Infogrames
£10.99/£15.99

The place: a corridor. The speed: light. The task: to bounce a ball down the corridor and complete various challenges. Yes, you guessed it: it's Break Out in 3D!

The Light Corridor is the latest in a long line of wonderfully weird games from Infogrames. In its isometric 3D environment, you use a transparent racquet to guide a metallic sphere through the obstacles that each level holds. Horrors like sliding walls, intelligent blocks that follow you around the screen and devilishly difficult challenges soon have your head spinning.

Floating icons can be collected just by bumping into them and either help or hinder your progress. There are score decreases, double-sized racquets, and icons which make the sphere stick to the racquet. It's not just a matter of collecting everything you see - you have to be careful.

The game seems really simple when the ball is coasting along in a straight line, but once it's hit a wall and spun off in another direction, life gets a bit more complicated. It's not long before you're manoeuvring the racquet all over the screen desperately trying to save your sphere.

The Light Corridor features 50 levels but in case you get fed up with those the game has an editor facility. Using this you can let your imagination run wild and have great fun making impossible corridors for your friends to attempt.

The editor is simple to use: the types of obstacle appear at the bottom of the screen and you use a pointer to select what you want and how far down the corridor it's positioned.

Break Out-style games are nothing new, but The Light Corridor adds a whole new dimension to the game style. As well as being pretty amazing graphically, it has a good audio side. There are tunes for each level, sound effects and even Prince samples to keep your ears ringing (that's Prince the pop star, not Prince Charles!).

Anyone who thought that Arkanoid was the ultimate in ball-bashing games has just got to play The Light Corridor. It's addictive beyond belief and there are none of the hassles of having to start from level one again when you get killed, thanks to the password system.

As well as being a good way to get rid of frustration (all that ball battering), this game will also test some of your brain skills. The mega-challenges you get every four levels take some working out, and when the ball is getting more and more out of control it can be a hair raising experience!

I recommend The Light Corridor to all fans of simple but wildly addictive games. See the light and get your copy today!

NICK [88%]

Arrgh! This game is so frustrating! No sooner do I fire the hall up the corridor than it flies back at me at warp factor nine! But after I'd calmed down a bit (and luckily failed in my attempt to throw the Speccy out of the window), I really enjoyed playing The Light Corridor. The editor option is a great feature, allowing you to be a really nasty git and build a corridor your friends can't beat (snigger). Graphics are simple but effective. Also of note is the funky tune that plays on the title page and in the game. The Light Corridor is fun to play and mess around with in the editor mode, buy it immediately (if not sooner).
MARK [85%]

Infogrames
£10.99 cass/£15.99 disk
Reviewer: Linda Barker

Imagine hurtling through a tunnel at the speed of light and watching the walls change colour. Good, eh? it'd be like travelling through a rainbow.

And, spookily enough, that's just what The Light Corridor's about (sort of). According to those rather funky people at Infogrames the aim of the game would seem to be to "illuminate the stars again in a new born universe". Eh? I haven't got a clue what that means (maybe I'm just not metaphysically-minded enough!), but not try and shed a bit of light on the thing anyway. (Hem hem.)

I CAN SING A RAINBOW

Basically it's about hitting a ball (or 'metallic sphere' ) down a very long tunnel littered with obstacles. To do this you're equipped with a see-through raquet which you hit the ball with (or try to) every time it bounces back. As you progress the tunnel changes colour, and just when you think you're stuck inside for the rest of your days you're rewared by a tiny chink of light directly in front of you. Of course, this time it's not some poncy, rainbow 'hue' but the real potato chip, the big, bad daddy of life and love - the sun. Hurrah!

"OWW!"

That's the basic game but it's certainly not all there is. No way. Jose! First you have to master the batting technique. You move with your bat, which means it's always at the front of the screen as you go forward. The hardest thing here is when the ball gets lodged between your bat and an obstacle, because if you try and roll it out if flies off behind you and you lose a life! (Mind you, you do get rewarded by a brilliant sound - a sort of manly high pitched 'Ow!", a bit like James Brown squealing 'I feel good". Spook!)

