe I'm a bit dim... Once you get to grips with this game, however, it's really neat - and frustrating. I can see it's going to be a while before I crack the problem and rescue the Queen. Essentially there are three arcade sequences, each of which is a compelling game in its own right, and there's an overall strategic element to the game. The graphics are good, especially the animation of the Cosmic Wartoad himself - if you don't move he just sits there and blinks at you. Lots of nice touches add up to a compelling game.

Ocean
£7.95

Wanted: a hero. Must have: nerves of steel; accurate marksmanship; goggle eyes, green, slimy skin and webbed feet! Yea - who wants to look like Harrison Ford when you can be a Cosmic Wartoad? And with your Queen transformed into a (Yuk!) human female by the 'orrible Rygellian Slime Beasts (Boo!), and chained beneath a descending buzz saw (Gasp!) then you have no time to lose.

Ninety, real-time minutes is the limit as you cross the void of Rygellian Time Nodes via your Cosmic Willy. Cosmic Willy? Who but Denton Designs could provide not a cursor but a tadpole? The Slime Beasts ain't glad to see you though when you arrive at a node you'll find a welcoming committee. Defeat this and you can occupy the node, but blow it and you lose a life and return to the previous node. Lose three lives (Oh no!) and you're returned to the start, but the chainsaw is ever nearer your prone Princess.

Don't worry if you don't fully understand all this nonsense... sorry, wildly exciting plot. The arcade action element as you travel between nodes takes three distinct forms, of graded difficulty. You'll have to clear the screen before your arrival is established, though with Slime Pawns reproducing and Sludge Slugs falling on you it's no picnic (Aww, and I bought the ants!).

Between bouts of frantic blasting comes the strategy element that sorts out the toads from the tadpoles. Your path across the eight by eight Time Grid allows for different courses, and some nodes are more useful than others as they provide Time Tunnels, if you can find the keys. You'll need others to recharge your gun. And all the while you'll be seeking to avoid the worst foes and collect the objects that you need to free the Queen.

With its iris-ing windows and great graphics the game is as stylish and idiosyncratic as you'd expect from the people who gave you Frankie, and it's pretty difficult. But who could resist when the prize for success is a webbed hand in marriage - and the price of failure is that you get to carry her home in two separate bags!

Publisher: Ocean
Programmers: Denton Designs
Price: £7.95
Memory: 48K
Joystick: Kempston, Sinclair, cursor

I'll tell you a tale, lads. A tale of a toad, a fighting toad, hopping to the rescue of a toad-queen. A toad of distinction, battling the vile squelchings of the Rygellian Slime Things to rescue his lady from the Sludge Saw which threatens to slice her warty loveliness from web to web.

A tale of the greatest hero of his race, the tale of the Cosmic Wartoad.

Alternatively, we could describe the latest line in software from Denton Designs via Ocean, and leave the amphibian fantasies to the cassette blurb.

Cosmic Wartoad is a mix of arcade and strategy, as we've come to expect from the programmers of Enigma Force and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. But it's a much lighter effort than those two soft operas, and really represents an effort to tie several standard shoot-'em-up concepts together within a long quest.

Play takes place across an 8x8 grid of time nodes, through which you move one at a time. Each node is occupied by one or more waves of slime monsters, which you have to defeat to progress. There is also a network of roads 'to nowhere and somewhen' which allow you to jump several nodes at once if you have collected the keys which open the roads.

To reach the queen and rescue her from the Sludge Saw you must traverse the grid from top right to bottom left - a minimum of 14 moves, according to Denton Designs. But you can't disable the hideous machine without collecting eight items of a cosmic tool kit along the way. Those include stellar fish, a chronosynclastic Stanley knife, and a Zippo lighter - funny once, completely irrelevant twice.

The graphics are smooth, competent and moderately fast-moving, but since the game falls into fairly simple sections anyway, they are not particularly breathtaking. The toad itself is large and fun to look at, and the monsters are different in behaviour and appearance.

First there's the Slime Master, which produces small slime pawns to protect itself. Those home in on you, but shooting them with your Constant Recoil Alpha-Pellet Gun is not much use as you'll only win by zapping the big slime itself. Touching it is instant death, although all other monsters simply reduce your energy, and you have to hit it many times to destroy it.

Then there's the Sludge Slug, a set of squidgy space invaders which drop gobbets of muck on you like a flock of mutant pigeons. You can only move along the bottom of the screen - draw the slugs into attack and then run, turn and fire.

Finally you must deal with the Frenzied Flies, Galaxian-type nasties which come at you four at a time, homing in like the slime pawns. The cassette blurb says they are particularly dangerous adversaries, but I found them a doddle compared to the Slime Master.

