Producer: C.R.L.
Memory Required: 16K
Retail Price: £5.95
Language: BASIC & some m/c
Author: B. Rowlingson

Lunar Rescue is, of course, a 'Lunar Lander' game, where you must guide your rescue craft down from the mothership to the moon's surface to collect stranded astronauts one at a time and take them back to the mothership. In this version the moon is surrounded by a dense belt of asteroids, five layers in fact, moving in two directions and at differing speeds, through which the craft must be guided. Below, there are three landing places - a small, medium and a large one. With each successful landing, the large and medium landing areas become smaller, making a docking harder.

The ship is undocked from the mothership by using the thrust button. Take off from the moon's surface is automatic after an astronaut has climbed on board. If you rescue all six astronauts, the next level has more asteroids.

COMMENTS

Control keys: 1/2 = left/right, 0 = thrust
Joystick: none
Keyboard play: fair
Colour: very poor
Graphics: primitive
Sound: unimaginative
Skill levels: 1
Lives: 3

Two years ago I'm sure this would have been a thrilling game for any owner of a ZX81 or even the incredible new Spectrum, but today it just looks silly. The graphics are primitive in the extreme with unanimated character block movement and virtually no use of colour at all, just red, green and yellow stripes for the landing platforms. The game is reasonably hard to play, but we've just become used to playing better looking games than this.

This game is in BASIC (with a very little machine code for some of the graphics) and therefore has obvious limitations, eg. jerky graphics (character movement). The game is average in play but it's rather out of date, and anyway there are better versions around

Lunar Rescue looks like a coloured up ZX81 game although there's hardly any colour in it. Getting through the asteroids is not easy - there's a left/right control and a thrust key, which is described in the inlay as 'increases your thrust'. In fact, pressing it slows you down. Not very good.