Producer: Imagine
Retail Price: £7.95

The aliens are invading and Mag Max, a robocenturion, has been created to save the threatened planet- just in time. His builders were destroyed by the attackers from outer space, and Mag Max must find all his components, scattered about the continents. Only then can he accomplish his ultimate programmed task in this shoot- 'em-up from a Nitchibutsu coin-op original.

His defending craft can move across the scrolling surface of the planet, and through the cavernous underworld that lies beneath its skin.

Aliens come in a myriad of forms: from death masks to yachts, from ice-cream cones to Cyclopean balls. Mag Max can evade but not destroy their blasts and shots, and he risks losing one of his six lives when he comes into contact with the aliens or their structures.

Craters pocking the planet's surface and the passageways beneath transport Mag Max to other, more perilous locations where more enemies await.

Mag Max's basic armament is a Super-Laser with a limitless supply of power, which can eliminate aliens and their constructions (and thus earn you points). And as he gathers his components into his ever-filling innards, he gains strength, defensive force and firepower.

Mag can also gather weaponry that doubles and quadruples his firepower; some invaders can only be destroyed with the special lance in the robot craft's weaponry. But each time he's hit by an alien, Mag loses the last weapon he acquired.

When a stage is completed, Mag encounters the leader of the invading hordes - and must vanquish him before going on to the next level.

COMMENTS

Control keys: Q/A up/down, N/M left/right, SPACE to fire
Joystick: Kempston, Interface 2, Cursor
Use of colour: generally drab in tone
Graphics: mostly small, though reasonably detailed
Sound: poor
Skill levels: one

The brilliant loading screen raises expectations, but the first time you play it Mag Max looks absolutely terrible; the graphics are simple and monochromatic. BUT the game itself is very playable. Mag Max is basically a shoot-'em-up with a few frilly extras. Collecting the robot's parts adds a new dimension to the game: with each part your ship becomes more powerful but more vulnerable, because you Increase in size. For all this, it's not particularly addictive - there just isn't enough depth. Mag Max is let down by its graphic presentation and lack of addictive qualities, and is certainly overpriced for an average shoot-'em-up.
ROBIN

As this game loaded I thought it was another 'save the world from the aliens' bore. But it's really quite good. The graphics are small but clear - especially the aliens, wandering around the screen making a nuisance of themselves. Just getting past the first few waves will make you want to keep playing. Though the idea - flying a spaceship round the screen picking up pieces of equipment to aid your mission - is not new, this game has for me that quality of making you want to see just one more screen. And with those aliens about it's difficult. Still, try before you buy.
MARK

At first play, I really disliked Mag Max because of the awful perspective technique; everything gives a false sense of depth and position, so I found myself doing quite a bit of exploding! But ten minutes of concentration helped resolve the problem, and once you get used to the poor graphics and odd collision- detection Mag Max becomes a reasonable-to good shoot-'em-up. The sound FX aren't anything astounding, but the title tune is quite nice. Overall Mag Max is a nice bit of blasting; but it's marred by the terrible perspective view.
MIKE

Imagine
£7.95

Ping, zzzarrp!!!! Piddle-tiddle-tiddle-tiddle-tiddle-tiddle-tum-tum.

And bong, bong, bong too. Here it is. Blast it all up, in the true Nitchibutsu (Bless you, Ed) arcade style. Scrolling action across a horizontal 3D, Zaxxon-style landscape or down through a person-hole cover (no sexism in a Rachael review) to try some side-on action in the caves.

Pop! Pop! Kaboom!!! This is one for the quick fingered as you duck, dive 'n dodge, shooting all the way like Dirty Harry on the trail of the punk who'll make his day.

You glide left to right - or rather the landscape glides right to left under you - and swerve in and out of the screen, avoiding surface structures as you go. But keep moving because the aliens all home in immediately, whether they're rooted to the spot or weaving around, and the only way to avoid their shots is to zig-zag.

Too much tension up top? (Try a larger T-shirt! Ed) Then position yourself over an entrance to the underworld and prepare to take on the formation nasties. They're joined together like some alien tapeworm and you've got to take out each section before they're dead.

