Producer: Firebird
Retail Price: £7.95
Author: Steve Wetherill and Colin Grunes

Sidewize had you hafting the invasion of nasty Darland Mutants in a shimmering shower of laser fire. Since then the galaxy has been pretty quiet - not a mutant uprising or intergalactic scuffle in sight. You're getting on with whatever mercenaries do in their spare time when suddenly the interstellar communilink bursts into life: the planet Luna is under attack from unidentified alien forces. You immediately rush to the shuttle dock, board your craft and enter the fray.

One or two alternating players may participate in the combat which takes place against a horizontally scrolling skyline of buildings, factories and Prawn hives. Alien formations attack from all directions, chimneys belch missiles and enemy bullets fly through the air. Collision with buildings is fatal and results in the loss of one of three lives.

Basic laser fire can be temporarily enhanced by moving over uniform weaponry installation icons which represent four different types of improvements of: bullet-fire, surround-fire, shield and smart bomb. Each weapon comes in two forms, weak and strong, and since all icons display the same symbol you can never be sure of picking an improvement. A colour-coded status display at the base of the screen lights up to show the type of weapon currently in use as well as its diminishing strength.

As the battle rages on, your character's energy decreases and he begins to slow down. Picking up energy pods restores strength, and a colour-coded energy meter indicates current status of health.

Play is divided into three multiloaded levels, each of which culminates in a confrontation with the huge tentacles of a mother alien. Dodge her moving arms, blast them to pieces and the Crosswize mission is one step nearer success.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: attractive use of colour with detailed scenery, but the main character is far too large
Sound: unimpressive effects
Options: definable keys, one or two players

Crosswize is a tremendous improvement over its predecessor, Sidewize. The graphics are very detailed and, unlike Sidewize, contain some attractive and colourful scenery. But, one major fault is that you can't turn and fire at the same time. Although this may sound petty, in certain situations it makes the game very annoying and almost unplayable. It's a pity to see the programmers making the game so hard - I fear that most people won't even get the chance to load the extra levels supplied on the tape, thus missing out on some great graphics and challenges. This isn't a game you can sail through: it requires great thought and a good memory. However, hardened arcade addicts will find all that they've been looking for. Worth the asking price.
PAUL [70%]

Play Crosswize and become cross-eyed! There's just so much going on that you can't keep track of everything! All you can do is cross your fingers and blast away. It's very similar to its predecessor Sidewize, but the scrolling scenery is much more interesting containing little green houses with chimney pots that fire bombs at you! This method of collecting more fire power is the same, but the chance of collecting the wrong icon adds spice to the process. As with Sidewize, Crosswize is basically just a difficult shoot 'em up with little else to it. I found the couple of lives you are given hardly enough to get anywhere, and this proves frustrating when you die and have to start afresh. However, there's plenty of playability packed into Crosswize and if you like mindless massacres then this is for you.
NICK [70%]

Graphically Crosswize is a definite improvement over its predecessor, Sidewize (50%, Issue 44). Aliens, buildings, bullets and hero are clearly defined against a detailed and fairly colourful background. The control method however, takes some getting used to. Years of space peace have obviously taken their toll; your man is far less agile than he needs to be and frantic wiggling of the joystick meets with a slow, lethargic response. Turning is especially difficult; you can't change direction and fire at the same time. The size of the playing area doesn't help: hero and aliens are crowded on to a skyline already cramped by hazardous aerials and chimney pots. All too soon your space career comes to an untimely end in an undignified spray of pixels and some unimpressive sound effects. With a little perseverance your sprite becomes more manageable and against all odds play can get quite addictive. If you're looking for a tougher-than-average shoot 'em up this might just be the one.
KATI [68%]

Firebird
£7.95
Reviewer: David McCandless

Remember liberating the five planets in Sidewize (I 't even get past level one, he moaned) and vapourising all the evil Darlard Mutants? Well, in Crosswize you're now taking a well earned rest and letting your legend ferment. So when the planet Luna comes under attack from alien forces, who does everyone expect to go in an kick ass? Yup, you.

Crosswize begins where Sidewize left off, and the game stands out instantly as something good: the slick presentation, the inspired graphics, and the fact that you perish almost as soon as you start. Yes, this game is H.A.R.D. (Highly And Really Difficult.) The colourful - yes colour! - landscape of rooftops glide (were talking Michael Jackson moonwalk here), along under you, while thousands of beeping aliens assail you from all sides. And these aren't your average every day, run-of-the-mill extra-terrestrials, that dumbly bounce up and down (oo-er), or stupidly zig-zag all over the screen either. These are your fast moving, bullet-breathing killers which spiral outa' nowhere to take you on... and win.

