Tengen Domark/Consult
£9.99/£14.99

Imagine 1942 with the planes replaced by dragons and other such mythical creatures, and you've got Dragon Spirit in a nutshell.

The gorgeous and mightily bedable Princess Alicia has been kidnapped by the evil demon Zawell. Being one of the multitude of chappies wanting to get to know her a little better, you get yourself changed into a dragon, and set off after her.

Heading off along the vertically scrolling backdrops of prehistoric lands, waves of Zawell's evil creatures come in for the attack.

Starting off with simple fire power, you can accumulate loads more by bombing eggs and collecting the power icons which fly down the screen. Icons provide extra heads, (thereby increasing the number of flames shot at any one time) and bigger flames which can make you pretty invincible.

Once all his prehistoric minions are killed, the moment comes for you to take on the evil demon Zawell. A challenge Indeed! Dragon Spirit is very difficult. Like a lot of other games of this type, the monochrome screen display makes it hard to see what's being shot at you, and consequently, there's a lot of unexplained deaths. Still, if you can adjust the telly so that you can almost see what's happening, then it's quite fun.

A more important negative though, is the problem that vertical scrolling shoot 'em ups have been around for far too long as it is, and something more than a change of sprites is needed to revitalise the genre.

MIKE [65%]

Dragon Spirit's conversion to the Spectrum has worked really well. The game has kept all it's slick presentation, graphic elegance, and still has brilliant sound. The only trouble is that it's really hard to play. You may think you're the expert at shoot 'em up games, but you haven't seen this yet! The idea of playing a dragon that can collect extra heads, powers and a whole host of other interesting things is brilliant and the presentation simply puts other games to shame. Of course the concept of having a main character, be it a space ship or dragon, scrolling over a detailed landscape shooting things isn't new, but you can't seem to get enough of it! If you think you're up to a challenge then Dragon Spirit maybe for you.
NICK [73%]

Tengen (Domark)
£9.99 cass/£14.99 disk
Reviewer: Matt Bielby

Hmm. Vertically scrolling shoot 'em ups - you don't get many to the pound on the Speccy, do you? Thinking back, there's only been Xenon this year worth mentioning - well, that and Gemini Wing I suppose. (Quickly remembers Gemini Wing.) Nope, I was right the first time.

So I wasn't really holding out too much hope for Dragon Spirit. Domark's Tengen conversions have been a bit up and down in quality so far, and since APB wasn't too bad this month I thought we might be due a crap one. After all, vertical strollers are traditionally hampered by a couple of hard-to-avoid faults like a small play area and confusing backdrops (see box off) which don't help.

Here we are then, having loaded up Dragon Spirit, and is it crap? Well, no, it's not actually. There's a big block of icons and a picture of a dragon on one side, as expected, but they've managed to turn the play area into a portrait shape without really eating up too much of the screen. At the bottom you've got the main sprite, and, well, you're going to have a game called Dragon Spirit you may as well have a good dragon.

This one's a fine specimen. Good and big, he's also animated rather nicely. As he flies along his wings flap and his body moves from side to side in, erm, dragon-like fashion. Swing him to left or right and his head moves and you can see he's actually steering with his tail. Nice one.

Anyone who's played this type of game before will know it's just a case of blasting the waves of baddies that come at you down the screen, destroying the fixed gun emplacements and battling big end-of-level monsters. It's all done quite neatly and turns out to be very hard - though Domark assures us it's not as bad as the coin-op, which was murder!

Most of the baddies are suitably lizard-like, from the funny icon things that turn into (very fast moving) pterodactyl-types, through the ground-based diplodocuses you can bomb (they don't just wink out of existence, they turn into charred skeletons) to the bullet-firing Loch Ness Monsters.

The bombing process is a bit tricky though. If you're playing on a keyboard, fine, but with a joystick you have to reach over awkwardly to the space bar with your elbow to try to get the ground-based baddies, 'cos the fire button only works your air-to-air prey breath. Basically without the bombs you're scuppered 'cos there are so many ground-based baddies - my solution was to balance Jackie's pitta breads on the space bar to get it firing constantly. Maybe you'll come up with a better idea.

Otherwise, the game is pretty much as you'd expect. There are eight progressively difficult levels, and various add-on weapons to collect too, only in this case they increase the amount of firepower you have literally (you are a dragon aver all) by adding to the number of heads you've got. Get the full set (three) and you're really cookin'.

And there you have it. A very respectable, very tricky progressive scroller. Apart from the annoying bomb control (I would have preferred the joystick fire button to operate both weapons at once) it's pretty hard to find serious fault with it. Much to my surprise, Dragon Spirit really won me over.

REPLAY

In an effort not to appear Dutch, we've got hold of the brightest reviewers and the newest games. And it's all for you!