Defeating the monsters is done on a sort of tug-of-war basis. A bar chart or similar indicator goes up if they hit you and down again if you hit them, so it's not just a question of killing a specific number to move on to the next level. Each monster comes in four tasteful colours. Red is the most dangerous, then purple, yellow and white - and you have to go through each shade to win. For example, if you get lumbered with the purple Slime Masters, and manage to defeat them, you then get the yellow ones and finally the white ones before you are given a new monster to fight or put back on grid to make a new move.

Apart from your gun you also get Times Ultrasonic Robotic Defenders which look like small eggs deposited by your toad every time you score a thousand points. Those operate on the Slime Master and Frenzied Fly screens, and any pawns or flies that collide with them are stuck until the defender decays. In keeping with the Tug-of-War style play, there are two scores - toad points for you and slime points for the computer. The difference between the two scores affects the lasting power of the defenders.

You get three lives with which to cross the grid, but the game is not over if you lose them all - instead you are sent back to the beginning again. Meanwhile the Sludge Saw has descended closer to the body of the toad queen, and the points totals are carried over - you have 90 minutes of real time before the saw reaches the queen. That is an unusual feature of play, and gives you an opportunity to explore the grid quite thoroughly.

The final feature concerns the gun, which eventually runs out of ammunition. That can be replenished on certain nodes, and your path will have to include several of those if you have any chance of finishing the game. Thus you progress, playing sets of simple arcade games - though by no means easy to win - and trying to discover a reasonably safe route across the grid as you go.

The ridiculously over-the-top scenario and blurb is almost like a satire on those space games where the over-hyped cassette covers bear virtually no relation to the game itself. Surprisingly, Cosmic Wartoad is extremely playable, pleasant on the eyes, and thoroughly addictive - proving once again that you don't need 500 locations and state-of-the-art 3D megawotsits to make a good game.

MACHINE: Spectrum
SUPPLIER: Ocean
PRICE: £7.95

It's not often that you get a game made exclusively for one computer these days - but Denton Designs and Ocean have come up with an exclusive for the Spectrum in Cosmic Wartoad.

True to DD's style, the game is slickly presented with nice graphics and sound. Nice looking screens and good packaging complete the picture. But when it comes to game play. Well, it's basically a shoot-up with frills.

The usual elaborate Denton scenario comes with the game. And it goes like this. The Queen of the Cosmic Wartoads has been captured by the Rygellian Slime Beasts - deadliest enemy of her race - and transformed into a human female. Only the Slime Beasts know why.

She awaits her fate beneath a galactic guillotine in the Slime King's Lair. The player takes on the role of a heroic Cosmic Wartoad. You must battle across the Rygellian time-void, and dismantle the tortuous guillotine before it turns the Queen into prime cuts.

To complete the task you need to acquire a Cosmic Tool Kit. These eight items are scattered throughout the time vacuums of the Rygellian time void. They include incredibly useful items such as an Intergalactic Whisk, 3M Megawatt Light Bulbs, and a Death Ray Smutt Gun.

To travel, the player must pass through the time grid windows which contain venous breeds of "nasties". Within these time grid windows Cosmic Willy - a tadpole! - comes to the player's aid. By acting as a cursor he enables the player to select which time node he wishes to occupy.

You start the game with a view of the "time-grid". You move the tadpole cursor to the zone you wish to visit and hit the fire button. Then you enter into a shoot-up with the alien creatures which inhabit that particular "node".

On each combat screen you get a "balance of power" readout which shows how you are doing in comparison to the enemy creatures. Let it creep too far in the enemy's favour and you'll lose a life.

Clear a screen and you open up more of the "time grid" - in similar fashion to Starion.

You can only move your Wartoad to directly adjacent "nodes" although there are eight linked nodes which allow you to beam around the time grid more easily once you have liberated them.

Ultimately - although the game is extremely well presented and documented - it gets repetitive and boring. Some nice ideas well executed let down because there's not much of a game in evidence.

Spectrum
Ocean
Spoof-'em-up
£7.95

The whacky title gives the game away. Cosmic Wartoad is clearly intended as a spoof, or perhaps as a grotesque parody of the Star Raiders type game. You start off on the Time Grid, Wartoad's version of a Star Map or Elite's Galactic Chart. Here you select an adjacent Time node for your next port.

Then instead of going on to do gallant combat amid the stars, you end up in a room, facing a Slime Master, or a Sludge Slug, or Frenzied Flies. Somewhat lacking in finesse, these nasties usually come straight for you, and also reproduce once hit. So it is a matter of firing away until such time as the program has judged that you are ready to return to the Time Grid. In other words, this stage of the game presents the simplest sort of shoot-'em-up.

The general idea is to work across the Grid to the Slime King's lair, picking up eight vital items along the way. On the cassette inlay the game is dressed up as a space-time romp, involving Time Paradoxes, Time Vacuums, and the like. However, the major part of the action is shooting nasties.

Wartoad features highly imaginative graphics. The creature you control, a green toad, is a superbly animated eight by eight character supersprite. Windows open up on different game stages; and in between you get a tantalising glimpse of the Slime King's lair.