Virgin/Sales Curve/Random Access
£8.99

Gemini Wing is probably the first computer game to go healthy. We all know it is better to eat organically, but is it better to shoot 'em up organically too? You man a small ship that has to fly over seven levels of organic excitement with a mission to kill Mutant Alien Scum, who try their best to smash into your ship (ouch!).

Being the hard person that you are, you could probably kill all the alien enemies with a single laser gun for a secret store of rubber bands like Skippy has.., ping, ouch!), but the Gemini Wing ship is capable of much more than that.

You can collect gunballs from the aliens you liquidise to give the Wing extra fire power. These gunballs do all sorts of extremely catastrophic things to the poor aliens, like blasting a three way fire ball, an alien seeking missile, a spiralling circle of destruction, and the dreaded windscreen wiper of death, the subject of many nightmares on planets far, far away. They also give extra lives and points.

All this plot sounds so exciting I think my Spectrum is going to explode (puft!). The only trouble with Gemini Wing is that you can't see it (Eh?!). The organic backgrounds are detailed, the aliens are detailed and the ship is... well not so detailed, but put them all together coloured with the same monochrome and you simply don't know what's going on half the time! Though there are colour highlights on the explosion effects.

Different mega weapons are a good idea (even if it's been done before), especially the windscreen wiper of death, but there's a lack of playability. Decent sound effects and tune do a good Job to rescue the game, but it's not enough. Gemini Wing holds nothing new, so check it out only if you are a shoot 'em up lover, or disappointment may be yours.
NICK [65%]

Not another! Vertical scrolling shoot-'em-ups are all well and good... at least, they used to be. This isn't. The tune on the title screen is pretty good, but that doesn't really make it worth the asking price. The graphics are too small, and the colouring is awful; yet another example of 'invisible enemy syndrome', it's just another shoot 'em up, and as such there's no real reason to buy it. If Gemini Wing was more original, and the colour plan thought out slightly better it would be great - but these two flaws really knock it down.
MIKE [61%]

Mastertronic Plus
£2.99

Wave upon wave of mutant alien scum attacking your tiny ship... blah, blah, bolt-on weapons... blah blah, just another shoot-'em-up really, and not much fun.

Virgin/Mastertronic
£9.99 cass
Reviewer: Jackie Ryan

Hoo hoo hoo! Ha ha ha! Well I'll say one thing for Gemini Wing, it's got a jolly good scenario going for it if nothing else. According to the blurb, after several centuries of reading "little green men made love to me and then turned me into a potato" stories invented by Soonday Spirit hacks, the rest of the inhabitants of this rather enormous universe of ours were understandably getting slightly peeved. So when the crazed headline writer flipped and came up with "Die Mutant Alien Scum" as the front page lead story for the early edition one Tuesday, the clamour of outrage from aliens everywhere was a little loud.

Hordes of them set out for our shores prepared for battle, thinking they'd trash us easily. But little did they reckon on the ingenuity of Earth's weapon scientists - for they have invented the Gemini Wing, the ultimate fighting machine!

So far so good, eh, Spec-chums? But hold it right there, 'cos unfortunately once you've finished reading the scenario and actually booted up the game, the fun ends and the frustration begins.

Gemini Wing is a multi-level, vertically scrolling, monochrome shoot 'em up. which just doesn't measure up as a full price release I'm afraid. You get to pilot a Gemini Wing fighter and must fly along a vertically scrolling background using the old left, right, up, down, fire control system, blasting and dodging all the armed aliens (Mutated Butterflies, Flying Beetles and Giant Salmon) in your path.

At the start of the game you can kill the aliens by either pumping the fire button like mad for a constant stream of cannon fire, or holding it down for a while and then releasing it for a massive blast of gunball power. The aliens you're up against carry a huge array of weaponry. But they carry them in the form of gunballs too, so once you've totalled them (which isn't very hard to do), picking up their lost gunballs is a must. To do this simply fly over them in your craft, and, jumping Jiminey, the extra weaponry (like extra firepower, smart bombs, extra lives and the windscreen wiper of death) appears like magic in the side panel on the right hand side of your screen.

Unfortunately, it's impossible to use your extra weaponry gunballs intelligently, as the game doesn't allow you to choose what extras you can use and when. Instead you find that when you go to use these extras, you are only able to release the weapon which is at the top of your list (that's on the right hand side of the screen, remember).

The only way Gemini Wing might have dug itself out of its grave would have been if it was a really good ducking and diving blasterama. Unfortunately, even here it fails 'cos though your fighter moves well around the screen, and responds quickly to your commands, the monochrome graphics and backgrounds mean it's incredibly difficult to follow the action. More than once I found myself losing track of my fighter, as it got lost amongst the explosions in a particularly vital fracas. And when it did reappear again (luckily unscathed) I was often concentrating so much on finding my Gemini Wing again that I couldn't look around to see what else was coming at me further up the screen.

It's confusing colouring and pretty inadequate gameplay make what could have been a quite good shoot 'em up... um... a not very good shoot 'em up at all. Only for die hard addicts methinks.

RICH PELLEY and JON PILLAR - as nice of couple of young chaps as you could ever hope to meet. So we locked them up in the...

BARGAIN BASEMENT

Mastertronic
£2.99
Reviewer: Rich Pelley

If there's one thing which annoys me, it's those irritating bits which always get stuck round your mouth every time you eat a packet of Fruit Gums. Oh, and another thing are games which suffer heavily from the disapearing bullet syndrome. And this one certainly does.