The Hit Squad
£3.99
Reviewer: Rich Pelley

Only the other day I was trying to work out how many shoot-'em-ups featuring dragons I've seen and I came up with three - Thalmus (ancient), ST Dragon and Dragon Breed. A few days later, yesterday in fact, whilst on the toilet I wondered "what made them so good?" Whilst on the loo later that day I realised that it was because you actually used parts of the dragon to help you - its firey breath to flame baddies, its tail to curl around you and protect you or to whip nasties with.

So imagine my surprise when Dragon Spirit popped through my door for reviewing. I immediately loaded it up, had a few goes, sat on the lav for inspiration, and came up with this analysis.

Dragon Spirit isn't as successful as all the other games with dragons in 'cos the dragon has nothing to do with the game. You simply scroll vertically up the screen, shooting other dragon-related things whilst flying over the sort of scenery you'd imagine dragons to fly over. In the arcade, the graphics would probably make the game look quite innovative, but here it looks identical to about fifty other shoot-'em-ups including Flying Shark and Gemini Wing, the only major difference is the redefined graphics. Fans of this sort of thing can't go wrong 'cos the game's got some neat touches and plenty of power-ups. But all in all Dragon Breed gets neatly filed away in the box at the corner of the shed marked 'vertically scrolling shoot-'em-ups that are all the same', where one suspect's it will stay for some time. Hardly the thinking man's shoot-'em-up.

Label: Domark
Author: in house
Price: Cass £9.99, Disc £14.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: Sinclair, Kempston, Keyboard
Reviewer: Garth Sumpter

Have you ever given thought to the trials and tribulations of a dragon? It's not particularly easy. Finding a parking space in the morning, never being able to get a seat on the train and having to fight the constant battle with the most rip-roaring case of bad breath and finally, of course, being run down to the local police station every time even the most vaguely virginal princess goes missing.

Of course, it does have its advantages. Take Dragon Spirit, the latest game from Domark, in it you're transformed into a mighty dragon and sent forth on a mission to rescue the kidnapped Princess Alicia from the clutches of the evil demon serpent Zawell.

So, you've been miraculously transformed into a dragon, been briefed and have decided to put mummy dragion's packed lunch in foil because the cling film just kept on melting, and you're ready to go. Bit waffly.

There are eight levels of action that you have to negotiate as you wing towards your goal. The going isn't easy, however, as Zawell is not a good snake and had sent his minions to stop you in your quest. They attack by land, sea and air shooting little balls of pure evil, well half evil as you can take up to two hits before losing a life.

In the air a carefully aimed fireball can be devastating, but the ground targets can only be hit with bombs thoughtfully provided at no extra cost. Littered on the ground are the occasional egg which, when bombed, release various goodies to aid your cause. Increase firepower, homing shots, extra lives, shields and a quick shrink in size, useful for those tricky bits, can all be collected but beware of the skulls head - this cancels all of the benefits of any goodies that you may have picked up.

At the end of each level you'll find a beastie which has to be disposed of before you can gain access to the next level.

What about the gameplay, I hear you cry. Well it's pretty good with the dragon moving slowly, but oh so gracefully across the vertically scrolling landscape in all directions. The scenery changes on each successive level to include sea, swamp, desert and coastal headland with each territory havin a an appropriate guardian to the next level. Watch out for the bone dragon, you must shoot him in the heart to destroy him, and the weird looking plant which can only be bested by bombing its egglike babies.

Take care in the desert section as bombs are coughed from the very bowels of the earth and bombing them offers no respite.

It's a good game and one of the better conversions from a coin-op, which is something that we will be watching Domark for in the future especially as they have a three year contract with Atari's arcade company Tengen to convert suitable games.

Dragon Spirit is a good product with lasting appeal and good graphics and is worthy of a little shelf space in your games cupboard.

Label: Hit Squad
Memory: 48K/128K
Price: £3.99
Reviewer: Garth Sumpter

Dragon Spirit first came to our Speccy screens only a couple of years ago as a Tengen coin op conversion. And now it's back!

Yes, belching fire with consideration for the greenhouse effect, you control a large Dragon-shaped thingy as it makes its way up the screen, coughing a fiery death to all comers. And come they all do too! To beat them our fiery friend must collect odd egg shaped power-ups which litter the ground. Use his lethal breath to fry these eggs (yum yum), or drop a rock on them in a tally-ho chaps, yolks, bandits at one o'clock sort of move. Once cracked the eggs release a power up which floats down the screen for our reptilian arsonist to pick up. He'll then grow an extra head (it's no wonder he hasn't any friends with this sort of behaviour) and his breath weapon becomes even more methane ridden than before, turning his foes into toast and his teeth into red hot razors of death, while leaving his bum, well, largely redundant.

The big sprite moves smoothly and whilst the backgrounds on later levels get a little complicated, the graphics are sharp and carefully colourful.

Does Domark's Dragon do justice to the coin-op?

Dragon Spirit is a relatively obscure and very tough coin-op which takes the vertically scrolling shoot 'em up theme into the realms of fantasy.

Eight completely different levels lie ahead of you, populated by unique opponents - all of whom will reduce your life-bar by one unit. Lose three units and you forfeit a life. At the end of each stage there's a fairly typical confrontation with a pretty awesome enemy which is very tough to kill.

