Label: Ultimate
Author: In-house
Price: £9.99
Memory: 48K
Reviewer: Jerry Muir

By the time of Atic Atac, Ultimate was well on its way to fame. It's the first on Unbelievable Ultimate II. Much imitated, it's a giant maze game, set in a haunted house, with lots to pick up. Added interest comes from your ability to choose different types of hero.

Sabre Wulf has also inspired programmers. This time the maze is a series of jungle passages, inhabited by a variety of foes, some of which are best avoided. It's a huge game and possesses the Ultimate trademarks of great graphics and good humour.

Sabre Man crops up again in Underwurlde, which even improves on his first outing. Here he's seen sideways and he runs and bounces about a series of rooms and caves, swings on ropes and floats on hot air bubbles.

Of all the Ultimate games, Alien 8 was the one that had most influence on the programming world. This was the game that introduced the solid 3D view, seen from above.

Everything from Sweevo's World to Batman owes a debt to the antics of this little android, and even if some of the techniques used here have been refined since, the game's still got a lot of ingenious puzzles.

On the whole Ultimate in its hay-day did get it right, time after time. With four games for a tenner, you can't grumble if you want fast action and undemanding scenarios.

U.S. GOLD'S LATEST COMPILATION IS AN ULTIMATE GREATEST HITS COLLECTION.

U.S. Gold/Ultimate
£9.99

This is the second of the two compilations of Ultimate games released by U.S. Gold, and by far the better of the two. Ultimate almost singlehandedly pioneered the arcade adventure hybrid which has now become so widespread, and the four titles on this compilation read like a history of the genre.

Side one of the tape kicks off with Atic Atac, the first real arcade adventure, and the game which introduced that mythical hero, The Sabreman, to the gamesplaying public.

You have to search the five floors of a castle in search of the Golden Key. Along the way you have to map the layout of each floor and find the objects that you'll need to overcome various creatures (such as the Frankenstein monster). Atic Atac was also one of the first games to attempt some sort of 3D graphics by giving an overhead plan view of the rooms and objects. This game, like all the others on this compilation, gave birth to a great horde of imitations, games which were graphically similar but which often lacked the addictiveness of the originals. Because of this, Atic Atac may well seem like a familiar style of budget game to people who didn't catch it the first time around, but you shouldn't underestimate its addictiveness even if the format of the game now seems a little dated.

Next on side one is Sabre Wulf. Each time Ultimate produced a good game this was often followed by disappointment if their next game wasn't a huge improvement on its predecessor, and this was the case when Sabre Wulf followed Atic Atac. Both games were very similar except that the rooms in Atic Atac were replaced by a mazelike path through a jungle. However, games which look a lot like Sabre Wulf are still being produced, which gives you an indication of how good it was at the time.

UNDERWURLDE

Flipping over the tape you first load up Underwurlde. Now this really was an influential game: Nodes of Yesod, Starquake and Tremor are all among the hordes of games that have a more than passing resemblance to Underwurlde. Faced with the task of finding your way out of the underworld, you have to find the weapons and magical gems which are scattered around the caverns and which you'll need if you're to guide the Sabreman past the monsters that stand in your way, For the first time Ultimate began to introduce series of obstacles that needed to be manoeuvred past (floating gas bubbles and swinging ropes), and gave the Sabreman the ability to jump so that the game involved more than just shooting monsters and collecting objects. Now you had to stop and think about where you were going and how to get there, and this added an extra element of difficulty to the game that helped make it even more addictive.

At this point you'd expect the fourth and final game to be Knight Lore, which was the next game that Ultimate produced as well as being the fourth in the Sabre Man sequence (and my personal all-time favourite). Unfortunately Knight Lore has already been included on another compilation, so this one jumps forward to Alien 8, the game which came directly after Knight Lore.

Alien 8 is the robot which you control in an attempt to save a space ship from plunging into a star. Aboard the craft are the records and last survivors of a dying planet who put themselves into cryogenic suspension while their ship sought out a new home world. But of course completing your task involves getting past the strange creatures which populate the ship, and finding your way through the deadly traps which occupy the cryogenic chambers.

By the time they produced Alien 8, Ultimale's reputation was at its height, With its two most recent games they had perfected a style of 3D graphics that were revolutionary, and which has more or less become adopted as the 'standard' way of presenting 3D graphics: Movie, Batman, Sweevo's World, Nexus, Prodigy and many other games are simply variations on the format that Ultimate pioneered, and Alien 8 has still to be bettered in its combination of problem solving, difficult obstacles, and detailed graphics.

Sadly, Ultimate never really progressed from this point and while they've produced some good games since they've been unable to get back to the peak that they reached with the games on this collection. Because these games were so influential, people who have only gotten into computing in the last couple of years are likely to be more familiar with the large number of games that have copied Ultimates originals, but these games are still among the best of their various types, so this compilation is worth getting if you're at all interested in arcade/adventures.