Producer: C.C.I.
Memory Required: 16K
Retail Price: £5.00
Language: Machine code

Based on an old arcade game, Ed-On presents you with a series of concentric squares, representing four Streets' with four compass point crossovers. The streets are lined with dots, and you must drive your car around in one direction, collecting all the dots. The computer controls another vehicle, which travels in the opposite direction and which you must avoid. At points in the game flags appear and add bonus points if collected. On clearing a screen you then face the task over again with two enemy cars, and so on.

The four directional keys allow you to speed up or slow down, as well as change lanes to avoid the enemy cars. In the centre box your lives appear as well as a simple bar indicator for speed. The enemy cars have a fixed speed of travel, and change lanes whenever they feel like it.

COMMENTS

Control keys: Q/A up/down, C/B left/right
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard play: very responsive although the dual-purpose takes some getting used to
Use of colour: poor
Graphics: block movement, simple and not very big
Sound: average
Skill levels: progressive
Lives: 5

The enemy cars tend to home in on your lane, which makes the game very fast and fairly challenging, especially when there are two or more cars in play. The graphics are simple and it ends up being just another average game.

Once loaded, there are a good set of instructions. The idea is simple but it is a quite difficult game to play as the computer-controlled cars seem very intelligent. The biggest disadvantage of this game is that the keys are dual-purpose, that is, they can be used to increase or decrease your speed as well as move the car up/down or left/right. This does tend to get confusing. Not a very interesting game on the whole but it might appeal to some.

Ed-On is very similar to Arcade's first game, Gridrun, with the addition of acceleration and braking. The graphics are small and the use of colour is pretty drab. A simple idea and quite hard to play but it doesn't get very far and palls quite quickly.

Memory: Any Spectrum
Price: £5.95
Joystick: Kempston

In these days of perspective graphics and complex simulations which tax the mind as well as the joystick fingers, a game like Ed-On, from Add-On Electronics, is a little disappointing.

It is billed as a car racing game in which the player steers his vehicle round a circuit accelerating and decelerating.

The object is to collect the maximum amount of dots while changing lanes to avoid the other car on the circuit. The other machine will do its best to collide with the player's. The circuit is a grid-maze and the vehicles are small UDG symbols. Steering is by the keyboard or you may use a Kempston joystick.

Five lives are allowed in each game. The difficulty increases as you become more successful and more opposing cars will appear after the first screen, making the action tougher and more dangerous - a kind of motorised Pacman, in fact.

It is no state-of-the-art game and the graphic display offers little excitement. The program is fast, however, and the task set is difficult given this speed. At times it seemed as if the computer was cheating, as the enemy car would tend to leap across sections to meet the other.

Steering is easiest with a joystick, though the keyboard controls are simple and well-placed. Manual dexterity and reaction speed are the only qualities needed.

Even if that is all you want from a computer game, there are more interesting games available and it had no really addictive pull to it. All in all, an average program with nothing to raise it above so many others.