Producer: Mirrorsoft
Retail Price: £7.95
Author: Dalali Software

Think once, think twice, think bike - for in Mean Streak they're going to be coming after you, on this Sunday afternoon ride with a difference.

You're out there on the road, minding your own business, when a succession of computer-controlled psychopathic bikers try to bump and bore you off your two-wheeled chariot. And if that fails, they're not averse to taking a pot shot at you.

But you're not standing for that. You too can push attackers off the roadway, or get behind them and blow them away using the guns and missiles you just happen to be carrying.

But these fiendish bikers who have never passed a proficiency test in their lives aren't the only dangers lurking on the streets. Scattered across the blacktop are tin tacks to puncture tyres, rocks and oil slicks that can send you careering and make you vulnerable to an opponent's nudge, ramps that have to be cleared, walls that can flatten a face, and gaping holes the council have forgotten. Lose control of your machine and you end up as an accident statistic with one of your three lives gone.

To avoid these odious obstacles, the bike can accelerate or slow down, be swung across the road or leap into the air. Advance warning of the problems ahead on the scrolling screen is given Defender-style by a radar screen showing a vertical view of the road section with the position of your bike and opponents displayed.

Fuel, oil, missiles and tyres are in limited supply, though there are engine-refreshment cans and missiles on the road.

There are three restart cones that can be picked up as you ride onward; should you succumb to an unwholesome end, a cone will allow you to restart from the point where you picked it up.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: good main characters, marred by jerky scrolling
Sound: reasonable tune and spot FX

At first Mean Streak looks very promising, but successive plays reveal a lack of real substance. The graphics are simple but the jerky scrolling that lets it down slightly. Here's a game requiring little in the way of instructions, and so it's easy to get into and enjoyable for a while, but I wouldn't describe it as addictive and it turns out to be a bit too frustrating - on several occasions when my player was killed off the exact cause of death was a bit dubious. Mean Streak offers some good ideas but repetitious gameplay and some slipshod programming knock it down a lot of points.
ROBIN [64%]

I was immediately taken back to the days of Spy Hunter, speeding down the city streets blasting down all and sundry. It's a pity that there seems to have been little progress since those days. I had the impression Dalali plumped for monochrome graphics and diagonally-scrolling play area just to make the game more up to date. The shoddy implementation results in inaccurate collision-detection, making the game unplayable for the most part. While the bikers are well-animated and drawn with plenty of detail, the rest of the graphics seem to have been forgotten - and they're very average.
PAUL [53%]

Mean Streak's an odd game. It resembles virtually all the other diagonally-scrolling games in feel and difficulty of control; somehow, though, Dalali Software has succeeded in making it playable. After a few lengthy plays I'm well stuck in and probably will be for an hour or two to come. The controls are a pain - fair enough, eight moves on one joystick isn't bad, but in a panic it's frighteningly easy to jump when you want to fire a missile. Nice graphics, nice gameplay, nice presentation - overall Mean Streak is a nice game.
BEN [75%]

Label: Mirrorsoft
Author: Byron Nilson
Price: £7.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Graham Taylor

Imagine Paper Boy with firepower and you have some of the flavour of Mean Streak - new out from Mirrorsoft.

Where you had to dodge around obstacles and deliver papers in Paperboy in this game you have to dodge obstacles and blow away a whole series of computer controlled rival bikes.

We're not talking push bikes either - these machines are mean.

You control a bike speeding across a featureless landscape. Featureless that is except for assorted brick walls, tin-tacks and other obstacles that will total or seriously damage your bike.

And here and there are useful items you actually want to bump into - bonus oil (for causing oil slicks), extra fuel and missiles.

The objective is pretty simple - destroy the other bikes and get to the end of each level within a tight time limit.

This is also going to involve carefully timed jumps over ramps and sometimes the destruction of barriers with only moments in which to respond.

On early levels dealing with the bikes is mainly a matter of getting behind them and blasting but as they get cleverer you will need to swerve and weave your way around. One entertaining option is to barge the bikes on to a ramp which runs along the side of the road.

The barging can get very frenzied as the two bikes push back and forth - not unlike a James Bond film actually. More fun is to be had by dropping oil slicks...

The combination of bike-to-bike fighting and obstacle dodging makes for a pretty potent game. It's nicely presented too. The screen scrolls smoothly and diagonally at la Paperboy and the movement of the bikes looks pretty authentic.

On a game as fast moving as this the screen is inevitably two-colour though exactly which two colours you get depends on the level.

It must be said, the backgrounds are pretty plain and uninteresting but then the bikes are really where most of the action is.

The only real criticism I have is that after a point there are few surprises in the game - the levels look pretty much the same and only the intelligence and numbers of the enemy and the variety of obstacles changes.

To be fair though tactics is the point of the game rather than lots of vastly different levels and in that sense it succeeds magnificently.