Audiogenic
£10.99/£14.99

It's no easy life being a bug exterminator, but utmost loathing of creepy crawlies should give you the determination to succeed in Audiogenic's latest: seven levels, each one a houses, filled with more bugs than you could swing a fly swatter at!

Each house consists of five areas: a bathroom, a basement, a garage, a kitchen, a bedroom and an attic. Your objective is to move from room to roam swatting the horrid things that lurk there. An optional two player mode has been included if you feel you need moral support.

Each exterminator takes control of a disembodied hand which can perform several tasks. You can hire a gun, pound the insects to pieces or grab and attempt to squash them, The game is viewed vertically with the current room stretching up the screen, your attackers zooming down at a vast rate of knots. These take on many guises and include wasps, spiders, rats, frogs and mosquitoes.

Along the bottom of the screen is a list of rooms; still unvisited: the idea (apart from killing bugs) is to squash the ground based creatures on one lane of tiles. Each death turns one tile black and when they're all the same colour you move to the room indicated. Erm... it's easier to play than explain.

Energy is lost through; contact with the creatures, but juice bottles occasionally appear to lop you up: also watch out for the secret warp that takes you to the next house.

Exterminator is based on an arcade coin-op: I've seen it and it looks well weird... very much like the computer conversion. Graphics have been digitised from the arcade parent, and are very detailed. The going is tough. While the first few rooms are fairly easy to clear, by the time you reach the second house the action is fast and furious. Exterminator is a load of fun - even if it is a little strange.

MARK [86%]

Exterminator is one weird game! You play the part of an exterminator (believe it or not!) and have to rid the houses in the game of all their bugs. You do this by either grabbing, shooting or pounding them to death (lovely). To add extra annoyance there are also things you cannot kill easily. Bees come up and sting you if you don't shoo them away, tanks fire at you and you can even get shot by a squirty bottle! The backgrounds used on each of the rooms in the house are excellent, packed full of detail and all in glorious 3D. There are also a few tunes and ditties to listen to. Exterminator is no ordinary shoot-'em-up: prepare to play something a little different. Fast and frantic action all the way!
NICK [78%]

Audiogenic
£10.99 cass/£14.99 disk
Reviewer: James Leach

Here in the dilapidated YS shed, we all know about bugs. The place is infested with them. Okay, so a few here and there usually tend to brighten the place up, but recently it's definitely got out of hand. They've got into Andy's hair, and Rich's flares, and all over Linda's record collection.

And, coincidentally, pretty much the same thing happens in Audiogenic's new game (spook, eh?). The action takes place in a leafy Chicago suburb where a usually quiet, Brooksidey cul-de-sac has been completely overun by bugs. The poor suffering residents have scarpered, but before they did, they called in a chappie called the Exterminator (which is exactly what we'd do if ever we had any dosh!).

WEIRD!

Of course, you're probably expecting this dude to look like 2 Arnie Schwarzeneggers rolled into one and covered with more guns that a World War 2 battleship. Sorry to disappoint you. You see, you don't actually, er, see him at all (well, not properly anyway), instead you just get this pair of rather large (and very nicely-drawn) hands, as he trundles in and out of people's houses, crushing and pounding all the bugs he finds inside. Yep, the whole set-up is definitely a smidgin on the strange side!

When you get into the first house, you find that each room is displayed in a sort of 3D style. Your hand's in front of you and it can more or less move around wherever you want. And, by golly gosh, it's going to need to because dashing at you from all directions (well, in front of you anyway) are a million and one horrible nasties with only one thing on their mind - giving you a very hard time!

They don't attack in ordered waves, ho no (being bugs, they probably don't have the brains) - they simply fly around the room irritating you until you manage to crush them to jam with your hand (which sort of bunches into a fist and slams onto the ground. It can also fire little laser blasts, though these don't seem to do much damage). And as well as having to pound lots of toys and tin cans you've also got an angry wasp to worry about which can't be killed, and follows you around doing its darndest to sting you and knock you out for a few seconds! All in all, it's just not on!

EVEN MORE WEIRD!

Spooky enough so far? Well wail fill you hear about the floor! in all the rooms this is covered by linoleum squares, like a big chessboard. But every time you pound a toy tank or Coke can then the squares in that line shift along by one. As soon as you've splatted about 6 things in one line, the lino will flash (oo-er!) and you'll have completed the room and be ready to move onto another. And that's, er, where the trouble begins...

TIME FOR A GRIPE!

It's just that all this non-stop action soon starts to feel repetitive (and it's not helped by all the confusing monochrome tints either). Occasionally things get livened up by a bonus screen where swarms of harmless rats run up and down the shelves of the basement (blast them with your laser to get megapoints), and there are some pretty funky toads lying around the place that make nice little splurgey sounds when you squash them - but by and large it soon becomes a case of 'business as usual'. Once you've cleared one house it's just a case of moving onto the next to do it all again. There might be a new room there, but in general it'll look very similar to the one before.

Exterminator is wacky enough to hold your interest for a while, but unfortunately it lacks the edge to really push it towards total fabbiness. Ho hum.