But all is not lost (until you have lost everything - Philisophical Proverb no 562), 'cos guess what's available? Uh-huh, extra weaponry to shove your meagre laser-beam in the shade. Smart bombs, spray guns, invulnerability, they're all there if you just fly into a flashing "?" icon and press fire.

However, even with these weapons the devious aliens fight back. Deadly bars emerge hemming you in, chimneys that spit bombs at you, nasty cross-firing boxes and ultimately the big nasty. Yes, at the end of each level you have to combat a big, fat, grotesque alien before you can load in the next level.

Crosswize is in no-way original, but it's the pure execution of the worn ideas that counts - and works, and it's a great game to watch. Smooth movement, luverlee explosions and detailed graphics make the screen really eye-catching. I especially liked the way your man looks so cool leaning back on his backpack, gun at hip, almost stifling a yawn as he casually blasts the next wave of nasty nasties.

Addictiveness? is this game addictive? We are talking fail your exams, lose your job, break up your marriage, and even don't wash your hair type addictiveness. You keep pounding at the joystick, trying to get past that building to see what will kill you next. Have another go, and another, just one more, and another, one more time...

Label: Firebird
Author: Weatherill/Grunes
Price: £7.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tony Dillon

As shoot-'em-ups go, Sidewize was one of the best of '87. What better could Firebird do than a sequel? But, as has been proven time and time again, the word 'sequel' can bode misfortune. Not just in the games world, either. Superman 4, for example. Thankfully, Crosswize falls into the slim category of games that at least equal, if not better, the original and continues where Sidewize left off.

After saving the 4 worlds of thingy, whatsit, erm and you know, the universe became a happy place. Your reputation as a hero grew and grew, as did your head. Peace has reigned triumphant, until now. Lots more aliens have decided to be a pain in a place where the sun don't shine, and you have been conscripted to help on the front line. Well, not exactly help. To put it another way, you are the front line.

Following on in the trend of such games as Soldier of Light and indeed, Sidewize, Crosswize places you as a lone fighter, without ship or copy of SU, expected to save the show by moving through a right to left scrolly landscape, shooting anything that comes at you.

The aliens attack wave after wave, and good golly, there's a lot of them. All different shapes and sizes too. Some fly in set patterns, some zoom by and shoot at you, some dive at you kamikaze like (Someone takin' my name in vain? K.B.).

The diamond shaped objects and the spheres are the ones that travel in set patterns. No problem, bang bang. Then there are the large slab like things that come on from all sides of the screen. Occasionally, if you really have bad luck, a wave of craft will fly on from just behind you, and loop around you, shooting as they go past. Perhaps a little help is needed in the form of some extra weaponry.

In a lot of places (to start with) lie various tokens. These either give you extra energy or, huuuuuugh (sharp intake of breath), an extra weapon. Not any ordinary nancyboy weapon either, but a real instrument of destruction. You can get a portable missile silo, enabling you to fire 5 missiles in a forward direction. You can get fan bullets, which fire outwards in the direction you are facing, as well as complete surrounding bullets, that fire outwards from your person. A shield can be found and used to get past 'that bit'. You know the bit you can never get past normally. Finally, a smart bomb, which kills everything currently on screen.

In some games, you get a set amount of lives. In others, you get an energy level. In Crosswize, you get both. You instantly lose a life, if you crash into something (ground feature, bullet, other sprite). Also, your energy is continually dropping, and must be topped up with the help of the energy icons. Should your energy drop to a sufficiently low level, you begin to slow down. Slow to the point that you die.

In this game, it's not just the enemy that are a lethal threat. The ground is too. You fly over various buildings, and most of them have aerials, chimneys that spit bullets and all manner of strange artefacts.

To get to the next level, you must destroy the multi hit mother ship. All I can tell you is that she is big, at least twice the size of your little sprite, and very hard to kill without additional weapons.

I'd go as far as to say that Crosswize plays better than most of the recent Spectrum games I've seen. The game moves along at a very fast pace, though never too fast to be confusing. The pattern of aliens is learnable, though a random element is involved in certain positions in the game.

A terrific shoot-'em-up and a classic blast. Violent escapism at its best.

Firebird do it sideways.

DID you manage to survive the onslaught in Sidewize? Even if you didn't you can still take part in the sequel. This time you're saving the planet Luna from invading aliens by guiding your character as he moves from left to right across the continually scrolling landscape. Crosswize has good graphics and animation and the game plays well, but it's still dull stuff that lacks addictiveness.

Reviewer: Andy Smith

RELEASE BOX
Spec, £7.95cs, Out Now
No other versions planned

Predicted Interest Curve

1 min: 70/100
1 hour: 65/100
1 day: 50/100
1 week: 40/100
1 month: 20/100
1 year: 0/100

MACHINES: Spectrum
SUPPLIER: Firebird
PRICE: £7.99 (cass)

It's quite bizarre, this one. The first shoot-'em-up to take place in the air over Coronation Street! You control a little space man who flies along dodging telegraph poles and TV aerials, as well as the prerequisite formations of alien blobs, over a landscape of terraced houses. When I lived in a northern town, life was never like this!

