Enigma Variations
£14.99 (disk only)
SAM Coupe

Sphera, one of the most feared prison planets owned by the emperor of the Rigel IV system, a place where many people have gone in - but hardly any have come back out. Having been sent here for a crime you didn't commit, you seek revenge and escape.

This seems impossible until you stumble upon a broken-down supply ship. Before the repair droids begin work, you sneak aboard and hide until the ship is fully operational. Taking control of the ship, you now have to fly through three massive levels of shoot-'em-up mayhem to reach freedom.

Blast the guardians of Sphera as they attempt to foil your plans for escape - there are loads of 'em! in some cases, you meet a guardian two or three times before you actually destroy it, so a healthy trigger finger is needed.

These end-of-level monsters include giant crabs, deadly scorpions and sand creatures, and to defeat them you fire until they're forced off the top of the screen (avoiding their deadly bullets while you're at it).

Sphera's gameplay is basic shoot-'em-up. It's a 'simple' matter of avoiding the continuous onslaught of space debris, killing the occasional attack wave of ships, picking up the extra lives, energy and weapons, then blowing away the end-of-level monster. The only things that vary from level to level are the monsters and some of the scenery graphics.

Sphera's scrolling is impressive. Backgrounds scroll by at varying speeds, interweaving with each other. This makes impressive viewing but can be confusing when you don't know what you can fly over and under. The game boasts 16-colour graphics and stereo sound, showing what the SAM can get up to. I feel that some of the graphics could've been better: if you can have 16 colours to play with, why are all the alien ships boring old while on black?

Sphera is a good example of what can be produced given half a chance. It lacks a lot in gameplay but is bound to be a hit with all SAM owners, simply because there are few other games around. With more software development (Sphera is a little rough around the edges), I predict we're in for some very exciting games in the future. Hurrah indeed!

NICK - 77%]

Sonically, Sphera is very good, but the graphics leave a fair bit to be desired. The backgrounds are colourful, as are the end-of-level guardians, but the spaceship sprites are very crude in comparison. I found the ship's controls to be slightly sluggish when responding to the hail of enemy bullets. This caused much frustration and I couldn't get any further than the end of the first level. Sphere is a blast-'em-up for well 'ard joystick junkies only (and people with milder tempers than my own)!MARK - 58%.

LABEL: Enigma Variations
MEMORY: 256K
PRICE: £14.99 (disk)
PROGRAM BY: Ken Jarvis, Sean Conran

If you have been holding your breath waiting for some decent SAM software, you can expel it in a great whoosh of stale air. Sphera is here; it's a great program by any standards, and for software-starved SAM fans it's more welcome than a bucket of iced Lilt in the Sahara.

There's nothing revolutionary about the game format - it's a straightforward vertically-scrolling shoot-'em-up - but it's lovely to see the SAM's Mode 4 graphics used to their full capacity: with multiplane parallax scrolling starfield backgrounds, multi-channel sound and loadsa colours. Sphera is good enough to compete with the best 8-bit games around, and with many of the 16-bit efforts.

You want plot? Forget it. This is just a matter of headsdown, no nonsense mindless blasting, as you steer you bog-standard white starfighter along giant space complexes. Monochrome enemy ships attack in predictable waves, from all directions, and a collision with any of them results in loss of one of your four lives. You can withstand more hits from enemy missiles, but these are a lot more difficult to avoid; they're small, round, white, and fast-moving.

What makes it more difficult is that you soon realise that you don't have to dodge the huge, multi-coloured sliding blocks of the background. You can actually fly your ship "underneath" them, the problem being that as you do this you lose sight of it; it's very easy to run into a storm off missiles while you're out of sight, your only warning being the crash of explosions and your plummeting energy meter.

If you can combine dodging the missiles, shooting the enemy ships and steering through the background objects, you should get far enough to find power-up icons. You start off which a blaster which fires single bolts of energy, but icons add extra weapons such as rapid fire, restore your energy or give extra lives: typically, the icons appear in the middle of particularly nasty waves of baddies.

If you survive through to the end of a wave you encounter a mother ship, and here the SAM's superior graphics really tell: the mother ships, which include a giant crab-type, a sand creature and a silver citadel, are huge, colourful and smoothly animated. Knocking one out is a bit of a nightmare, and they get more vicious as the levels get higher.

Each level loads separately from disk, but the loading routine is fast enough to avoid interrupting the action.

I could do without the supposedly funny messages when you get killed - "Now I don't think you wanted to do that!", as Harry Enfield would say - but other than that Sphera is a fast-moving, good looking and aurally stimulating experience. I don't really have to tell you to get it if you have a SAM, you would probably get it even if it was a turkey - but you can rest assured that Sphera does justice to the machine and is well worth the spondoolix.

GARTH'S COMMENT:
A great first time original game for the SAM that will no doubt become part of SAM history!