Producer: ANTARTIC
Retail Price: £1.99
Author: David McGee

The moral of this tale is a simple one. Never fall asleep in the cinema after a hard day's graft, especially if the film you are watching happens to be about fearsome fanged monsters and long legged beasties. If you do you may never wake up...

After a day's digging, there's nothing Jasper the gravedigger enjoys more than a scary film. One evening while, watching The Dream of a Thousand Vampires, he drifts off into an uncomfortable sleep and has a curious dream. Somehow he has been transported into the film he was watching and has taken over the starring role. Now it is up to him to defeat the Vampire Master.

Vampires are pretty indestructible creatures. Their one weakness is a dislike of anything religious and the sight of a Cross is enough to get them shaking in their coffins. Jasper must collect as many crosses as he can if he is to stand any chance of defeating the Master of evil. The Master is not the only danger in the game. Each screen is filled with an array of monsters, from scuttling spiders to slithering snakes. Jasper loses a life every time he touches a monster - at least he has nine lives in his dream!

The locations are booby trapped - ten ton weights drop from the ceiling to squash Jasper, and false floors send him crashing to his death on the ground below. Each screen must be cleared of crosses before Jasper can move on the next one. Careful timing is essential as some of the crosses turn into blazing effigies of evil and it Jasper tries to collect a fiery cross he looses a life.

Before the final confrontation, Jasper has to work his way through a range of strange locations - from his Club to The Sinking of the SS Titantic. The Master must be confronted five times before he is destroyed, and takes on a different character each time round the game.

A status area at the top of the screen indicates Jasper' progress, and as the sun gradually sets and the new moon rises you know that time is running out for the little Gravedigger. This'll be the last time he watches any late horror movies for a long while,...

COMMENTS

Control keys: X left, C right, top row to fire, 2nd row to jump, ENTER to start
Joystick: Kempston, AGF
Keyboard play: adequate
Use of colour: bright
Graphics: crude; poorly animated
Sound: dreary title tune and tiny spot effects
Skill levels: one
Screens: 9

This game is absolutely appalling. The graphics are very bad and slowly animated, and game is nigh on impossible to play. The instructions at the beginning use a re-defined character set which is very hard to read even on the most well tuned T.V. and the music is very dreary. The Master looks like a very poor copy of Chiller which was pretty terrible anyway. I really couldn't see any good points to the game - stick to the T.V. series.

Nothing about this game appeals to me. It is so infuriating that after only one go I'd had enough. Lack of speed and poor control are the two things which really bring it down. The graphics are not what I'd call good, but they are adequate; the characters flicker slightly and none of them are really detailed: the backgrounds are a little over-coloured but there is very little colour clash. The sound is poor - if you listen carefully you may hear a spot effect during the game and there is a tunette on the title screen. Generally I wouldn't recommend this one as it offers almost no playability or addictive qualities.

What can I say? Nothing even vaguely complimentary, that's for sure. The Master is one of those awful games that really annoy me, because it's been so badly written. The graphics are grotty, the collision detection inaccurate, and the music on the title screen: arggghh! The Master very definitely looks as if it has been rushed, as a few more alterations could have got Artic a nice game. As it is though... Ugh!

Artic
£1.99

Artic may have vamped up its new budget software label, Antartic, with the release of a new title in the hope of taking a byte out of Mastertronic's market. It makes a big deal of the new packaging - but if the cover of The Master is anything to go by then Antartic may well leave you cold.

As for the game, it's a multi-screen arcader with the emphasis on platforms. Jasper, who has a penchant for watching horror movies, has fallen asleep during one. He awakes to find himself trapped within a world of film horror. Spookey! His only escape is to play his way through seven platform screens before the ultimate confrontation with The Master on the eighth.

As Jasper, to reach The Master, you must collect the correct number of Holy Crosses, and that's not easy as they have a tendency to transform into symbols of evil. Along the way, secure in the knowledge that, like the coolest of cats, you have nine lives, you'll need to zap numerous aliens (though they can't all be killed) and avoid a barrage of missiles. Once you've defeated The Master five times (yawn) it's back to the fray, though in a new form, to vanquish the vituperative vampire. On your journey you'll be tempted, Alice like, to press certain buttons which may or may not help you. Either way, complete the task before midnight (you'll see the daylight seeping away on-screen) or you'll end up with a right pain in the neck.

