Producer: Artic
Memory Required: 48K
Retail Price: £4.95
Language: Machine code

So this was what we were returning to; a scarred battlefield and ashes. We'd travelled across the universe to save the Earth, we'd seen off the invaders and suffered the casualties, only to find It had all been a decoy.

So I'm In Shock sets the scene for this grid/shoot em up game. You can move your laser base left and right, while shooting up. The screen is divided into one character squares by green grid lines with you (and the aliens above) sitting in the squares. The number of aliens depends on how many waves you have killed off. They move about randomly, very slowly descending. Should one reach the bottom the game is over. Some squares have diagonal lines filling them, which cause your shots to rebound at right angles, whereas the aliens can fire through them quite happily. This requires some strategical thinking to use the shields to double rebound and thus still hit an alien. Every 3 screens, a command ship, resembling a spider, crawls across the screen half way up, and scores a bonus if you hit it.

COMMENTS

Control keys: very simple, CAPS - V left, B - SPACE, right, H - ENTER, fire
Joystick: none
Keyboard play: fast and over-responsive
Graphics: average, small, 1-character size
Sound: good
Skill levels: 5
Lives: 3

The graphics are quite small and simple and the keys are over-responsive, making it very hard to move to an adjacent square. The game itself is quite reasonable, but something of an anti-climax after reading the intro on the inlay - "The moon was the colour of wide frozen shrieks of laughter, the frost ran down the window - I'm in shock." See what I mean.

I thought the graphics and colour were generally rather poor, and the game, though an original idea, does tend to get repetitive and is very easy to play.

I like the energy reflectors, they added a dimension of strategy to an otherwise very ordinary shoot em up. But the alien craft could have been a bit more energetically nasty, it would have made the game more interesting to play. Very difficult to control small movements of the laser base too.

Producer: Artic, 16K
£4.95

The inlay, uncharacteristically for Artic, is way over the to in description! This is a grid/shoot em up. Alien craft inhabit the top squares between the fine grid and you have a laser base at the bottom, moving left and right. Between you and the aliens are reflecting mirrors at 45'. These are sometimes in singles, sometimes in ranks, and they deflect your shots off at right angles. The trick is to use several ranks of these reflectors to shoot up, across then up again to hit the aliens. There is a command ship which crosses the screen every now and again for bonus points. The aliens move from square to square horizontally, also descending slowly. Small graphics and over-responsive control on the laser base which makes it difficult to line up shots accurately. An original idea, reasonably playable, perhaps not terribly addictive though. Simple control keys, no joystick option - fair to average, overall CRASH rating 55% m/c.

MACHINE: Spectrum 48K
JOYSTICK: No
CATEGORY: Arcade
SUPPLIER: Artic
PRICE: £4.95

Your suspicions about this program are first aroused when you discover that it loads in well under a minute. They're confirmed when you start playing. It's junk.

According to the drivel on the cassette inlay you're supposed to be a battleflier shooting up alien ships in a battlefield constructed by the enemy.

What actually appears on screen is a grid speckled with a few coloured blobs, one of which is you, the rest the enemy.

You can move right or left (not up as the instructions tell you) and fire. The game's only hint of novelty is that the 'rays' from your gun bounce off shields placed at angles on the grid.

This means you can destroy aliens which aren't directly above you - while they can't destroy you because their shots don't bounce. Strange way to build a defensive battlefield.

The game is pathetically easy to master and is unlikely to sustain interest for more than a few minutes.

Although the motion is smooth, all the moving objects are the size of single characters, and there's no attempt at animation.

The game's title, incidentally, bears no relation to what happens - it must be a reference to the reaction of people who actually buy this rubbish.

16K Spectrum
Shoot-'em-up
Artic
£4.95

"The moon was the colour of wide frozen shrieks of laughter, the frost line ran down the window... I'm in shock". So goes the blurb for this engrossing grid game. You are zipping around the bottom of the screen as per Gridrunner, but without the peripatetic plasma cannons. Instead fiendish diagonal step deflectors are laid across the screen, so you cannot shoot straight up at the invaders, but have to allow for deflection.