You start off with 4 lives/balls, but by moving your bat through the little things that look like motorway signs with a 'L' on them you can pick up an extra metal ball. There are other signs too. The one with 2 little rectangles on turns your single transluscent bat into 2. The trouble with this is you only have control over one while the other one dodges around. Sometimes this is quite useful as it's something for the ball to rebound off if you miss. At other times, like when you're trying to get under a barrier and it won't move down to the right level, it's just annoying enough in make you stamp your feet and go "Grr!" a bit. (A much better signpost to pass through is the single square one which gives your racquet a boldly-defined edge. It doesn't do anything much apart from making the bat easier to see, but I thought it was pretty groovy!) Oh, and you know when you've passed through a sign 'cos not only does your bat change (!) but it makes a daft little ping noise too.

As the colours switch (every 4 levels) the obstacles get more difficult. At first it's just stationary blocks, a bit like dividing partitions, but later on these start to move (like lift doors opening and closing). Obstacles come in all shapes and sizes and the best way get to know them is by going down to the option menu and checking out the best bit of the game...

CREATING A CORRIDOR

This is what makes The Light Corridor that wee bit different - the chance to make your own tunnel and choose all your obstacles. The best bit is simply playing around with the 2 sets of options (they sit in a control panel at the bottom of your screen). There are blocks that move and don't move, obstacles that work in unison with each other, the lot - in fact, you can use pretty well everything that you get in the normal game to set up the most impossible corridor of your dreams and then save it to tape or disk! Funky, eh? It's even more fun with the 2-player option, 'cos if you've made the corridor then you know when the difficult bits are coming up and your mate won't. (But that's a bit nasty and I know that you don't think like that!)

FAB AND GROOVY

Despite all the nonsense on the packaging about "chromatic harmony" and "sensitive universe" this is actually a good, honest, down-to-earth game. At times it's like playing squash and at others it's like a space age version of an obstacle race in The Krypton Factor. It goes on about being something to do with "the echo of light on the walls of silence" but it's not at all (unless you turn the sound down!). I thought it was pretty fab and groovy. Bits of it had me close to tears (of) frustration), but I still kept going back for more. It's that sort of a game. Another corker for Infogrames after last month's North & South, so well done, chaps!

Label: Infogrames
Memory: 48K/128K
Price: £10.99 Tape, £15.99 Disk
Program By: New Frontier
Author: Vincent Bourieux
Release: Out Now
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins

It's not often that I like the products of French software houses; they seem to be keen on complex, baffling ideas which don't add up to much in the way of gameplay.

But light Corridor is the spiffiest, zippiest bit of coding ever to appear from our European cousins, and if you miss it you be doing your brain an irreparable injury.

Imagine a cross between Breakout, Room 10 and Psychedelia - only in 3-D and you'll begin to get an inkling of what The Light Corridor is about. The basic idea is simple - always a virtue - but it's carried through with such imagination and technical skill that the mouth dribbles to think of it.

You have to steer a bouncing boll through maze using a paddle. Easy, yes? But the maze is in 3-D, the paddle's transparent and the tunnels are fun of unexpected hazards and obstacles.

Although each level is monochrome the graphics are incredibly fast-moving. As the 3-D tunnel unwinds ahead of you, you'll be amazed that the ball, your paddle and the various objects which appear move with such smoothness and speed. Crikey!

Your paddle can be positioned anywhere on the screen before you launch the ball, which shoots into the distance and disappears, continuing until it hits an obstacle and bounces back. You then have to move the paddle to bounce the ball back up the corridor, following it along with the paddle by holding down the fire button and pushing up. If you miss the ball on the rebound you get a sampled cry of despair and the instruction to get ready to launch the next ball.

The tunnels are full of obstacles such as panels which protrude halfway across from the side or the floors, moving panels which block the path way: and icons which disappear when you pass through them.

Some of the icons give you useful new features such as dual bats and sticky bats, bonus balls (oo-er) and even a homing bat! Others icons are heavy bummers though; the minus icons reduce the size of your paddle and one (you find out!) will loose you life.

There's a speed up option which allows you to shoot through the corridors at breakneck speed, and 50 stages each with a code number which you can use when restarting to put you straight to any level you have reached before. After every four levels there's a special challenge, such as a target square which has to be hit before you can proceed further.

The music is fantabulously rockacious, and there's even a course designer option allowing you to design your own corridors placing obstacles anywhere you want and saving the new layout for later use.

The overall effect is a stunning bit of coding which should keep you stuck to your Spectrum as tightly as Madonna is to her underwear.

GARTH'S COMMENT:
Sacre Blu! It's absolutely superb. Light Corridor is so addictive it should carry a warning! Don't settle for less - get the best ball batting game on the market!