Battling in the bloodstream

Producer: Cascade
Miniature Money: £9.95 cass
Author: Data Design Systems: Stewart Green, S.W. Scott, Nigel Pritchard, Alan Z. Jones

Prepare yourself for a fantastic voyage. You've volunteered to undertake a dangerous mission inside Nick Roberts's stomach! With Raquel Welch by your side, you must guide a microscopic ship through places where only 9-inch pizzas have ventured before.

The reason behind this strange mission is that Nick, an expert at poking games, recently decided to do a similar thing to himself. He implanted raw DNA (a kind of groovy acid) and a growth accelerator into his own brain, in a bid to improve his intelligence. Unfortunately, the experiment failed, and left the Tips man with a rapidly-expanding noddlebox (no wonder he's been getting big-headed!).

Before Nick's head explodes, you must reach his brain and kill the implant with the help of a growth inhibitor, broken into six parts, scattered around his body. While doing battle with Nick's natural defences, you must find keys to enable you to pass through blood vessels to other horizontally-scrolling body parts.

While floating around in someone else's body doesn't appeal to me a great deal, this game is initially quite playable. Control of the craft is a bit suspect though: even with the speed-up feature active, it moves very much like a drunken tortoise. Despite its unusual setting, DNA Warrior is another unexceptional shoot-'em-up.

MARK [56%]

THE ESSENTIALS
Joysticks: Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: not bad, if a mite dull
Sound: blip, blip, blip...

DNA Warrior seems like a fairly well-programmed beast, but unfortunately its addictiveness is sorely marred by one or two frustrating factors. The ship-turning procedure can be absolutely maddening - it takes one whole screen-width to turn around! This very nearly wrecks the enjoyment of the game, because the ship often flies all around the screen by accident, usually ending in the loss of a life! The graphics are fine, but the action is very slow: unlike most similar shoot-'em-ups, it doesn't romp along at a fast rate - instead, it crawls! DNA Warrior isn't the sort of game likely to appeal to blast freaks - it's too frustrating to be addictive, and too slow to be particularly playable.
MARK [50%]

Aartronic
£9.99
Reviewer: Marcus Berkmann

This one looked promising. The company I had never heard of, but the packaging was pretty impressive, and the screenshots (Atari ST, natch) gave the impression of a really spanky new shoot 'em up.

Ah, but what a disappointment. Aartronic only turns out to be the latest new label from Cascade, and the game to be distressingly mediocre.

The idea's quite neat - a rip-off, essentially, of the film Innerspace, which was itself a rip-off of a really silly sixties movies called Fantastic Journey, starring the young Raquel Welch (yum). You, you poor sap, have been miniaturized, along with your ship and injected into the bloodstream of some barmpot professor who has been experimenting on himself with pure DNA. In fact the plot's quite ingenious, particularly in the maze-like way it all boils down to a simple shoot 'em up.

Unfortunately the same care has not been lavished on the game itself. Like every shooter since Nemesis, this one involves a sideways scrolling screen, lots of things coming at you, and the ability to get extra weapons if you polish off an entire wave of nasties. But even though others in this genre have been lightning fast, with amazing backgrounds and brilliantly zappy nasties, DNA Warrior somehow manages to be incredibly slow, dull to look at and initially very confusing.

You start by moving at a very leisurely pace along what appears to be an artery (it's red - there's no other clue). Nasties come at you in familiar formations, but just as you're getting the hang of it, they stop. In fact everything stops when you reach what appears to be the end of the artery, and you sit there and wait, sometimes for up to five minutes, for your craft to turn around and go back. (Clearly some sort of bug is at work here). On the way back boulders come flying at you, which seems a little strange, but then perhaps the Prof is a vegetarian and eats loads of rye bread, with all the healthy sand and soil that the stuff seems to contain. Anyway, this part is the most fun, even though you're never to clear why you're doing it.

After half an hour or so of this, you notice that there's a crater down below, and you wander down to it. To your initial surprise and pleasure (soon followed by excruciating boredom) you see that there's another artery down there, with more nasties, and at the end, a key, which needs to be picked up. The boredom hits you when you realise that this artery's almost exactly like the first, and the only way out is the way back.

There are other backgrounds - most looking so like alien cities that you suspect that this originally started out as a completely different game. But after wrestling with it for an hour and a half I was bored.