As you can probably tell, the game relies heavily on repetition and persistence - I mean, you have to fire and jump like crazy to get through the screens. If that's the kind of game you like to get your teeth into, fair enough - but I'm sure you'll find as good elsewhere, even at this price.

WHAT CAN I GET FOR £1.99

Rock bottom - £1.99. It seems there is a simple rule governing software pricing policy - if it doesn't cost £9.99 then it must cost £1.99. Now this is jolly simple for software distributors and retailers who find the fact that most software is one of two possible prices easy on their accountant's brains but it means this: software which costs £9.99 is either really fab or involves a licencing deal so expensive that the software firm needs the margins.

Software which costs £1.99 is... well... rapidly becoming almost everything else. From the titles reviewed here it's clear that £1.99 will buy you some of the most awful and some of the most awesome programs ever devised...

THE MASTER
Label: Antartic
Author: Dinky
Price: £1.99
Joystick: Kempston, AGF
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Graham Taylor

One of the first releases from Artic's new Antartic budget range but it leaves me very cold indeed. The blurb has it like this: 'a classic game of fast and furious action that requires lightning reflexes.' After several hours of reflexing over and over again it became clear that what we have in The Master is a severe case of the 'Oh my God, Manic Miner again except that the whacky sprites aren't funny at all, and anyway the program doesn't know how to use them properly since everything looks translucent and insubstantial' syndrome.

The creaky plot has you simply jumping and bouncing your fast and furious way around lots of screens collecting crosses, dodging some depressingly whacky sprites, and then leaving the screen to go on to the next one which, you can be sure, is even more whacky than the one before. The single element that amounts to a good, or at least original, idea is that every so often one of the crosses bursts into flames making it too hot to handle - the usual instant death results.

Theoretically, the point of all this bouncing around is to collect enough crosses to kill The Master. Your character comes complete with an inexhaustible stock of what looks like custard pies with which to temporarily blast lesser monsters. The Master, being a sort of vampire type creature, is killed merely by your having gone through all the screens and collecting all the crosses - I can sympathise since going through the whole game would damn near kill me.

The programming is very dodgy, aside from platforms from which you can walk at least five steps into thin air before falling - just like a Roadrunner cartoon - there seem to be some occasions when you can hang on to a platform by the neck. Quite apart from the fact that jumping through steel girders and other solid constructions is a frequent part of the game.

Even at £1.99 the program is overpriced and, even if you absolutely love Manic Miner style games, I doubt you'll want this...

Artic Computing
£1.99

Artic Computing, once one of the big names in the Spectrum software marketing, have recently launched their own budget label and like Creative Sparks, have kicked off with a platform game.

The master has you chasing after a number of crosses in order to defeat a vampire who lurks somewhere in the final screen of the game. The crosses are situated on the many levels of platforms on each screen and, of course, these platforms are patrolled by an assortment of deadly beings who stand between you and the crosses. Once you've collected all the crosses on each screen you can then make your way to the exit which leads onto the next screen.

All the screens that I've been able to reach so far have been named after and based upon well known science fiction films such as Blade Runner, E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark. So on the E.T. screen there are platforms patrolled by little extra-terrestrial type creatures and men in space suits.

The best thing about The Master is that the screens have clearly been well thought out in order to present you with a real challenge. It took me ages to get past just the first screen, but the game was sufficiently addictive that I enjoyed the process of trying to get through even though I was having to tackle the same obstacles over and over again.

The addictiveness of the game makes up for the fact that the animation is a bit flickery and the colour combinations on most of the screens are a bit rough on the eyes. There's also one sneaky little feature in that the crosses you're trying to collect are themselves deadly from time to time. Every now and then they burst into flame and I often found that I was so busy working out how to reach the crosses that I didn't notice when they were on fire and lost several lives as a result, just when I thought I'd managed to clear the screen.

The only less than addictive feature of the game is that you have to go through the screens in a fixed order, and after a while going through the early screens time after time could get a bit boring. But at £1.99 this is an enjoyable budget title and will probably be good fun for the younger Spectrum owners.