Producer: Hewson Consultants, 16K
£7.95
Author: Mike Male

If you get a little queasy flying, you could always have a go on the ground as an air traffic controller - in this case at the busy Heathrow airport. You must direct incoming flights from the holding stacks safely onto the runway. Your instruments include radar, showing the aircraft call signs, blips and trails; displays giving the altitude and bearing, heading and speed and size of the aircraft. There are 7 levels of play including a demo mode, and you can progress to handling mixed traffic restricted airspace and outbound flights, as well as cope with emergencies like unknown aircraft intruding, radio failure, loss of runway and on board instrument failure. After this you'll never fly again. Recommended.

Producer: Hewson Consultants, 16K
£7.95
Author: Mike Male

If you get a little queasy flying, you could always have a go on the ground as an air traffic controller - in this case at the busy Heathrow airport. You must direct incoming flights from the holding stacks safely onto the runway. Your instruments include radar, showing the aircraft call signs, blips and trails; displays giving the altitude and bearing, heading and speed and size of the aircraft. There are 7 levels of play including a demo mode, and you can progress to handling mixed traffic restricted airspace and outbound flights, as well as cope with emergencies like unknown aircraft intruding, radio failure, loss of runway and on board instrument failure. After this you'll never fly again. Recommended.

CAN THIS BE REAL?

Fly an aircraft, race around the world's most dangerous Grand Prix circuits or take a steam locomotive from London to Brighton. Just as your Spectrum can take you into the depths of space to zap aliens so it can simulate most audio visual real-life events you can mention. This month SU straps itself into the world of Spectrum simulators. Here's our choices:

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL
Label: Hewson
Price: £9.95
Memory: 48K/128K

Take over control of two of the worlds major airport: London Heathrow and Schiphol Amsterdam. The screen display may look docile but you're in the hot seat from which the landing instructions for a host of jumbos and light aircraft are issued.

You're not in the pilots seat this time but make just one slip in stacking those aircraft before landing and you could have a major disaster on your hands. Fortunately, the game has eight play options which help you to train in your new job.

The most simple options include Basic Vectoring where you must guide a selection of aircraft onto your strip, while the most difficult include emergency landings and stacking. If none of those seem easy the author, who also wrote Nightflite II and is an air traffic controller at Heathrow, has included a demonstration which shows how the screen is layed out and the types of command you need to know.

Like many computer simulations it's not graphically impressive but it's the most powerful and authentic simulator of the lot.

ROGER, GOLF ZULU TURN LEFT... ER...

MAKER: Hewson Consultants
MACHINE: BBC Model B, Electron, Spectrum 48K
FORMAT: cassette
PRICE: £7.95

First thing that happens is you crash a lot of aircraft and kill a lot of people. Sounds good, huh? Well all you aspiring homicidal maniacs out there better think again. The object of the exercise is to land the aircraft safely and NOT kill the people. Of course if you've got a real vicious streak you can have great fun directing all the traffic to the middle of the screen then sit back and watch the resulting carnage. That's if you can get the hang of it first. Believe me, it ain't easy.

Heathrow is a simulator. Not a flight simulator, but an air traffic control simulator. First there's the instructions to plough through. Complicated? Imagine a four year old learning machine code.

The game takes you through seven levels, from total none-brain air traffic controller to super ultra zippo air traffic controller, with a demonstration somewhere in the middle. When you start getting competent (maybe three years from now) you can start covering things like Vortex Spacing (Eh?), and emergency procedures, this is a faithful simulation of the problems facing an air traffic controller and it would come as no surprise to learn that there's a room full of nervous wrecks somewhere in Heathrow with a label on the door, 'Ex-air traffic controllers'.

