Producer: MAD
Retail Price: £2.99
Author: Stuart Middleton

Indiana Jones, Ian Botham, and Roland Rat eat out your hearts. Think you're real heroes huh, but wait until you've seen this guy action. And the guy - well he's you! There's a choice of three locations and a predicament in each - to be a hero or a gutless wonder?

In the land of Pharoahs, camels and an awful lot of sand lies an ancient tomb - and you're locked in it. An escape through its passages and rooms must be made if you're to be home in time for tea. Within the mausoleum are seven types of doors, each requiring its own key. When all seven have been unlocked out you can stagger into the bright Egyptian sun.

But the museum you work for wants 24 pieces of ancient tablet collected from the tomb. Returning without them would not only look rather cowardly, but put you on the dole, and in these UB40 days, there aren't many openings for Egyptologists.

You make the decision.

Whatever you decide, you'll find some aggressive spiders, snakes and mummies after you, and your health is seriously affected by their bites. Two pineapples on the right of the screen wither when bites are sustained. Protect yourself with accurate gun fire and enjoy the bits of food left by previous explorers to see those decaying fruit restored.

Once out of the tomb, rather incredibly, you find yourself the sole survivor of a space ship uncontrollably off course. Finding and using the correct security passes opens locked doors to reach the escape craft. However a real hero wouldn't just abandon ship, he'd find the 24 pieces of circuit board required to fix the ship, bring it under control, and still have time to send a postcard home to mother. Again watch out for alien attackers, your life's in danger. Shoot them quickly and collect supplies as you go in order to restore your health.

Hero or space-wimp, the choice is yours.

Then, just when you thought that space was the final frontier, you're transported into a mutant city, searching for a vital document. The document has been torn up and hidden in (guess what) - 24 locations. Lying about the city are keys, which allow passage between buildings in search of an escape route. But escaping without the document results in a court martial and a docked pension is inevitable. In all scenarios you can pause to save position.

COMMENTS

Control keys: up/down, left/right and fire - all definable
Joystick: Kempston, Interface 2
Use of colour: average but bold in use
Graphics: large but undetailed
Sound: no tunes, minimum variety of ubiquitous FX
Skill levels: one
Screens: three scenarios

I think I like this! Nice big graphics with plenty of colour, and most characters are well defined. The nasties tend to flicker, though, which is somewhat off-putting. A neat trick is to let you select the starting level. The game's rather slow, making play a bit boring but its addiction is great. I fail to understand how deteriorating pineapples reflect your health status; is our hero a secret pineapple eater? As a shoot it if it moves game it's quite good and worth the money
GARETH.

How to be a Hero looks good. The graphics are big, bold and colourful, and though the aliens flicker they're quite bearable. It's essentially playable, and therefore, as it isn't too difficult, and you can select your starting level, it's pretty addictive. The instructions are too hard to read; but this doesn't ruin what is a brilliantly simple game that doesn't take any skill to understand or even to enjoy. Good for the price.
MIKE

MASTERTRONIC's last Gauntlet variant Storm was disappointing to say the least, How to be a Hero isn't much better. The action's boring, repetitive and sometimes unfair - nowadays nobody wants to search a maze for hours and then get killed because he can't fight off more than three baddies at one time. The graphics are large but simplistic, more detail could have easily been added to make the dull playing area more interesting. The sound is also below average with no tunes and sparse effects. Given that this is effectively three games, How to be a Hero offers reasonable value, but it's a package I wouldn't recommend.
BEN

Mastertronic
£1.99

Calling all trainspotters - stop picking your spots and pay attention, because this is the game for you. Inside this packaging lie three maze game tests of your prowess. Open the box, if you've got the strength, oh weedy one, and participate.

All three mazes are of the collect-the-objects-before-escaping type, though the really weedy are allowed to make a run for the exit immediately, scoring about the same as Norway in the Eurovision Song Contest. Others will wander further in search of parts of the ancient tablet - good for ancient headaches - bits of a spaceship and a vital document, plus other valuable goodies and food.

As you might have deduced from the above, each maze is set in a different do-or-die situation. You won't be scared of mummy in the Egyptian tomb, get spaced in the space station or bomb out when you face a mutant after the holocaust, will you? And you can always load in another maze without completing the one before it.

All of this is very competent, with a nicely scrolling overhead view of the catacombs, a message window and your dwindling life force shown by shrinking pineapples - the relevance of which quite escapes me. The main problem is that, on this showing, being a hero soon gets dull and repetitive. Yawn!

But given the budget price, if you like this sort of game, then go to it. You'll only need a heroic capacity for playing unsophisticated computer games.

Issue 40 (May 1987) Page 111

ROBIN: How To Be A Hero comes in three distinct parts: Egyptian Tomb, Space Station and After The Holocaust.

In the Egyptian Tomb your hero has to escape after locking himself in, the silly fool - and the museum he works for wants 24 artefacts from this tomb. Of course you can concentrate on escaping, but it would look a bit cowardly if you returned empty-handed.

Once out of the tomb, being the trainee superhero that you are you miraculously appear on a spaceship where you are the sole survivor of some disaster. This ship has gone off course and is hurtling through space. For the more cowardly adventurers there's an escape craft; the brave can attempt to repair the doomed spaceship.

In the final stage, you're an army officer in a mutant city and must find 24 pieces of a vital document. To return without them would mean a court martial. As in all the other levers there are nasties out to stop you - and your only defence is a super zap gun specially designed for heroes.

The graphics on HTBAE are big and bold, but the aliens flicker annoyingly. The gameplay is only average: though there are three distinct levels, the game is essentially the same in each.

I find HTBAH boring and repetitive as Gauntlet games go.

RICKY: Big, pretty and dull. The main problem is the oversized maz, which is too large for excitement. The decaying pineapples are quite amusing, but the novelty wears off quickly - like the rest of the game. How To Be A Hero is above the standard of Storm, but only marginally.

Then: 70%
Now: 56%

Mastertronic
£2.99

Character building software from Mastertronic's MAD label, How To Be A Hero is actually three games of the wander-around-collect-the-object variety, collected onto one tape.

The idea behind the games is that in each game you can opt for the easy solution, which is to head straight for the maze exit, or you can do it the hard way and attempt to collect the 24 items of treasure hidden in each maze. You don't need to be much of a hero to realise that the treasure is going to be guarded by monsters who will attack and drain off your life energy (illustrated with wacky computer buff humour by two pineapples at the side of the screen). So scattered around the mazes are additional food supplies to keep you going, as well as the keys that you'll need to get through the locked doors.

The three games are all very similar, and only the differences in layout of each maze separates one game from another. They all present you with the same sort of overhead view and chunky block graphic, only the minor details vary. In one game you're an explorer in an Egyptian tomb or a space station or a ruined city, and you're always looking for 24 bits of treasure.

They're all passable budget games, and I suppose that getting three of them on one tape is quite good value. Fortunately I'm already such a hero that I don't need to learn how to be one so I shan't be rushing out to buy this.