In fact DNA Warrior does have the seeds of a decent game hidden somewhere in its unchallenging and drab exterior, but you have to search mighty hard to find them. The Speccy market is still going strong, years after everyone went to the funeral, but games like this do little for its life expectancy. Don't encourage them.

Label: Atrtonic
Author: In-house
Price: £8.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Jim Douglas

There should be a law against this sort of thing. To state, as Artronic do, that DNA Warrior has "excellent graphics" is simply a lie. It's got hopeless graphics. Fortunately, the rest of it isn't as bad. Well, not quite as bad.

The plot, similar to a few games at the moment, centres around the mad antics of a brilliant scientist, who, so intent on learning more and more in his advancing years, goes to unnatural lengths to enhance the process. Obviously, had God wanted us to have two brains, he would have given them to us, and to the scientist's dabblings go horribly wrong and endanger the boffin's life. Your mission is to enter the man's body in microscopic form, zoom around the blood stream and deconstruct all the growth from the implant, thus saving the scientist's brain from being overrun.

DNA Warrior is, at first glance, is a rather pale imitation of R-Type. It's not quite as simple as that though. True, the screen scrolls and a variety of aliens appear to shoot and there are extra weapons to collect, but there are differences too large to ignore.

Once you've travelled a certain distance in one direction, you'll find an exit to the next level. You'll need a key to get through these. The further into the body you get, the more difficult it is to find the correct key for the door.

The graphics are poor and while the scrolling (bi-directional) is perfectly fine, your ship moves in a continual series of jerks. Your fire rate is dreadful and even the Rapid Fire icon had little effect. The weapons options work a la Slap Fight - you collect tokens, each of which allows a more sophisticated add-on. Hitting FIRE will activate the option.

Aliens come at you in uninteresting swirly patterns that have all been seen before. Since your rate of fire is so hopeless it's almost impossible to kill the aliens quickly enough in order to earn another token.

So why don't I hate DNA Warrior completely? Well, there are some nice touches. Once you've headed in one direction and decide to turn around, the ship glides back and turns around in a most satisfactory manner. On the way back through a level - in search of the elusive key or exit - asteroids (well, corpuscles) fly past, smashing into you and draining your energy.

These bits are nice touches, although the overall feeling I have is that DNA Warrior is pretty disappointing. There just isn't any point in trying to reproduce the feel and play of R-Type unless you can beat it. DNA Warrior falls a long way short.

Spectrum 48/128 Cassette: £9.99
Commodore 64/128 Cassette: £9.99, Diskette: £14.99
Amiga: £19.99

THE MAN WHOSE HEAD EXPLODED

Professor Szymanski is a brilliant but power-crazed man. A Nobel Prize in genetics was not enough for him, and in an incredible experiment he injected DNA and a growth accelerator into his brain, thinking this would increase his memory potential and intelligence quotient tremendously. Now he is on the brink of death.

Szymanski is in a coma and his brain is expanding to dangerous proportions. A growth inhibitor cannot reach the affected area - his natural defences have mutated too far - so a miniaturised one-man submarine must be piloted to the spot. So far so Azimov and Steven Spielberg et al...

The Professor has a number of artificial limbs and organs, so the various sprites which attack the would-be body voyager include both biological and mechanical mutants. Your ship's rather tame laser cannon and slightly cumbersome handling can be exchanged for better add-on systems by collecting plasma spheres.

In the crowded world of shoot-'em-ups, DNA Warrior's originality lies in its horizontal two-way scrolling and selectable exit levels which allow a choice of route to the brain. This isn't much use if the game is essentially lacking in guts, and unfortunately, it is.

THE COMPLETE YS GUIDE TO SHOOT-'EM-UPS PART 1

Where'd we all be without shoot-'em-ups, eh, Spec-chums? Well, we'd all have much smaller games collections, that's for sure! Join MATT BIELBY for an epic blast through nearly a decade of firepowered Spec-fun...

Blimey! The complete guide to shoot-'em-ups, eh? A bit of a mammoth task you might be thinking (and you'd be blooming right! It's taken me absolutely ages!). It's so blinking gigantic in fact that we've had to split it in two to save the whole ish from being packed to the gills with ancient shooty-shooty games and very little else!

So how's it all going to work? Well, this issue we spotlight those hundreds of games where you control a little spaceship, aeroplane or what have you, while next time round we'll be wibbling on for ages about those blasters where you command a man, creature or robot - things like Operation Wolf, Gryzor, Robocop (the list is endless, I'm sorry to say). Yes, I know it's a bit of an arbitrary way to divide the whole subject up in two, but it's the best I could come up.

