Producer: DK'Tronics
Memory Required: 48K
Retail Price: £9.99
Language: Machine code
Author: Don Priestley

For many of you the all too brief appearance of Terry and Arthur once a week is simply not enough, perhaps DK'Tronics has the solution, now you can idle away the time waiting for the next programme playing this program. Minder is a trading game played in true Arthur Daley style, if you feel sure that you can double deal, short change and generally put one over your fellow humans then you should have few problems. As with any trading game the object is to buy and sell goods to make a profit. Of course the goods dealt with in Minder tend to register on the upper band of the temperature scale.

At the start of the game you have two thousand notes and a variety of goods, these will vary every time you start a game but 5 home computers at £47 (they must have been Commodore 16's) and 10 bags of mushroom compost at 6 quid a bag would be typical. You can take stock by selecting 'I' for inventory and you will also be reminded of any goods that you should deliver or collect. To sell goods you'll need some victims and Minder offers a choice of locations where they may be found, the prime one being the Winchester club. Travelling from one location to the next is simplicity itself, selecting 'G' offers a sub-menu with a choice of locations. You can go to your home, the 'lock-up'. Terry's flat, the Winchester club or any one of eight dealers. Arriving at a location, you will be confronted with a set of windows. If they are empty then no one's in, otherwise there will be pictures of the various characters present. To talk to a character, simply enter appropriate the frame number.

On entering the Winchester any hesitation in selecting a person to talk to will result in one of the many rogues attempting to force dubious merchandise on you. These people can be a real pain but you might be missing a good deal and being rude will only cause a scene. The picture of the person you are talking to appears alongside the input/output area and since each character always identifies himself the player soon learns the useful contacts and the not so.

The Winchester club is a less than ideal sales patch as the characters prefer drinking to doing business. When you want to unload some goods it is far better to pay a visit to one of the dealers at their own premises but there your problems begin. The dealers spend most of their time away from their places of business, so you can decide to wait or try another dealer. To play the game well you will have to and learn the various characters' lifestyles so you will know where to go when you want them.

The work really begins with selling. This is hard work! You can begin the banter with Phrases such as 'ARE YOU INTERESTED IN...' or 'I'VE GOT SOME...' The next stage is to fix the price you want the highest price, he wants the lowest with luck you may agree in the middle. You will find yourself bickering in the same way over the quantity of the order but after an agreement has been reached your customer will confirm the agreement and give you date by which he wants them delivered. You can sell goods that you haven't got but if you fail to deliver them on time the buyer will be more difficult in the future. Delivering goods is a major part of the game, and having clinched the deal Terry will have to be found and asked to deliver them it helps to remember the customer's name so Terry knows where to go. After the delivery Terry deducts his cut and hands the balance over - when you have found him again!

The Daley slog, then, consists of trips to and from dealers, chasing Terry and trying to find the best deals. The game lasts for 15 days (not real-time) and time-wasting must be avoided whenever possible. The game introduces a lot of complications, the most important being good old Sgt. Chisholme, a man constantly on the prowl. Dealers won't discuss business with him around and should he find his way to your 'lock-up' then you could end up with some gear confiscated and wasted time in jail. Terry's role is not as important as in the series, although he does act as your minder. Unlike the TV series Terry does rather well, dictating fees which you just have to pay.

The accepted vocabulary helps re-create the series'atmosphere with phrases like 'I'M ASKING A PONY' (a request for £25 rather than an attempt to converse with an equine quadruped). It's important to remember that the characters have memories, they will not forget you if you mess them about. Time is against you it's lost waiting for dealers, an hour goes on each journey, conversations also cost an hour, and just to make matters worse 'Her indoors' will not allow you to stay up later than 3pm so there's no chance of doing a 24hr stint to conclude a deal. The final score for the game is the amount of 'folding' that you hold, and on the fifteenth day unsold stock will not count as part of your profit, so get rid of it!.

COMMENTS

Control keys: respond to prompts
Joystick: N/A
Keyboard play: input a bit slow
Use of colour: not a great deal needed
Graphics: characters recognisable
Sound: good Minder tune
Skill levels: 1
Lives: 1
Screens: many different location

Minder is a sort of trading simulation game not unlike the TV series. The game follows the same buying and selling routine with dodgy faces and skirmishes with the 'old bill'. A point that I would like to make is that if the game existed without the TV tie-in it would not really rank as anything special. Don't accuse me of being anti-TV variant as I'm great fan of 'Minder' and I think the game is a very good idea. It really could have been expanded upon to make it more interesting and variable but it's still amusing and challenging and it improves with play. All right my son!