Your basic weaponry consists of limitless bombs and the ability to spit fire-gobbets, but this ammunition can be enhanced by bombing eggs on the ground. Blue eggs give you an extra head, and red ones give you an extra power unit; eventually, you can work your way up to a powerful flame-thrower.

Other enhancements come from killing flashing enemies. These include extra points, shields, mega-flame, multi-directional fire, homing flames and speed-ups.

In the end, Dragon Spirit is just a standard vertically scrolling shoot 'em up, but using a dragon as the main character rather than a fighter plane or spacecraft is a nice touch. All versions are characterised by poor sound effects, and that's the only real let-down. Domark's conversions contain all the features of the original coin-op and if you liked that, you should look at this.

Reviewer: Gordon Houghton

RELEASE BOX
Atari ST, £19.99dk, Out Now
Amiga, £19.99dk, Out Now
Spectrum, £9.99cs, £14.99dk, Out Now
Amstrad, £9.99cs, £14.99dk, Imminent
C64/128, £9.99cs, £12.99dk, Imminent
IBM PC, £24.99dk, Imminent

Predicted Interest Curve

1 min: 70/100
1 hour: 75/100
1 day: 80/100
1 week: 75/100
1 month: 70/100
1 year: 55/100

Domark
ST, Spectrum
Spectrum £9.99, Atari ST £19.99

Domark's latest Tengen conversion offers a new twist on the vertically scrolling shoot 'em up theme. Instead of flying a space ship against the massed army of some exotic alien nation, you take control of a huge blue dragon on a mission to rescue a Princess who has been captured by a big, evil monster This requires you to fly through eight levels of action and lay waste to anything that gets in your way.

The landscapes are varied, and range from volcanic ranges through snowscapes to deep valleys. Each one is packed with hordes of flying creatures and mutant foliage which spit fireballs at your dragon. The dragon can defend itself by gobbing fireballs at anything in the air and blue firebombs earthwards to burn things on the ground. And there are plenty of targets to torch!

To help prolong your dragon life, there are also power-up icons to collect. These are released when an egg is firebombed, and the icon inside can give an extra head (up to three), shrink your dragon (makes you a lot harder to hit), give extra shot power, full flame or homing missiles, a temporary shield, earthquake power (destroys all ground objects), extra points or extra lives. A neat collection, really.

At the end of each level is (surprise, surprise) a giant guardian who must be destroyed. These range from dinosaurs to maniacal flowers, and put up a tough fight, with missiles flying from all angles! If you destroy the baddie at the end of the eighth level, the Princess is rescued and you can get your just rewards...

The Spectrum conversion contains all the elements of the original coin-op, and there's plenty of action for blasting fans to get their teeth into.

The ST version boasts similar graphics and playability to the arcade original, and although the action is tough. It's highly addictive and is recommended to shoot 'en, up fans.

Spectrum 48/128 Cassette: £9.99, Diskette: £14.99
Amstrad CPC Cassette: £9.99, Diskette: £14.99

GETTING INTO LASER BREATH

This sword and sorcery jaunt has already graced the illustrious pages of this magazine, on Japanese wonder machine, the PC Engine (TGM017, 65%). As Domark are set to release the home computer conversions, let's look briefly at plot and gameplay, shall we...?

It's the standard damsel-in-distress yarn: the fair Princess Alicia has been kidnapped by nasty dragon Zawell. By a happy coincidence, royal soldier Amul has the pretty damn amazing ability to transform himself into a blue dragon, and so sets off to rescue her. You are that vast, horned, flying reptile.

Zawell's army of beasts - generally avians but some creatures fire up from the ground - attack constantly through the vertically-scrolling levels, but they can be dealt with by breathing fire (predictably) and dropping bombs (though quite how they're produced and where they're released from is a mystery best left uninvestigated, methinks). Your power can be increased by collecting eggs, which increase breath-strength (a bit like garlic) or add up to two extra heads to your scaly body.

Although cliched for an arcade adventure, the scenario is quite novel for a shoot-'em-up but unfortunately that can't be said for any other element of Dragon Spirit. Few add-ons - a simple power-up and two or three-way fire (literally!) - don't help the over-used, over-familiar vertical blaster, and unspectacular adversaries and attack waves mean this will disappear with little trace as so many shoot-'em-ups have before.

As a conversion. Dragon Spirit is fairly accurate, but the coin-op was middle-of-the-road to begin with, so there was never much hope. Zawell, Domark, that's the way it goes.

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?

Dragon Spirit
Tengen (Domark)

A slightly different tack here - instead of planes or spaceships, this conversion featured a giant dragon, with extra fire-breathing heads as power-ups. It worked quite well really - there was a nice flapping movement to the main sprite and everything was so big there was little danger of the "disappearing bullet" syndrome. Pity about the chunk of screen wasted to make the play area a vertically scrolling shape though.