Wipe out enough aliens and you get the chance to pick up a free gift - apparently this is an obligatory feature in shoot 'em ups, '87-style. These appear in order and include things like the blasters which double your fire power, a pair of fast-walking legs and a lance, which you'll need for some of the heavyweight nasties.

But Rachael has a little quibble. To get enough features onto each screen, which gives you time to steer around them, the graphics are a little squidgy and the smaller missiles are difficult to see against the monochrome background.

But what the heck! It all moves so fast that you'll be diving back in every time you die. This is a high score freak's dream. Even if it isn't the most involved scenario ever, it's dangerously addictive entertainment. I'm just grateful I'm not pouring ten pees into the arcade machine.

And now. If you'll excuse me... Whap! Whapp!

Label: Imagine
Author: Gary Knight
Price: £7.95
Joystick: various
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Tamara Howard

When one realises that the end of civilisation is at hand, and that there is no hope for survival, it makes sense to go down a hole and build a robot. It's not going to keep you alive, but you at least have the satisfaction of knowing that your 'droid is going to blast the hell out of the aliens after you've gone.

And that fellow star fighters, is basically the SP of Mag Max (Max being the droid in question). But there's more. Owing to sudden death, the mechanics didn't quite finish off poor old Max. So he's got no legs and no protective headgear. But never fear! It's quite easy to pick up these little necessities, once you've wasted a few of the enemy hordes.

But that's not easy. They're pretty mean as hordes go, they've got pointy heads and they walk around and fire at you. Doesn't do a lot for intergalactic peace really, but it does serve to make the game a bit more exciting.

And gosh, it's one exciting game. Some of the screens are green, and one or two of them are brown. Amazing. Mag Max is pretty enjoyable. Lots of opportunities to kill things, and progress on to higher levels, with some more things to kill. At first, as with all shoot-em-ups, it's quite tricky to get past the first row of aliens, but after a while, it's easy to suss out techniques to get you through.

As you pick up various bits of your metallic anatomy, you gain more fire power, which makes life good for a laugh. This is extra important, because there are certain aliens which can only be destroyed by certain weapons, and if you come up against one without that particular piece of weaponry, you're scrap metal.

As games go, Mag Max is pretty good to look at. The graphics are large and clear and the scrolling is smooth. The only problem that I found was on the green screen. Seeing as everything else around you is green, including the background, apart from the black bits, which aren't green at all, it's quite difficult to spot the alien bullets coming for you, and sometimes you just find yourself dying, and you never even saw them coming. The satisfying part to dying, if dying can ever be said to be satisfactory, is that if you hammer the Fire button while you're doing it (dying that is) you can carry on shooting even when you're a celestial sort of robot. And that's good for a laugh.

At the end of each stage of the game, an excessively large and evil dragon appears, which has to be bombarded over and over again with various bits of ammunition, and then you can proceed to the next level and start all over again. If you should get bored with one particular screen, you can always duck down a hole and go on to a different underground passage. In that section the 3Dish view becomes side on. You still kill everything though.

So that's Mag Max.

Another actually quite good scrolling shoot-em up from Imagine.

C64, £8.95cs, £12.95dk
Spectrum, £7.95cs
Amstrad, £8.95cs, £14.95dk

Here's a horizontally scrolling shoot-em-up that has the player controlling a robot scouring the surface of a planet looking for parts of himself. This robot was designed to repel the hordes of invaders and every part of the robot that the player collects increases the his fire power. The end-of-level guardians and progressively harder stages make for one highly addictive and extremely playable game that will certainly test your reactions. The Spectrum version is, arguably, the best of the bunch.

(Although the review states it's for C64 there is nothing in the review to indicate this. Plus all screenshots are from the Spectrum version.)

MACHINES: Spectrum/C64/Amstrad
SUPPLIER: Imagine
PRICE: £7.95 (Spectrum), £8.95 (C64/Amstrad)
VERSION TESTED: C64

Fancy changing the destiny of a whole planet? Not an offer that comes your way every day, is it? But Mag Max gives you the chance to save a world from the evil Mechanoids. Haven't we just had an election to do much the same thing? Enough of this biting social satire - on with the review.