This slight 'innovation', if you could call it that, is the nearest thing Firebird's newie gets to original thought, and even that is soon lost as you enter a more standard system of tunnels and stuff for the later stages. Still, even though this is nothing more than a bog-standard, run-of-the-mill, throw-a-stick-in-the-Virgin-game-shop-and-you'll-hit-fifty-of-them-shoot-'em-up, it's still a pretty good game. Despite all the advances we've made in computer games, for sheer playability all out destruction is still hard to beat.

"Destroy the alien waves" is about the nearest the packaging gets to a plot line apart from the info on the back informing us that it is the sequel to Sidewize, which we could hardly have forgotten since that was only out towards the end of last year! - and that is no bad thing. We all know what to do, just throw me straight into the action say. Which is precisely what the game does. There you are on a screen that scrolls quite fast to the right, indulging in pretty fast joystick waggling to avoid the waves of aliens. You start off equipped with a basic high powered laser gun which is what your weapon always reverts to when any picked up extras run out of juice.

Lucky you. there are a couple of E marked energy pods and a weaponry icon floating there right in front of you, which enables you to select one of the higher powered guns from the display at the bottom. You'll need it too, because the bad guys come at you thick and fast, and the proximity of the roof tops means there really isn't so much room to move. Besides being hit by an alien, you die if you touch the roof, or if the chimneys of the otherwise ordinary looking houses belch out an indestructible bullet at you. Hey! Not fair! I thought the native aliens on this poxy backwater planet I'm trying to rescue were on our side!

As with all games of this type, of course, practice makes perfect, and as you learn the various attack formations and how to deal with them, you progress a lot further into the game. One thing to bear in mind is that not only does the screen keep scrolling after you lose a life, but you are invulnerable for the first few seconds after you reappear. What this amounts to is that if there is a particularly tricky obstacle that you find impossible to get past, you can beat it by strategically dying just before it appears, and then using the scrolling of the screen and your brief invulnerability to get past it. Of course, this means sacrificing a life, so it is up to you to decide if it is worth it. In your choice of weaponry you do have a shield which comes into play when you hold down fire to provide the same service, but it soon runs out if you use it at all. Other weapons include Surround fire, bullet fire and a smart bomb, though you need to travel over an icon to get to use any of them. For certain parts of the game though, having a weapon that throws out a wall of five bullets in front of you is almost essential.

You can tell of course, that this is almost your generic shoot-'em-up. Lots of weapons and energy pods to collect, waves of aliens to beat, and, of course, the big mummy alien at the end of each level. Despite the wide range of shoot-'em-ups that exist for all you Speccy fans out there, this one does leave a pleasant taste in the mouth. If you're not the jaded old gamer with a hundred games similar in your cupboard, then pick this one up. It won't blow your socks off, but you could do oh so much worse.

Spectrum Cassette: £7.95

IN THE CROSSFIRE

The sequel to Sidewize, Crosswize follows in the tradition of the Nemesis games as another vertically scrolling, all action shoot-'em-up. Programmed by Steve Wetherill with the graphics by Colin Grunes, part of the Odin team whose previous work includes Heartland, Nodes and Arc Of Yesod as well as Robin Of The Wood (which added another string to their bow).

The planet Luna is under alien attack and you are charged with the task of saving its populace. Off you go, equipped with a jetpack, over the three horizontally-scrolling levels of planet surface. The landscape is deadly to the touch as are the aliens who move round in formation, firing missiles before leaving the screen as fast as they can. Some eject from holes while others adopt Delta-type formations, requiring multiple hits before exploding. A real mother of an alien awaits at the end-of-level for those skillful enough to survive long enough to meet it.

Weapon icons can be collected to give: further laser fire, bullets, spray fire, a limited shield or a smart bomb. Each weapon has finite power and when depleted, the next most powerful weapon is activated unless the relevant replenishment icon is collected. Limited energy slows you down as it drains, resulting in loss of a life when zero is reached.

Although offering nothing new over games of the Delta ilk, Crosswize is an 8-bit arcade blaster of formidable proportions, consisting of intense action and a high level of difficulty. Graphics are first class, the planet landscapes are varied and full of detail - if a little bland - and the overall air is one of quality. The planet landscapes take up a lot of the screen, which restricts play, and coupled with the incredible speed and minimal warning with which aliens appear, makes Crosswize a difficult game. Progress through practice is possible, but with virtually no margin for error it can get frustrating very quickly - suitable for masochists or ultra-good arcade game players only.