Melbourne House
£14.95

Yes, it's finally here! The coin-op conversion you'd sell your granny and all her goods and chattels to own! The arcade game that had them rolling in the aisles. Having released the MM Construction Set last year, Melbourne House has now gone rolling ahead with a full implementation of the original game itself, in a special gold trimmed pack, marked "The Official Version - Deluxe Edition". On the reverse of the tape is a new improved version of the Construction Set editor program.

Marble Madness was always an arcade favourite, (still is at some venues) and the clinical condition, Marble Madness Queueing Syndrome ranks up there in the British Medical Association's hi-score table with Asteroid Wrist or Defender Thumb. For those of you who never saw it in the flesh, here's a brief rolldown of this wholly spherical scenario.

You are a heavy metal ball (Whooorrr Deep Purple Kerannnggg!) whose task in life is to roll around the 3D platforms of a far distant planet. En route to your escape, you encounter all manner of villains, fiendish badlets, and cruel blobby things...Brr! Not to mention (well don't then. Ed) the black balls, brooms and spinning hoops.... oh yeah, there's a bit of oil around the place too. The Ed must have been fixing her car on this planet a while ago!

This is all very well, but how does it play? Very nicely thank you. Which is quite surprising, 'cos there's a tremendous array of baddies doing their stuff (eurr!) on screen at the same time as your little bearing, so the Speccy's doing a lot at a high speed too! The play of the game is true to its arcadian daddy, with all the humps and bumps faithfully reproduced. The programmer must've been a real fan to do it this well!

The graphics aren't in colour though 'cos something had to go, and the richly soaked colours lost out. An well, you know what they say, 'You can't make an omelette without breaking the space time continuum'. And sure enough, the continuum in this case is monocoloured, that's to say, it's one colour all over, with black or blue lines on it. It doesn't detract from your enjoyment too much, because the game is complete in all other respects, and you spend too much time avoiding the baddies to worry much what colour they are.

I lurve it to bits. The ghosts of the martian marble can finally be laid to rest.

MACHINE: Spectrum/Amstrad
SUPPLIER: Melbourne House
PRICE: £8.95/£9.95
VERSION TESTED: Spectrum

Here's a nifty bit of software that no true MM fan should be without - the only problem is that 64 owners aren't likely to get a chance to play around with this useful utility because Melbourne only have the rights for Speccy and Amstrad.

What you get is the normal Marble Madness game plus an editor which allows you to construct your own MM tracks - complete with all the nasties like bubbles, oil slicks and Mary Poppins flying umbrellas. All the ingredients of the arcade classic.

You can build your tracks from scratch or simply edit the ten different tracks already included in the program.

The construction screen shows a smaller version of the play area with icons representing the different MM track sections ranged down the right hand side of the screen and the nasties/bonus scores/options along the bottom of the screen.

When defining a playing area you are free to move the cursor over any part of the screen. To place a new piece, move the cursor over the shape you want, press fire, that shape appears as a cursor in the play area, where you can move it to the desired position and press fire again to drop it.

To delete a piece, move the cursor over it and press fire. All other aliens and special features are placed using the cursor and the fire key.

Once you've built a track you can try it out by selecting the "test" option. And if it doesn't work out you can go back to the edit mode to put things right.

You can go on adding screens until the memory is full up and then you can save your designs, and go back to creating more new MM challenges.

Fancy a break from building? Then just go back to the main menu and select the play the game mode. This gives you as good a game of MM as you can expect on the Speccy.

The construction set makes MM a whole new ball game every time you play!