Well, it's a vertically-scrolling shoot-'em-up, and traditionally you have to shoot things - this time spooky bug-type insect things. It all starts off pretty well, the scrolling's smooth and the controls are responsive, and it almost fools you into thinking that the thing is some cop. But seconds later everything gets lost into the detailed background. Not only is it a case of "Wherre did that bullet come from?" and "Crikey, who put that baddy there?", but also of "Blimey, where the hell am I?" Needless to say that things become very (very) hard. The weapons system isn't much better either - you spend ages collecting weapons, but can't choose in which order to use them. Tsk. A bit on the lousy side really.

Label: Sales Curve
Author: In-house
Price: £8.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tony Dillon

If there's one thing I can say about Gemini Wing, it's that it is very difficult. Not difficult as in playability level, but difficult in actual distinguishing anything. A game where you die because you saw the bullet at the last moment isn't half as frustrating as a game where you dies because you can't see any bullets. Or enemy ships come to that.

You see, it all boils down to the graphics. The main sprites themselves are fine, small but finely detailed. It's the backdrops that cause all the trouble. You see, the backdrops are also very finely detailed, so much so that they camouflage all sprites on screen, which means you're going to have a bit of a hard time avoiding the enemy ships, let alone the bullets.

And that is really the only thing that marrs what isn't really a bad shoot-em-up. Set in the style of games like 1942 and Slapfight, you have to fly your little twin engine plane upwards through trillions of levels of continuous trigger firing action.

And it's action all the way, right from the word go. You are plunged into a blazing sky, enemy fighter and their bullets screaming through the air around you. What do you have to fight back with? Not a lot pal. The default weapon for the game is a titchy little twin barrelled automatic perched on the front of your plane. As you fly along blasting things, the things you blast drop little capsules, which you collect by flying over. Once collected, they fall into a tube and form a queue. Each of the capsules is a one-use special weapon that you activate by holding down the fire button. One of the weapons acts as a smart bomb, another gives you limited three way fire and so on.

But as a game, that's it. Basically a pretty uninspired shoot-'em' up. Nice scrolling and nice sound and all the rest of it, just stupidly difficult. The funny thing is, had the backdrops been better throughout, it could have been a good game.

Label: Virgin
Price: £2.99 Cass 48K
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

Subtitled "Die Mutant Alien Scum", Gemini is rather a strange shoot-'em-up, obviously designed someone little Japanese at Tecmo who had indulged in much raw fish or suchi, the night before.

It's a vertical scroller, it's a bolt-on-weaponer, and it's an end-of-level nasty type. It's also an aliens against-Earth-men effort, but this time we're classed as the nasties, as the civilised races of the galaxy gang up on the insufferable Earthmen to put an end to their crude behaviour once and for all. For some reason not understood by Earth scientists, dead aliens drop anything up to eight Gunballs which you can pick up to boost your weapon status, unlike some games, in which weapon bonuses are few and far between, in Gemini Wing there are dozens of the buggers, but the catch is that you use them up very quickly when you activate your extra weapons. These include three-way fire, alien-seeking missiles, FireWall, speed-up, Circle of Death, Windscreen Wiper of Death (!?), extra life, and points bonuses Gunballs trail behind you like a tail, and are used up in the order they appear; in two-player mode, you can pinch your partner's gun-balls if he has more than three, but think how unpopular that will make you. The graphics in Gemini Wing are rather small and squinty; smaller aliens tend to blend into the background, while end-of-level nasties like the giant walrus (?!?!?! again!) are nicely depicted and hard to zap. Not a bad effort, then, probably as good a version of the coin-op as you could expect, but in order to include all the action of the original, the graphics have had to be squashed into a scale which makes gamepiay 'difficult' rather than just challenging, if you see what I mean.

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

SHOCK HORROR HEADLINE STARTS WAR TO DEATH

Reading your gutter-press Sunday paper, you may never have realised that those 'alien restaurants on the moon' stories can have some nasty comebacks. For years now, the Soonday Spirit has printed smear stones about our stellar cousins. Tolerant beings, they ignored till one day a journalist coined the headline 'Die Mutant Alien Scum'.

All hell was let loose, the aliens declared war on Earth and prepared for an easy victory. But rather than read the Soonday Spirit, they would have been better off watching Earths weapons technology development. The Gemini Wing project was ready and launched against the aliens without delay. As a Gemini Wing pilot you are sent (with or without a companion) into the dimensional voids to shout the official Gemini Wing battle cry 'Die Mutant Alien Scum' (and kill a few of course).

Prepare for a journey into a weird alien dimension where level after level of pissed off denizens wait to blow you away. The action takes place in many exotic vertically scrolling locations, and the aliens aren't the only hazards. Gun turrets, walls of stone and flame as well as mean end-of-level fatties vie to bring about your demise. Your standard weapon is a twin laser set up, but due to a strange warp in temporal logic gun-balls (extra weapon pods) are occasionally created.

There are three ways to gain these gun-balls: first, shoot certain aliens as they hover: second, shoot aliens called Bringers, which drag a string of eight gun-balls behind them; third - despicable but sometimes necessary - nip behind your partner in two-player mode and nick his gun-balls.

Gun-balls include three-way fire, 2000-, 5000- and 10000-point bonuses, alien-seeking missiles and the awesome windscreen wipers of death.

A wonderful cartoon-like quality enters with the end-of-level nasties: large centipede-like creatures, something resembling a walrus and a huge sentient battle craft. The going gets very tough, especially on later levels, but Gemini Wing is playable enough to stop you feeling the old 'why bother' frustration. With a lot of coin-op conversion releases around at the moment, we're glad to say that Gemini Wing is one of the better examples.