Again Again/Enigma Variations
£9.99/£14.99

I'm sure we're all well acquainted with the disgusting snotty slimy green (and I mean that literally) alien thingy from Get Fresh and Gilbert's Fridge. Yep, Gilbert's back, and this time it's your computer that gets covered in filthy green goo!

The foul alien hero is getting his colleagues on planet Drill a bit annoyed. He can't stop telling every one how wonderful he is, so when he gets offered a new contract to appear on Earth TV, his not so-friendly friends nick some essential bits of his spaceship, The Millennium Dustbin, so as he won't be able to get to Earth to sign the contract. Poor Gilbert. No-one will tell him where the bits are, and so he can't go back to Earth. He'll have to go on a YTS...!

But - but! - there is one hope left. Scattered around homeworld Drill are five arcade machines. Play the games successfully, and the machines will give him a clue as to the location of one of the parts for the Dustbin. Brain Drain is a memory game where you have to match tiles by remembering where you saw them; in Sprout Wars you shoot the little face lots of times without hitting any of the sprouts; Greed is a Tron variant where you collect numbered bags of money in order without crossing your path; then there are the fairly obvious Earth Invaders and Ping Pong.

Gilbert is really good fun. I don't like the character (not that I ever watch Saturday morning children's programmes, ahem), but Again Again have made a good job of this one. The tune on the 128K is excellent, and though the live arcade machines are incredibly basic, when combined with the rest of the game, they make a nice diversion; it's quite fun just to hunt around Drill for a machine to play.

Colour is overdone (turn down that contrast control matey!) but the Gilbert animation is quite funny, especially the snotting (who said that?)! The other computer versions of Gilbert were laughable; it's good to see that the Spectrum can still beat the competition!

MIKE

Yukky! Snotty little alien creatures on your computer! Gilbert Escape From Drill is in a very similar style to games like Garfield - Big Fat Hairy Deal and Jack The Nipper. Drill, the aliens, and Gilbert himself, are all done in a cartoon graphics which adds to the appeal for youngsters, plus there's a jolly tune playing all the time (and it does get a bit annoying!). The game's playable for a while, but for hardened gamesters it won't last long. Younger games players familiar with the Gilbert character will love just exploring the city, so it might be worth buying for them. Quite a fun little game.
NICK

Again Again
£9.99 cass/£14.99 disk
Reviewer: Marcus Berkmann

Gilbert is of course Gilbert The Alien, that noticeably snot-tinged impersonator of football commentators and general loudmouth. And Drill is his home planet - not too nice a place by the impression you get from this game.

You see, his fellow Drillians are sufficiently browned off with Gilbo (what with his incessant bragging and rabbiting, natch-o) that they aren't letting him go back to Earth to record another series of his programme. You'd have thought they'd be glad to be shot of him if that were the case, wouldn't you? But nevertheless, the Millenium Dustbin, his trusty spacecraft, has had several important bits (even the khazi) removed and hidden around the main city (wouldn't it be nice if all cities were like Milton Keynes?) How can we get them back for him?

'Tis simple, old bean. For the Drillians may be a dreary lot (and judging by the game's graphics, their architecture leaves something to be desired too) but they're at least sporting. So in the various Milk Bars dotted around the city (they get drunk on milk?), there are video games for Gilbert to play. Should he play one successfully, he gets a clue to the whereabouts of the missing khazi and all the other bits. Your task, then, is to find these Milk bars and play the vid games to the best of your capability. And it's not as easy as it sounds.

For one thing, you've got loads of nasties chasing you around. These can be 'snotted' at (Gilbert has capacious quantities of snot to fire at them, rather than a handkerchief like everybody else), which is a touch better than letting them hit you. 'Cos you've got 24 hours in which to solve all the various problems (not real-time, don't worry) and evey time you're hit, you're docked a few minutes. Worse, if you fail at one of the video games, you lose a full hour.

You can of course run out of snot - even Gilbert's nasal passages have their limitations - but if so, you can miraculously fill up by visiting a Milk Bar (is it on draught or in bottles?). If you snot away enough nasties on a particular screen you'll see a 'hoverjelly' appear, which if successfully snotted (and it's not easy by any means) will drop down an item of food for you to pick up. This can be one of two things, a can of beans, which when consumed gives Gilbert such a bad attack of the wind that he can float over the landscape, or a piece of cake which brings him back to earth again. He can carry up to four items, although to be honest you won't need these that often.

A good piece of advice is to make a map. Those Drillian streets are labyrinthine in the extreme, and you'll get nowhere if you don't know where you are. As for the vid games, well, they're surprisingly challenging. One is the old joke People Invaders (you're an alien, remember?), in which you play a Space Invaders game but shoot people instead of nasties. It's harder than the original. Then there's Sprout Wars, in which you have to shoot a nasty that's terrorising some harmless little sprouts. The trick here is that you have two guns, one shooting horizontally and one vertically, and they shoot one after the other - so you have to remember which one is shooting next if you're not to zap one of the sprouts by mistake. Brain Drain I never managed to find in my travels around Drill, but I did catch Greed, a fine little puzzle game whose subtleties are often too hard to work out in a hurry (which is what you need to do if you're going to solve it successfully). Sadly the Speccy version has no room for the final game, Snot Fight At The OK Corral, although I suspect that no game, however brilliant, could every quite live up to that title.

Should you fail at one of the sub-games, you can't have another go at it straightaway - you have to go and attempt another one first. There's a lot of running around, then, so if that's your bag, this is your game. It's alright, actually, this. For once, a game with a character actually uses that character in a reasonably imaginative way, so that you're not left with the sneaking suspicion that the game was written first and the character tacked on afterwards as an afterthought. It's fast, it's challenging, it's very silly, and I liked it. And it's certainly the first 'snot 'em up' I've ever played...

alternative
£2.99
Reviewer: Rich Pelley

Regular pant-swingers will no doubt know who Gilbert The Alien is - he's one of (and probably the best-looking) presenters from that kiddies' telly program on 'the other side'. Anyway, he's due to do another series, but the rest of the planet Drill aren't too keen on the thought of him returning to Earth (all this presenting seems to have gone to his head, you see). So they've stolen bits of the Millenium Dustbin (the spaceship he needs to fly back in) and will only tell him where they are if he can beat them at some of their favourite video games.

But does this mean that you'll simply be walking around a maze until you find one of the video games, entering a sub game, and then carrying on again? Er well, yes, it does actually. The walking bit merely consists of trundling about 'snotting' at passers-by to avoid losing lost time. You have 24 hours (minutes in real time) to complete the game, but whenever you touch a baddy time is lost, as it is when you fail to beat the video game and you lose a full hour (minute). As far as the games are concerned, there are 4 different ones (including one of those 'match the numbers' jobbes), 'Sprout Wars' (don't ask), and Earth Wars (you're an alien shooting waves of people). At the end of the day. Gilbert Escape From etc is rather good actually. The map is large, but as games tend to last for ages, this is rather a good job. Its got a nice line in wacky humour and the graphics have that 'cartoony' feel to them that works so well on the Speccy. The only real problem is that things are perhaps a bit too slow. And I'm not too sure how long it'll be before you decide that walking round mazes and playing subgames perhaps isn't such a good idea because it's rather repetitive. But for 3 quid, you can't complain.