Hewson Consultants
60a St Mary's Street, Wallingford, Oxfordshire.
16/48K Spectrum
£7.95

FROM DEEP-SPACE ADVENTURES TO WORLDLY BOARD-GAMES IN MEIRION JONES' SURVEY

Less than a year ago the appearance of Scrabble on disc for the Apple caused consternation among micro owners. The program defeated three-quarters of the humans who challenged it to a dual of words. At least Scrabblers could comfort themselves with the knowledge that they had been beaten by a £750 disc-based system. Now Psion has taken even that consolation away by launching an improved version of the game with a bigger dictionary and better graphics which will run on a £150 system - the 48K Spectrum and a cassette recorder.

This illustrates the rate at which Spectrum software is improving. The latest releases include clever implementations of board- games like monopoly and arcade favourites such as Scramble, long and complicated Adventures with names like Knight's Quest and combinations of arcade and Adventure like Pixel's Trader. While serious and educational material software is still thin on the ground, programs like Hewson's Countries of the World show how much useful information can be packed into the Spectrum.

MORE ORIGINALITY

Unfortunately the standard is not uniformly high. Sometimes imagination is lacking. Bridge software still insists on marketing what it calls "an exciting game for two to six players". Yes, you guessed, it is boring old Hangman.

At other times graphics are weak. Micromega sells a version of Roulette which features a roulette wheel which looks more like a flying saucer on an off day. There is still too high a percentage of unloadable tapes and of tapes which you wished had been unloadable. Davic Games Tape 1, for instance, features a game which has Tooth Monsters instead of ghosts, which is probably the dullest-ever version of Pac-Man. The Tooth Monsters themselves are about as threatening as a pair of jelly babies.

If you want real tooth monsters try Imagine's excellent Molar Maul. This is a real nerve-tingler from the moment that an enormous set of gleaming teeth appears on the screen like something out of jaws. Armed only with a toothbrush and toothpaste you have to defend these dentures from swarms of evil bacteria.

These germs go by the name of Dentorium Kamikazium which allows Imagine to talk about "the DK Menace" - a triple pun partly at the expense of Imagine's Ipswich-based rivals DK'tronics.

Imagine's punsters are at work again on the cover of Arcadia where we are told we are fighting against the "deadly menace of the Atarian empire". Perhaps this explains why Sinclair owners have shown such enthusiasm for Arcadia because the game itself is just a lacklustre version of Galaxians. Much better is Imagine's Schizoids.

If, like me, you have always wanted to be a bulldozer, Schizoids is the game for you. You are a bulldozer in outer space and your job is to push tumbling cubes and pyramids into a nearby black hole without falling in yourself. Perhaps this nearby anomaly in the space-time continuum affects the wavelength of light. At any rate the game itself is only in black and white.

Pixel is another company which cannot resist veiled messages. Trader is part space Adventure and part arcade game. The Adventure, trading commodities between different worlds, is more convincing than the crude skill tests such as finding the right orbit when approaching a planet.

Trader may well be bought as much for its attractive packaging - which includes a survival guide for the would-be Trader - as for the game itself. After buying supplies for your first trip you set out for the planet Psi where the inhabitants - yes, Psions - who look like a cross between Clive Sinclair's beard and a muppet ask you tiresome questions such as "What is the formula for carbon monoxide?" or "What is your first name?". Entering "Clive" as an answer elicits the response "What a strange name". So, for that matter, does any other reply.

If disaster should strike, a caption will appear saying "Is this the end...?" The answer is "No" because Trader is a trilogy so there are another two complete parts to load from the tape. There are many more traditional text Adventures of the "Go south, open door, take gold" variety but the narrowness of the replies they will accept is often irritating.

DOWN THE MINES

Mikrogen's Mines of Saturn starts with a cheery "Have fun" and then proceeds to ask questions like "Tunnels lead N, S, E and W - what will you do?" Attempts to answer "N" or "go N" or even "go n" will not wash. It must be "go North" or nothing. At least Phipps' Knight's Quest has a 120-word vocabulary to help you on your damsel-ridden way to a castle in the air.

Everest by Richard Shepherd Software is more of a strategy game than a straight Adventure. You have to take enough food and rope to climb the mountain and cope with every hazard. I enjoyed the climb but I never reached the summit - partly because the Sherpas are not what they used to be.

When Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Everest for the first time he managed to find a Sherpa called Tensing. The time when you visit a Nepalese hill village to recruit porters you are asked to choose between Sherpas with names like Keith, Brian, Ron, Tim and Paul. Presumably they are ex-hippies, lost on the road to Katmandu.

Things obviously still are what they used to be down at Mikrogen. If Andy Capp sends you into fits of laughter Mad Martha might just raise a smile. It is the same old story, boy meets girl, well, hen-pecked husband meets axe-happy wife - all very predictable. Mikrogen also sells arcade games like Cosmic Raiders - a competent impersonation of Defender with a long-range screen and grabbers.

Melbourne House's variation on the same theme is called Penetrator. The display looks more like the arcade version of Scramble. A training facility to help you build up specific game skills is a good idea. C-Tech's Rocket Raider is yet another competent variant on similar lines.

Artic offers a suicidally fast asteroids game called Cosmic Debris. Still in the arcades, both Elfin Software and Quicksilva produce robot battles which are of the Pac-Man-meets-Tanks variety.

Elfin's Tobor has the more exciting opening titles but loses on points to Quicksilva's QS Frenzy whose exotic science-fiction plot seems to offer a better justification for the game.

Speaking of Tanks, DK'tronics 3D Tanx was one of my favourite programs in the whole batch. You can track you gun barrel from side to side and adjust the elevation as you lob your shells at four lines of moving tanks which can fire back at you. Although the opposing tanks at first appear to be crawling across a structure that looks more like Brighton's West Pier than a battleground, this is one of my four games you might catch me paying to play in an arcade.

JOIN THE PROFESSIONALS

Artic's Combat Zone is another ambitious attempt at a Tank game. Your target and the landscape - a few pyramids on an invisible plane - look like refugees from Psion's Vu-3D program. They are very simple three-dimensional shapes but they change position smoothly and realistically as if you were walking past them in some world inside your Spectrum.

You and your opponents fire fragments of cubist paintings at each other but the abstraction is not so important as the fact that you are playing the first real Spectrum game in three dimensions - Vu-3D itself is a Psion program which allows you to build up three dimensional objects on the screen and then rotate them, or float them towards you and back again. In effect it is a crude version of the mainframe programs which create the effects for films like Tron.

ET makes an appearance too in an Abbex Adventure with voices called ETX. Unfortunately after loading pages of instructions about how I should phone home ending with the advice that I should treat any MI5 man who appeared as an enemy, the tape self-destructed.

This left me with an unnerving impression of "the strength of Britain's security services.

The secret police are certainly important in DK'tronics strategy game called Dictator. The setting is a banana republic. The instructions ominously point out that "your rule is measured in months". You have to balance political factions, army, secret police, peasants, landowners, guerillas and superpowers if you are to survive.

Breaking into embassies would doubtless be all in a day's work for a dictator. So for all prospective saviours of the nation, Sinclair's Embassy Assault will come in useful. It is very much like those maze games which present your view. standing in the maze. Instead of trying to avoid a minotaur, this time you are looking for secret codes and the like.

All this is enough to send you back into the arcades but Jet Pac's creators have moved from the arcades into home computing.

Ultimate Play the Game's Jet Pac puts you into the position of an astronaut who has to build a rocket from the pieces he can find sitting on clouds around the screen. The scenario is not entirely convincing but it makes for a good game. The same cannot be said of the simulations by CCS.

CCS's representations of the oil business, Dallas, running a printers, Print Room, and of international aviation, Airline, may be realistic but they are not very exciting. Although these were originally designed as training for middle management, livelier presentation would not necessarily have made them less useful. Hewson's simulations of air-traffic control, Heathrow, and the Nightflite flight simulator are more convincing.

Board-games seem to transfer particularly well to the Spectrum. Psion's Scrabble has already been recommended. With its four levels of play and 11,000-word dictionary it can offer almost as tough opposition as you could want. There are also two different approaches to that old favourite Monopoly.