Mag Max, if you remember, was advertised ages ago, but like many a game failed to appear on schedule. But now this conversion of the Nitchibutsu (Bless you!) coin-op is here and raring to take you on a zap-packed adventure.

The game is set on a once civilised planet which has been destroyed by the awesomely nasty Mechanoids. They are the sort of people who like ripping the tops off flowers as they walk past your front garden.

Which is what happened on the planet where the Mag Max project was being carried out. Mag Max, an advanced robot with more deadly gizmos than a food processor, was created by the Sci-Corps who, when threatened by the Mechanoids, buried bits of Max all around the planet. They left the main bit in a secret bunker.

The Mechanoids went about spitting horrible laser death joyfully unaware of Mag Max sitting waiting to pounce.

And this is where you come in. You control the mighty robot and direct his attack on the mean old Mechanoids. Guide him across the surface of the planet, and through underground passages, searching for his long-lost spare parts.

You begin by flying the main bit of Max over the 3D perspective surface of the planet - full of animated hazards, pillboxes and flying mechanoids.

Your best bet is to grab the body section you see waiting by a crater and then dive underground to familiarise yourself with the controls and idea of the game.

The underground sections are pretty straightforward, horizontally scrolling shoot-'em-up. But watch out for the homing missiles fired by the various types of aliens you encounter.

Collect more parts of Mag Max - you'll find them scattered around at pretty regular intervals - then find a hatch which leads back to the surface and have a crack at the more difficult surface defences with your increased firepower.

By no means a classic - but well presented, with good graphics, nice sound. It's also very challenging and very playable.

£8.95 cassette/Amstrad
£7.95 cassette Spectrum
£12.95 disk 64/Amstrad
Publisher: Imagine

After approximately a year and a half, and a good sprinkling of hype, comes Imagine's next Nichibutsu arcade conversion.

Five Magmax droids are standing between an alien invasion and eventual conquest. Unfortunately most of the weaponry is spread out over the horizontally scrolling landscape.

Your aim is to survive the various landscapes by collecting extra pieces of your robot. This increases firepower by an extra sprite. Another novel weapon is the lance, used to spear certain indestructible aliens. From time to time you have to destroy a three-headed metal dragon. This generally requires all fire power.

You can go above and below the planet surface via a series of lifts, the lower caverns usually being more hectic. Here the enemy activity consists of mobile and stationary aliens as well as near-impassable bridges and barriers.

What is Imagine playing at? This game is full of bugs and irritations. Why does the inlay say RETURN is the pause/unpause button when the buttons are F1/F7? The dragon sequence in the 64 conversion is completely pointless - a static creature with two heads and no neck (three heads plus necks in the arcade version). What is the point of having orange bomb-bases if at one point you are going to change the screen colour to orange? Consequently the bases become black dots with an outline of the actual base there.

Why have the coin-op's original colours been changed from a brown and grey bas-relief combination to blue, pink and purple? It looks disastrous. The aliens, by the way, have discovered the secret of eternal life - you shoot them and they still chuck bombs even when dead and gone!

If you get killed anywhere while still fully armed, the game decides you don't deserve to play any more and duly crashes. (If you are above ground, the landscape turns to garbage as a warning.)

On one occasion the enemy sprites were turning black, to explosions, to garbage, to normal again. Sometimes, cavern based (two-dimensional) aliens make appearances on the above ground levels and vice versa. The garish green and orange would have been better as the green and light green seen in the advertisement if the cavern backdrop could not have been achieved exactly, the Amstrad look should have been adopted, a black screen with the cavern detail on the lop and bottom of the screen only.

Fred Gray's title screen music - I expect better from the man who did the Mission AD, Army Moves and Breakthru music. That Ocean loading music appears again! This is another in the 'I'll lock up if you press REASTORE' series.

Sometimes the bases only half blow up. What is it with Imagine? It can turn out consistently good conversions yet waste money on unconvertible arcade games. Imagine would do much better to stick to marketing games only. The games it releases from specialist software are much superior to those produced in-house.