SUPER GAME GUIDE

Look, over there, through that swirling cloud of strange mist... No, it can't be, but it is! SU's guide to the game-greats of yester-year. Yes indeedy there have been some good 'uns on the market in the last few years so now's the time to start polishing up on your collection if you've missed out on any of these fabbo titles. Mark Patterson, who's been in the business since before he was born and who has written not just for SU but also for Amiga, ST, PC and Console mages gives us an extra critical run down of the best...

EXTERMINATOR
Label: Audiogenic
Memory: 128K
Price: £10.99 Tape
Reviewer: Mark Patterson

This is one of the weirdest games of the century! For starters, you control a disembodied hand which resembles Thing" from the Addams Family. Your job is to visit the various houses in the neighbourhood and rid them of insects by squashing them with your fist.

The game originally started life as sort of Amiga/coin-op hybrid which, for some reason, didn't do very well in the arcades The Speccy version, however, is completely excellent Not only is totally original and playable, the graphics are utterly stunning. An essential purchase.

Label: Audiogenic
Price: £10.99 128K
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

It's yucky! It's squlshy! It's great! Yes, Exterminator is one of the best titles to emerge from Audiogenic since the year splat.

Not that the intro is that promising... Imagine if you will something that looks like the intro to Caterpillar, circa 1985; little crawly bugs scuttling across the screen trailing instructions behind them, followed by outline floorplans of a house you have to clean up in your role as a fearless bug exterminator. It all looks a bit awful. But wait until you select all your control options and get into the game... BLIMEY! Your eyes will pop out like a cockroach in a French restaurant.

Exterminator is a conversion of a Gottlieb coin-op (no, I've never heard of them either, but they were responsible for the classic Q'Bert). It's a sort of cross between xenophobe and Klax. Each of the seven houses you have to clear has a number of rooms, shown in perspective 3-D in gorgeous monochrome full of authentic details; the kitchen has a fridge, washing machine, cupboards and shelves, the basement has garden tools, dustbins and rows of containers, and so on.

Floating in a rather spooky disembodied way in the foreground is your exterminator's hand; in two-player mode, there are two hands controlled independently. The floor is divided into tiles coloured black or white, while toward you fly hordes of disgusting bugs. Your task is to squash, poison and mash them, choosing the position of their death so that as they fall they turn the tile below them black. This is made easier by the shadows they cast beneath them as they flutter about.

Complete a line of tiles, and you're transported to another room in the house; the next room connected to each row of tiles is indicated at the bottom of the screen. If you accumulate too many insect stings, you've got no chance of becoming an old hand at the game. Death is painful but only semi permanent with four continues available!

What's amazing about the game is the realistic animation of the hand, which clutches, shakes and files realistically (or as realistically as most common or garden hands can), and the speed and excitement of the bug-hunting. Before entering each room you're given a run-down of the wild-life you're going to encounter, and instructions on how to deal with them; mosquitoes, for instance, can normally be squashed in your hand, while wasps are more dangerous and must be shaken off with a wiggle of the joystick then squirted with bug juice (of which you have only a limited supply). To squirt, you have to move to the far side of the screen, open fire and direct the jet of poison up/down/left/right.

You can also change the colour of a tile by squashing ground-crawling objects such as tin cans, ants and toy tanks as they roll towards you from the far end of the room; to do this you move your hand towards the top of the screen and hit the POUND button, making your hand fly downwards and mash everything beneath it.

As you progress you face additional hazards like bottles of bug squirter which turn against you, toy tanks which shoot at you, and frogs which flop out their sticky tongues and flob you to death. On certain levels there's a bonus round where you get to shoot rats for extra points, and a Warp function activated by shooting into a fridge jumps you to another house.

It's the little details like the look on the face of the nosey mosquitoes when you mash them, the great 128K rendition of The Flight of the Bumble Bee, the sampled shouts of beleaguered householders begging for your help, and the whirling skull on the credit page, which make Exterminator stand out above all the other 3-D perspective bug-squashing multi-level arcade games released this week.

Audiogenic
Spectrum/C64 £10.99, ST/Amiga £24.99

Bugs! Horrible creepy-crawly, things have infested the neighbourhood, so the insect-hating citizens have called in the Exterminator - a pest control man with a difference! Starting off from one end of the street and working down, the player has to enter each house and clear all the rooms of bugs.

What makes The Exterminator different from your usual Rentokill grunt is the tools he uses. Instead of using environmentally unfriendly sprays, The Exterminator kills all known pests with his bare hands! His are special hands, though, because they're empowered with the ability to shoot blasts of laser death at any nasty that gets too close for comfort! The hand can also squeeze anything that buzzes by, as well as thump onto the floor, squashing tin cans or deadly toy tanks! And if you want, a second bugbasher can join in at any time, controlling The Exterminator's other hand! You haven't got it that easy, though - toy tanks, laser-spitting sprays and wasps are also Out to get you, and if they get too close, they'll drain your "juice just like that (snaps fingers)! Once a room is clear, you move on to the next, until the whole house is de-bugged, and then it's time to move your swat team down the street, where more bugs lie in wait.