Anyway, if you 're all ready, let's arm the missiles, oil the cannons, buckle our seatbelts and go kick some alien ass! (Or something.)

SO WHAT EXACTLY MAKES A SHOOT-'EM-UP A SHOOT-'EM-UP?

Well, at the risk of stating the obvious, it's a game where simple reaction times count for (almost) everything, and the actual shooting of various baddies constitutes the major part of the gameplay. It's just about the oldest form of computer game going (Space Invaders was pure shoot-'em-up, for instance), short of mad Victorian chappies crouching down inside big wooden cabinets and pretending to be chess machines. It's one of the most enduring forms too - hardly an issue of YS goes by when we don't review at least a couple of newies, and it's the rare arcade-style game (sports sims and puzzlers excepted) that doesn't include at least a small shoot-'em-up element in there somewhere as part of the gameplay.

But back to the case in hand. What we're talking about here are the pure shoot-'em-ups - games where the wiping out of waves of aliens or other baddies is everything (though let's be fair, the violence in most of these is very abstract and minimal). They easily divide into four major types, depending on how you view the action. And you can read all about them over the page.

THE FIRST EVER SHOOT-'EM-UP

Goodness knows - Space Invaders is the obvious answer, but most of the other early arcade games were shoot-'em-ups too - Defender, Asteroids, Galaxian and the rest. To find out what made it onto the Speccy first, well, we'll have to look back in the vaults and see what we come up with, shan't we?

Right, here we are with the very first issue of Your Spectrum (later to evolve into Your Sinclair), cover date January 1984. Flick to the review section and we have two Space invaders-type games, both from long-forgotten Anirog Software - Galactic Abductor and Missile Defence. The second issue (Feb 84. believe it or not) brings us such delights as Xark (Contrast Software), a Defender-type game and Alien Swoop (a Galaxians rip-off), while in issue three had Bug Byte's Cavern Fighter (a tunnel-based jobbie, like an early version of R-Type).

Hmm. Let's go back a bit further, shall we? All the early computer games mags were listings based (ie had lots of crap Basic games printed out line by line over oodles of pages, as if Program Pitstop had run rampant over the whole mag!) so we might find something in there. Believe it or not find something in there. Believe it or not, I have the very first issue of the very first computer games mag in the country sitting right here on my desk, cover-dated November 1981. There's only one Sinclair game in here (for a ZX80 or 81 - a Speccy forerunner - and taking up a whole 2K!). It's called City Bomb, and it's a sort of shoot-'em-up. Apparently you're in a plane at the top of the screen and have to bomb the city beneath you, flattening out a landing strip so you can put down safely. Thrilling stuff, eh? As for commercially available stuff, it's all lost a bit too far back in the mists of time to be sure. Still, shoot-'em-ups started emerging for the Speccy pretty soon after the machine came out, certainly by the end of '82. Throughout 83 people like Quicksilva and Bug Byte were churning out Space Invaders, Asteroids and Scramble clones advertised as 'being in 100% machine code and in colour' too, so perhaps it was one of those. Exciting stuff, eh?

RATINGS

In the great YS Guide To... tradition, for a one-off-only special occasion we've adapted our normal rating system to accommodate the shoot-'em-up theme. Here's how they work...

Alien-Death-Scum-From-Hell Factor
Are there oodles of inventive, nasty and extremely difficult-to-kill baddies all over the place (including the biggest, meanest muthas ever at the end of each level) or do you end up fighting a fleet of Trebor Mints?

Shopability
Are there oodles and oodles of well-thought-out and spectacular weapons available to pick up and use, or do you have to make do with the same crap little peashooter throughout the game?

Copycat Factor
Unusually, the lower the score the better here. Basically, is this exactly the same as every other shoot-'em-up ever (in which case it'll get a high score for being chronically unoriginal) or does it have something innovative and special about it to set it apart from the crowd?

Visibility Factor
Does everything make a degree of sense in Speccyvision, or is it all a jumbled mass of pixels, with bullets, missiles and even little spaceships winking in and out of view willy-nilly?

DNA Warrior
Aartronic

Here, I'm afraid, we have a representative from the ranks of what we loosely term 'crap shoot-'em-ups'. Note little white tadpole baddies, the little white spaceship, the total lack of anything of any interest at all really. Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.