Hewson
£12.99 cass, £17.99 disk

Hewson bring as a compilation of four new games: Kraal, Klimax, Head The Ball and Super Cup. Kraal has you as Epolog, a half human half alien with a mission: to mount a rebellion against the human masters on the planet Kraal. To ensure their destruction you must guide your ADO (Auto Destruction Device) around 16 maze filled levels trying to destroy the eight Nuclear Power Supply Units that are scattered around. Your masters send drones out to stop you. Start with a puny blaster and collect more powerful weapons with the destruction of security droids.

In Klimax the droids in a large industrial complex have gone haywire. You patrol the complex in your ACE Mk2 Intercepter and must destroy all weapon containers and droids that get in your way. There's a two minute time limit in which to destroy the containers, after which all air will be drained from the building and you will asphyxiate. Every fifth building houses a nuclear weapon and is guarded by particularly vicious drones, so watch out.

The third offering is the misleadingly named Head The Ball, leading you to expect a footy game. It's in fact about the search for your girlie, kidnapped by the leader of the Globoid Hells Angels gang. You're Head, who must survive the traps and pitfalls of the Globoids' territory and save her: jump over obstacles, shoot them (ammo is limited), or use your shield in emergencies. Collect gems along the way to offer as ransom, but hurry because time is running out.

Finally we have Super Cup which is a footy game with up to eight participants. Once teams have been decided on it's onto the menu screen to choose team colours, skill level (0-8), length of a match etc. The game is played from a bird's eye view.

Well, those of you who want to go back to the so-called good old days of Speccy games have a good chance with this! The price tag is just too much for what you get, buy CRASH instead and get better games thrown in. Out of the four games Klimax is the only one I found even mildly entertaining, and as for Super Cup: this is a family mag, so I'll keep my comments to myself. Steer wall clear. Hewson should know better.

MARK [41%]

Compilations are always the same, you get some good games and some bad. 4th Dimension is no exception. Kraal is the game that really grabs your attention. The presentation is first class with some strange sort of digitized speech and good colourful graphics. Sadly the game lacks playability. Head The Ball is similar to Kraal in that it looks really slick but has nothing to keep you coming back for more. It's a sort of low budget Wizball. The ball bounces around, firing at the various aliens in an annoying manner, and just as you think you're getting somewhere, you bang into one and have to start again! Super Cup: well, you saw how bad Kick Off was the other month. This is just as bad with stupid little footballers running around totally out of control. There's a good tune though, so perhaps you could just forget the football and listen to that. Klimax, is in a similar vein to hundreds of games around: the 3-D style's been used so often the games all look the same. It's in mainly white monochrome with lots of little robots running around, some look like typewriters and some like toasters! A simple tune and effects add some fun, but it's all been seen before.
NICK [59%]

Hewson
£12.99 cass/£17.99 disk
Reviewer: Robin Alway

Unless you've been held prisoner by the Clangers for the past five years you'll no doubt be familiar with the top-notch and generally spiffing games that regularly scuttle off the Hewson production line. Each new release from the company is welcomed by a chorus of 'Hurrahs' (with lots and lots of exclamation marks on the end) so a compilation of four previously unreleased Hewson games could quite possibly (and quite literally) bring the house down. Well, that's the theory anyway - but don't count your chickens before they've been McNuggeted!

SUPERCUP

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I reckon Hewson has never had a go at a footie game before, preferring instead to concentrate on extra-terrestrial shoot-'em-ups in which the haircuts are a lot easier to capture in pixels and no one's called Gazza, Dazza, Bazza or Kazza. Like MicroProse Soccer and Kick Off this one gives you an overhead view of the action and offers you all the usual stuff like choosing the name of your team, the number of teams in the league, the length of each half and which team colour you think will best clash with the green playing surface.

Footie game graphics have never been brill, but the players in Supercup look dodgy to the point of being non-human, which suggests that the programmer either a) subscribes to the abstract school of art or b) can't draw for toffee. Not only that but they're pathetically animated and move around in a most ungainly manner, which makes for a very jerky and style of play. Another crap bit was the way the goalies didn't move, but maybe I'm too picky. Basically it's the duffer of the pack.
Rating: 30%

KRAAL

First up is Kraal - quite a novel, viewed-from-above, arcadey exploration game with alien-type thingies to shoot, weapons to collect and a naff scenario to explain it all. This time you're Epolog, half-man half-alien, whose task it is to rescue the usual Princess from a fate worse than the one I attended at the local parish last Saturday afternoon. This basically entails driving a weedy little tank around five jerky-scrolling, plan-view levels trying to find and do away with small larvae creatures and their mums. There are various other naff-looking monsters, as well as gems to be exchanged for weapons or energy. And that's about it really. In fact, it looks and plays much like the ancient Panzardrome, and I can only wonder why Hewson didn't 'budgetise' it instead. The crying shame is that the front end's really snazzy, with some great alien speech and stuff, but alas none of this has rubbed off on the actual game.
Rating: 51%