I am a great fan of the TV series so I expected a great deal from this program. In some respects I was disappointed. I found it difficult to get on with. Finding characters is time consuming and annoying. At times I felt that I had little control over my role in the affair. Deals are very hard - upsetting the characters resulting in discussions being peremptorily concluded. Nor could I try and bluff a dealer; often both parties' prices would be very close but attempting to call the deal off in the hope that he would go for a slightly higher price rather than not at all, more often than not would result in the dealer saying, 'SHAME...' and trotting off. The police presence is rather heavy. Chisholme must be able to mind read because on the days he was about he was at every dealers' premises before I even arrived. One other point is that you cannot treat Terry as shabbily as the real Arthur does. To play, I find Minder as annoying as it is intriguing. On the plus side while the dealing may be fiddly it is also a lot of fun especially when you have learned where to find people and how to talk the language. The characters' presentation works well and throughout the game you can identify people by spotting their face in a window, rather like spotting a friend at a party. There is a great deal to this game, a lot must be learnt about the 'Manor' and the characters within if you are to have a hope of making a crust. 'Hey guv, a tenner's a bit steep ain't it?

Publisher: DK'tronics
Price: £9.95
Memory: 48K

Who needs 30 packs of pure gold acupuncture needles? Hookey stuff, without a doubt, but that won't stop you from making a deal in Minder, based on the hit TV series.

Minder puts you in Arthur's shoes with a two grand stake and a fortnight to get rich. Visit the Winchester Club to make the contacts you'll need to buy your stock, or have a chat with proprietor Dave about the doings of the Old Bill, in the person of mean, moody, Inspector Chisholm.

When you've bought the goods you want, you'll have to try and sell them to one of the many shady dealers in the manor. If they're bent, Chisholm will be after you. And there's always the aggravation of trying to get hold of Terry to do the fetching and carrying. True to form, all Arthur ever does is count the money.

The game is played out through conversations with the many characters. There are up to 35,000, identified by an identikit style of graphics to build up their faces. You can use Arthur's own brand of cockney most of the time; the program recognises much slang, although at times you have to use a specific phrase to clinch a deal. You can also play a more devious game, selling goods you don't own and then trying to pick them up cheaply before time runs out to make a killing.

It's all great fun and very much like the TV show, except in so far as Terry's life as a minder, with all the violence and confusion, is barely mentioned. Unfortunately the game is marred by the occasional bug in the interpreter, so that conversations can go off the rails, with words missed out or the wrong prices agreed on.

That tends to destroy the illusion and show up the program as rather more simple than it appears when things function properly. However, you will never get the old 'I don't understand' comments.

There is plenty of humour, particularly in the extraordinary goods you will have to buy and sell. Chisholm can be a right pain at times, and you may have to cut your losses and dump bent stock to avoid being hassled on other deals. But the roots of Minder are still those of a fairly simple trading game, and although it may sustain itself for a while, it will ultimately become boring to play.

In all fairness, Minder could have been done extremely badly indeed, and to the credit of DK'tronics and Thames TV it is not at all bad. Just a bit more care at the final stages, with a touch more variety and depth to the conversations, and it could have been a classic.

CHRIS BOURNE TAKES A NOSTALGIC TRIP THROUGH THE BATTLE-STREWN FIELDS OF LAST YEAR'S STRATEGY GAMES

Before programmers discovered sprites, 3D graphics and continuous fire buttons, strategy games were regarded as a sort of ideal computer entertainment. That was partly based on the idea that computers were essentially souped-up calculators and partly because mainframe computers were very good at games like chess.

If you were into computers when the Spectrum was launched, you'll remember titles like Football Manager, and Flight Simulation being held up as examples of the finest programs around. These days it's more likely to be Alien 8, Shadowfire or Dun Darach, and their reputation depends in great part on graphics programming.

One of the reasons for that is financial. In their wisdom, retailers and distributors tend to see strategy games as having a narrow appeal. They are the classic sleepers which sell steadily but slowly. The trade wants the money now and lots of it. That means quick-selling arcade games, preferably with some spin-off celebrity theme attached, which hits number one in the charts in a couple of weeks and stiffs out a month later.

Many of the fine strategy/simulation games, produced in 1985, saw little exposure in the shops - certainly not in the big high street chains. That does not mean they were no good. In fact, there has been something of an upsurge in the quality of strategy games recently, and most spectacularly in the field of wargames.

Wargames have as long a tradition as any sort of computer entertainment. If you've ever read the hefty instruction books for classic wargames of the past - Avalon Hill's Afrika Korps you'll understand why. Those rules tended to read like a computer program with complicated look-up tables for cross-referencing dice throws, gridded maps and strict sequences of actions within a given turn of play. They also took hours to play.

The computer is supposed to take all the argument of table-top gaming out of wargames. It quickly does all the adding up, it doesn't cheat, and it can handle secret moves easily.