Automonopoli offers a continuous display of the part of the board around your current position. This display moves smoothly when the dice are thrown. Do Not Pass Go from Workforce has a less interesting display but at least shows the whole board all the time. Automonopoli allows you to personalise the program with the names of players and both programs give the option of being either a board for humans to play on or of letting the computer join in as a player. In each case the computer becomes a soft opponent once you have reached the stage of building houses and hotels.

If you have ever wandered into a rundown dockland hotel or pub and been confronted by the sort of balding drunk who says he used to sail the seven seas and boasts that he can name the capital of any country you care to choose, I can reveal his secret. At home he has a Spectrum with Hewson's Countries of the World up and running on it.

At the touch of a button it will remind you that N'djamena is the capital of Chad or that Yaounde is the capital of Cameroon. In the corner of the pub someone with probably be playing a video game not unlike Firebirds.

Softek's Firebirds is a Galaxians-type game distinguished by good croaking noises from the birds. Still on the subject of sound effects Workforcé's Jaws Revenge is very noisy and fun. The graphics are great. You are a shark and you are after the divers and- boats which are after you.

Mined Out from Quicksilva is a very strange version of Mines. It is subtitled "Rescue Bill the worm from certain old age" and if you find a way through the first minefield you then have to rescue damsels in distress. Someone at Quicksilva has been playing too many Adventure games and it is beginning to show.

The last words on the cassette packet read "the image fades to soft focus which is replaced by waves falling on a rocky shore, except in Bill's dream there are no waves or soft focus..." It is certainly time that software cassettes carried a government health warning.

Air traffic controllers spend most of their working lives studying television screens. If this is the case, you might ask, surely this is one function that should be easy to simulate on a computer? And you'd be right.

In this simulation 'blips' come up on the screen and you direct the aircraft they represent to land on the runaway at Heathrow airport, and most realistic it is too! Even the familiar 'tail' of the signal is reproduced to enable you to see the direction of the aircraft. In fact the only major item missing is the static-filled crip exchanges between the controller and the aircraft's crew, but even this is displayed at the bottom of the screen!

Don't panic if the instructions included on the inlay card appear complicated and are difficult to absorb - the program gives you a chance of watching the computer demonstrate how it's done, before you tackle the job by yourself. Mind you, after becoming proficient at the exercises I'm not convinced the computer makes such a good job of it after all!

Basically, the idea is simple - as the aircraft signals appear on the screen, circling or 'holding' at one of four beacons at varying distances from Heathrow and conveniently referenced alongside, you guide them by means of inputting compass bearings along with controlling their speed and height levels, to land on a runway at Heathrow, approaching in either an eastward of westward direction. All the necessary data concerning each aircraft - the heading, height and speed you have instructed them to follow - is neatly shown on an easy reference display at one side of the screen.

So if it's that simple, where's the challenge, I hear you ask.

Select from a comprehensive menu. For example, a mixed bag of small, light aircraft and large Jumbo jets, compulsory height separation, rogue aircraft, sudden emergencies, etc, and the going gets really rough! Fortunately, the inputting of the instructions to the aircraft is easy and straight forward: this is essential because the airspace around Heathrow can soon get very very congested and all one's attention needs to be devoted to those 'blips' on the screen, not the keyboard. A nice helpful touch provided is that once an aircraft is 'locked on' to the correct glidepath for a successful landing this information is notified to you, so enabling you to forget that particular problem and free you to concentrate on the hordes of others approaching fast.

Heathrow A.T.C. is a fascinating simulation, demanding fierce concentration, an orderly mind and is very addictive. You even receive a rating after each exercise. The program can give you hours of enjoyment and if you're fed up with or want a change from those wham sphlat high-speed arcade games and want a quiet, thoughtful action game then this is the one for you.

Criticism? Yes, but a reserved one. The time restriction on each exercise is only 25 minutes, and, believe me, it seems nearer 10 minutes with all that work on your hands. But there again - should Delta Four 'hold' at Biggin Hill beacon for hours while I sort out the unholy mess that I created in the first place?