RASPBERRY SEASON

It's quite appropriate that the season for raspberries is almost upon us because this month I have a number of them to hand out. The loudest must go to a game that's grandly called Superpower - The Final Strategy.

Foisted upon the unsuspecting public by Howard Marketing, it is without doubt a strong contender for the coveted Worst Game Of All Time award.

The principal elements the game are highly derivative. There are 24 countries, each of which has different numbers factories, armies, missiles and shelters. The aim is to conquer the lot.

Ex-readers of the mourned Personal Computer Games magazine will be familiar with this scenario - it's the basis of PCG's Final Conflict, their multi-player postal game.

In Superpower, however, all the subtleties Final Conflict have been lost. With an unfailing knack for tedium, the designer of Superpower has even restricted the orders you can give to one country per turn.

Since the orders you can give are simple - build armies, missiles, shelters, factories or attack a neighbour (but only one of these) - the player is faced with making a series of Noddy choices.

Although Final Conflict's options per country were equally simple, the fact that you had to give orders for all your countries in a single turn presented the player with true strategic choices, for each combination orders would have a complex effect.

Apart from all this, the presentation of the game is awful. The continent you are supposed to conquer is a 4x6 rectangle of squares and - you've guessed it - each country is a square. No attempt has been made at graphic frills - a nice little picture of a missile or factory for example. It's all bare words and numbers. Input of orders is equally annoying; if you make an illegal order, the computer doesn't bother to tell you, it just waits dumbly for you to try again.

I do wish people like Howard Marketing would seek some professional or at least knowledgeable advice before wasting a lot of time, money and effort trying to promote a disaster.

What's worse, they expect Spectrum owners to cough up £4.95 for something that would have been more entertaining if it had remained a blank cassette!