Unfortunately, most wargames never turn out like that. Graphics tend to be based on unrealistic grids, the rules appear over-simple, and the computer generally takes a vast amount of time to think about the moves.

One such game, which in other respects might have deserved success, was ATRAM. The name stands for Advanced Tactical Reconnaissance and Attack Mission, which turns out to be a NATO exercise in which the RAF and USAF battle it out using Harrier jump jets. The idea neatly sidesteps the obvious problems involved in trying to flog a game based on bombing the daylights out of Port Stanley.

The game is a computer-moderated boardgame with a glossy magnetic board and stylized pieces that you slide about as if you were a real NATO general. Unfortunately, the computer part is less fun. The only excuse for the program is to handle the boring bits like keeping track of how much fuel each jet has consumed.

The author is clearly fixated on jargon, which makes the rules almost unreadable, and all moves are keyed-in in a jumble of letters and numbers. It is so easy to make a mistake that you'll never be entirely sure whether you're playing the game properly. Headbangers and retired Harrier pilots only.

A much better two-player wargame is Confrontation from Lothlorien. Confrontation is a wargame system which allows you to design your own maps and, within reason, choose the composition of your armies. That allows you to play at a tactical or strategic level. The flavour is essentially modern, with armour and mechanised infantry supported by footsloggers, artillery and air units.

To go with the system, Lothlorien has also released a set of four scenarios ranging from a fictional WWII invasion of Kent to guerilla warfare in Afghanistan and Angola. We found the Egypt-Israel scenario most interesting in that the open terrain left units extremely vulnerable without air support. The organisation of such support requires capturing and defending a chain of airstrips in order to reach Tel Aviv or Suez depending on which way you're going.

Nevertheless, Confrontation is still slow. The same cannot be said of Overlords, another two-player game from Lothlorien. Loosely based on an old boardgame favourite, Campaign, it is played across a large area of fairly basic terrain. The concept is abstract, involving footsoldiers, generals, and the Overlord. The objective is to capture strongpoints - ownership of which generates one piece per turn. The fighting is equally abstract, based on the number and strength of the pieces in contact with the enemy.

Both players play simultaneously, and the game is so fast that you'll almost certainly need joysticks - preferably one each. The pieces whizz about the screen and that leads to a magnificent confusion as both players simultaneously attempt to outflank their opponent.

By and large, it is the epic battles of WWII which command the keenest attention from programmers. Battle for Midway is a strange hybrid from PSS, and incorporates arcade sequences. The Battle of Midway was a crucial turning point in the war against Japan, when the US sent a force to smash the invasion fleet.

The PSS game falls into two parts. First, locate the course of the three arms of the Japanese forces. Having done that you must send out strike forces from your aircraft carriers to bomb them.

When battle is joined you get the chance to zap the Japs using a joystick, which rather spoils the point of a supposedly realistic wargame. The author claims it simulates the fog of war, or some such nonsense.

We found the game easy to beat - it's good to see the computer taking an active part in a solo game for once, but the graphics are primitive and not very clear. A year ago we might have had more praise, but there are better games around.

Much better, in fact, and the star of the bunch is undoubtedly Arnhem from CCS. CCS, like Lothlorien, specialises in strategy games. For years CCS games were worthy rather than exciting, and almost always written in super-slow Basic. With Arnhem the company has finally struck gold.

The game follows the thrust of the Allied armies across the Rhine against fierce German opposition. The main idea was simple enough. The British were supposed to hurtle down country roads to Arnhem while American paratroopers were dropped on the bridges ahead to hold them for the main advance.

Of course it wasn't as simple as that, and neither is the game. There are a number of levels at which you can play, until you get to the full battle. A time limit is set, and if you don't capture the bridges quickly enough you lose. The German task is therefore to hold up the advance.

The graphics are pleasant, and information about each unit's strength can be obtained by positioning the cursor. One of the best features is the movement system. You can choose to move in open or close order - open order means you are far less vulnerable to attack but cannot take proper advantage of the roads. The game can be played by up to three players - with three, one player gets the Germans and the other two play British and American forces.

The feel of the game is tremendously realistic, with the onus placed on keeping the British moving down the roads. Arnhem is absolutely recommended and will hopefully encourage other software houses to pull their socks up and match the standard.

Less attractive, but equally fast, is Lothlorien's The Bulge - the German counter-attack on Antwerp and Hitler's last great offensive in Western Europe. It was always doomed to failure, what with narrow country lanes and terrain choked in snow. The computer plays so quickly and viciously that you'll be hard put to survive.

Although The Bulge scores over Arnhem for speed, the graphics are less clear and the strategy less easy to fathom. Lothlorien has opted for simultaneous movement, and one is frequently reduced to hurling forces willy-nilly into the fray without much regard for tactics.