KLIMAX

From the out-and-out duffer to my fave of the four - Klimax. This is a 3D isometric arcade adventure that Hewson could have released as a full pricey without suffering too many dents in its shimmering and rather sexy body-work. It's set in a 16-level industrial complex which looks like every other industrial complex you've seen except it's got NPSUs (Nuclear Power Supply Units) plopped down all over the place. Also left lying about, a mite carelessly in my opinion, are ADDs (Auto Destruction Devices). The object is to get your droid-like hero to push an ADD around the complex and hopefully into the entrance bit of a NPSU which will then explode. Unfortunately, it's QDA (Quite Difficult Actually) because the whole place is seething with enemy droids that destroy the ADDS and sap your energy. You can see them off with a few laser bolts but as these can also zap your ADD you've got to be pretty bloomin' careful. Every alternate level is an Administration Level and the idea here is to stop repair droids accessing the destroyed Nuclear Power thingies and pick up some new weapons. Other things you need are pills to maintain Power, Range and Speed ratings.

The whole thing's depicted in stunning monochrome with large and well-defined sprites and, because it doesn't have a planet-sized playing area that you've got to map or whatever, it comes across as a surprisingly addictive little number and jolly good fun. At the end of the day though its still not up to Hewson's usual stratospheric standards and not much of an improvement on the kind of thing Ultimate was producing two or so years back.

HEAD THE BALL

Lastly, there's Head The Ball which has absolutely nothing to do with football and, because of that, manages to get away with another classic plot written by someone with an Honours Degree in Loathsomely Cute And Twee Computer Game Plots With Special Reference To Balls. Apparently Head is a ball-shaped character whose girlfriend has just been captured by the evil Gobba, head of the Globoid Hells Angels. It's up to you to bounce your way through several horizontally-scrolling levels avoiding contact with Gobba's henchmen, picking up gems and following the arrows to rescue your beloved. Basically, all this is the latest excuse to do another cute bouncy ball game as you guide Head through treacherous screens designed to wipe the smile from his rotund person once and for all. Your supply of weapons is limited - you start with a few smart bombs, a shield and firepower in the form of ten single shots. Because of this handicap most of the gameplay is made up of trying to bounce Head past the baddies and onto a safe-ish landing spot.

Visually it's a bit, erm, so-so and could have done with more colour and larger characters to get across more of a cartoony feel. It's hardly original stuff but good fun to play and the kind of game that, again, would've done well at budget price. Just depends whether you're into this type of game and can cope with the cuteness.
Rating: 60%

Well, there you have it - four Hewson games previously unplayed by human hand collected into one package. There's one godawful one, a few average efforts and another that's fair-to-middling. Rather than being the collection of unreleased classics I was hoping for, this little lot looks like it was found under the bed amongst a load of discarded old socks and Sunday Sport back issues - very much a budget bunch, I'm afraid.

Label: Hewson
Author: various
Price: £12.99, £17.99 disk
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

Normally you expect compilations to consist of chart-splitting, gut-wrenching megasuccesses, but Hewson has decided to do something different and release a compilation of titles which have never seen the light of day before. It's pretty obvious why, too - none of them are quite exciting or original enough to make it as full-price titles, but they're just about worth a bash on one big box.

A few months ago EMAP Towers resounded to cries of 'Oooooh! Offside! Goal! No it wasn't! Yes it was!' 'cos everyone was playing a well spiffing footie game called Kick-Off on the Amiga (spit). What's that got to do with Hewson's Super Cup on the Speccie, you may ask? Well, the two aren't dissimilar; the pitch is viewed from above, scrolling mightily to follow the movement of the ball. The graphics are minimal, the action's very fast, and the frills are non-existent. Trouble is, what looked good on the Amiga doesn't quite measure up on the Spectrum, so you're left with a soccer arcade game which is no better than a dozen others, and has none of the managerial elements.

Rather more fun is Head the Ball, which isn't a footie game at all, but a sort of cutesy-wootsie Mario Brothers effort in which a disembodied head bounces through a magical landscape in search of his lost girlfriend, kidnapped by the charming Heads Angel, Gobba. There are diamonds to collect to bribe Gobba, pits to leap and nasty heads to avoid; eventually you get a sort of jet-pack to fly over the nasties. Quite good fun if you like this sort of slop, but no points for originality.

Equally familiar is Kraal, which is so similar in appearance to The Edge's Shadow Skimmer that they might have been programmed by the same team. Here you explore the measureless reaches of an alien complex, exterminating larvae and hunting down the monstrous mother spiders. The backgrounds are marvellously colourful, and your fighter probe slips underneath scaffolding and other structures as you roam around. Annoyingly, the background flips to the next section before you get to the edge of the screen, so you tend to lose track of your position easily. Otherwise, Kraal is pretty polished, and there's a promise of some naughty smutty excitement if you get through to rescue the space princess (but not really, I suspect).

Klimax is the real oddity, and this one I think should have been released on its own; it plays a bit like Magnetron and looks like Alien Highway. If that's not much help to you, the idea is to pilot a ground-skimmer around a flip-scrolling background of grids, fighting off enemy robots, searching out and disarming auto-destruct mechanisms, and stopping at computer terminals to fuel up and check your directions to Zap City. Pretty good though a bit repetitive.