Producer: Go!
Retail Price: £7,95
Author: Ernieware

TWO GAMES ON ONE TAPE

This is not going to be a very pleasant job. Disease-infested spaceships are returning to Earth from the once healthy colony on Jupiter's moon, lo. They must not be allowed to reach their destination and spread their sickness.

In Thunderceptor, one of two games on this tape from US Gold's recently-launched label GO!, you command one of the craft in a fleet sent to destroy the colonists. Your multidirectional spacefighter carries both Phaser and Super Phaser systems - the latter effective against large spacecraft - and a defensive shield. All these are served by a single, limited power supply, and the energy complement of each can be altered.

On encountering the 'lo-fleet', you are met by waves of attack craft varying in their manoeuvrability and fire power. At some stage large mother ships and fighters appear, and these must be hit many times with Phaser power, sometimes with unerring accuracy, before they succumb. Points are awarded for every craft destroyed.

Meteor storms, satellites and wrecks also add spice to this space battle. After completing the first level, you can prowess to the next of the five, receiving medals and promotion as you go.

Flying by the seat of your pants on a magic carpet in Old Baghdad while working for the military is the name of the game in The Fast And The Furious, on the other side of the tape.

Your first mission is to deliver important papers to a base on the other side of the desert - but there's more to this silicon wasteland than sand, sand, more sand and cacti.

Though the desert is larger than the beach at Weston-super-Mare at low tide, the villains and brigands who live there seem to have no difficulty in finding you. Riding their shagpiles and Axminsters they come at you, and any contact with them, or with the fireballs that they unleash, loses you stamina.

You can return their fire - but be warned; you're not facing just a cutthroat band out to do you down, but also centipedes, dragons, bats and scorpions, any of which can inflict untold damage on even the hardiest carpeteer.

You can collect useful items by flying your carpet over them, in a sort of reverse hoovering marked by icon displays.

The objects collected, which include dollars. pounds, oil, hearts, flags, guns and musical notes, can be used in dealings with the villain's leader - he can be found at the end of each desert section. You can placate him by giving him the correct icons, and the result is a rise in your stamina level.

Once your dealings with the despicable rogue are finished, leap once more onto your carpet to do battle on three more levels with more dragons, more no goods and more danger.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: very fast and quite colourful
Sound: not an awful lot apart from a few bells and whistles

The Ernieware programmers have their act together when it comes to designing pretty graphics, but their problem is knowing what to do with them: Thunderceptor is awfully boring and monotonous. Each section contains the same old ships over and over again in slightly different combinations. However, the individual graphics are exceptionally well-drawn and used with animation to match. The Fast And The Furious is WEIRD; I've seen nothing like it in a long time. The game may basically be your old favourite shoot-'em-up, but the objects used are very strange; besides the usual bats and spiders there are also flying-carpet flights. As with Thunderceptor, the basic game construction is very simple and thus there's endless repetition.
PAUL [68%]

Thunderceptor has all the feel of a well-programmed game and quite a lot of playability - but it doesn't last. Despite its fast gameplay and large graphics, it's simply not addictive. And a more appropriate title for the other game on this tape would be The Fast And The Furious But A Bit Unaddictive! Again, it's very playable for a few minutes, but once you've adjusted to the speed (which certainly makes the game more interesting) and you know the first dozen attack waves, there's very little compulsion to carry on.
MIKE [52%]

GO! has really chosen the right name for The Fast And The Furious - the gameplay is so fast you don't know what you're doing half the time! The enemies really speed along and firing at them as they go by can be a problem. Apart from the sickly colour, the graphics are well-defined, with some good animation here and there. But the spot FX aren't very good and at the start, where you'd expect to find a tune, there are birds singing (goodness knows why!). And though it's quite original, I doubt this game will appeal to the budding arcade player for long. As for Thunderceptor, I've really had enough of all the recent Zynaps clones. Xecutor (reviewed last Issue) was just Zynaps turned through 90 degrees, and Thunderceptor is simply Zynaps sped up with the backgrounds taken away. But the game is quite decent and the graphics are adequately detailed. Both the screen layout and the way the enemies move are similar to The Fast And The Furious; in fact you might think it's just the graphics that have been changed.
NICK [69%]

US Gold

Never has a game been better named than this one from the Dutch Ernieware software house. Free with every cassette they should give you a darkened room to go and lie down in after you've finished playing.

As well as keyboard control you can use Cursor, Protek, AGF, Kempston or Interface II type joysticks. There's a much needed PAUSE facility, giving you time to wipe your brow, and also an Abort Game option for those really trying moments when mere death is not enough. Step back to old Baghdad. Bung the player on a flying carpet and you've got Zaxxon with curly-toed slippers. But they should have left you in the present-day if you've got to believe there are military installations out in the desert as well.

But enough of this and on with the fray - and the first person to make jokes about a frayed carpet gets a scorpion up their kilt. The game is basically a right-to-left horizontal scroll-and-shoot-'em-up. Climb on your carpet and you can move up and down, left to right. The first hazards are pillars and buildings which have to be avoided.

It's great fun zipping along on your carpet, especially as you can fire at the other magic carpet-riders that come your way, as well as the snakes, scorpions, bats and dragons. The graphics aren't the greatest, but the speed of the gameplay more than makes up for that.

The reason why you want to blast other carpet-riders out of the skies, is that you're an undercover agent working secretly for the military and nothing will stop you getting across the desert to the military base at the far side where you've some important documents to deliver. Well, nothing apart from all the nasties and a few outlaws that are waiting in between each of the levels. At the end of one level you fly over various icons, such as money, flags, music notes, revolver and oil symbols. You've some of these to your credit to start with, but choose carefully which you add by flying over them as you'll have to do some trading with outlaws in between levels before you can pass onto the next stage. The outlaws get the best graphics in the game, and one bears a frightening resemblance to the Man Ed, which surprises no-one. Beneath each outlaw, his temper, reliability, intelligence and aggression levels are indicated.

This bit in between levels is called a sub-game, but it's really just some extra fun and the best bit is the blasting, of course, with many monsters requiring more than one shot to see them off. And you also have the option of single-fire (fast but forwards only) or multi-fire mode (any direction by firing and moving your joystick the right way.) There's even a magic-mode facility, which keeps you away from all harm for a few seconds but decreases your stamina by 10%. When your stamina's zero it's Game Over time, folks.

The Fast And The Furious really is one of the fastest-action games I've seen on the Spectrum, and as for the excitement of riding a magic carpet, you can't beat it!

Label: Go!
Author: Ernieware
Price: £8.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

Otherwise known as "Attack of the Killer Carpets", Fast and Furious is a horizontally-scrolling zapper of a type I find particularly infuriating, where all the sprites are so HUGE that it's almost impossible to avoid being squished at every moment.

You pilot a magic carpet, viewed from above, and your task is to either avoid or exterminate everything in your path. Targets include other magic carpets, huge swirly flying snakes, bats, groups of hairy spiders and towering... er, towers. While some of the graphics are nice, especially the flying snake, the sound effects are irritating and the gameplay is monotonous, broken only by regular opportunities to fly over groups of tokens picking up as many as you can to supplement your energy, money and so on.

Since I thought this was a poor budget game when it loaded, I can't see that it deserves a place on the label which gave us Trantor.