A pleasing feature of both Arnhem and The Bulge is that you can issue general orders to units which they will continue to obey until you change them. That is a sensible and much more realistic alternative and saves having to move fifty pieces every turn, slowing the whole flow of play.

Moving away from wargames, another category of great antiquity in computer circles is what is known as the land-management game. An early example of the genre was Hamurabi which puts you in charge of an ancient kingdom. You are head of a population, and there is corn in the treasury.

The idea is to manage the economy - based entirely on corn - so that everybody gets enough to eat. There is enough corn to sow for next year with some in reserve in case of natural disaster.

Of course, the way the game is set up at the beginning, there is never enough, so you get to make decisions about how many people to starve to death for the greater good of the rest, and so on.

Such games are very easy to construct on computers, and if you want to write your own strategy game we suggest you try something along those lines. The secret is to construct a set of formulae governing the relationship between various factors - for example, how much food do people need? How many people are needed to sow an acre of land? How much corn?

There are very few business-type activities that cannot be simulated in that sort of way. Two famous games of this type are Football Manager from Addictive Games and Mugsy from Melbourne House, in which you play a gangster trying to run rackets with the aid of a none too loyal gang.

Sadly, Kevin Toms - Mr Football Manager himself - has not managed to follow that enormous success.

Addictive has brought out a number of games along similar lines in 1985, but none of them match the old classic.

Software Superstar casts you as a producer of games. You have to allocate time and money each month to releasing games, programming, advertising and the like. Nice touches include the decision to hype games or be honest about them, but the overall impression is dull, and we found it easy to get a hit program and reach the targets set.

Grand Prix Manager from the same outfit was equally tedious, with poor graphics to boot. Luckily CRL brought out the infinitely more entertaining Formula One - a Sinclair User classic - which we found totally compulsive.

Formula One is a full simulation of a grand prix season. Start off by hiring drivers and building cars - you have a million quid or so but it goes very fast. When the race starts choose your tyres and then watch the cars whizz past in convincing graphics. Messages inform you of the state of the track and incidents involving other cars, while a leader board keeps you in touch with the race positions.

Best of all, you can call pit stops for tyre changes, and the correct choice of timing may win or lose a race. The pit stop sequence is arcade based, and you have to manoeuvre a mechanic around the four wheels to complete it. Purists may have their doubts, but the speed of movement is linked to the amount of money you invested in the crew, and does not therefore make a mockery of the strategic element.

Formula One is a good game against the computer, but becomes really exciting when played with friends.

Almost as enthralling, although less well presented and rather more anarchic in play is The Biz, a simulation of the record industry from Virgin Games. You begin by choosing your social class - from stinking rich to unemployed - and then form a band. Hire a manager, go on the pub or college circuit and send endless demo tapes to bored record companies. If you have the money, you can cut your own discs, but beware - without the clout of the big boys behind you it may all go to nothing. The ultimate goal is, of course, to get a number one, but the road is full of pitfalls.

The game is full of subtle humour - you may reckon a dry ice machine is just right for your tacky rock band, but watch your credibility plummet. You may even get a chance to sample drugs during the game. Try it and see where it gets you.

On then to simulation proper, by which is meant those worthy and sometimes addictive attempts to portray accurately a real-life experience. The original impetus comes from the flight simulators used by airlines to train pilots, and for some time software houses only seemed to be interested in mimicking those.

They all look more or less the same, with an array of instruments on the lower half of the screen and a view of the horizon with occasional crude landmarks. Some are better than others for speed and ease of use, and the best are still Psion's antique classic, Flight Simulation and Digital integration's Fighter Pilot, which is rather more difficult but does allow for aerial dogfights.

DACC specialises in those features, and recently brought out 747 Flight Simulator. We've taken a bit of stick at Sinclair User for giving it the thumbs down, but I still maintain it's an unexciting production, mainly because the Jumbo jet isn't a patch on a light aircraft for aerobatics.

Real enthusiasts will probably enjoy it, it is certainly a worthy and apparently highly accurate program. If you're looking for entertainment, though, try elsewhere.

You might try looking at Southern Belle from Hewson. The program simulates the old Pullman service from London to Brighton, and you have to handle the great steam engine all the way.

Initial levels involve handling only one or two controls while the computer does the rest, but you work up to a full schedule with stops, signals, hazards on the track, brakes and handling gradients, to name a few.

It is a surprisingly fulfilling program, and the wire-frame graphics of recognisable landmarks along the track are well executed. You are marked at the end according to your accuracy on the schedule and how economically you conserved fuel.

Another unusual simulation is Juggernaut from CRL, in which you have to drive a container truck around town picking up cargoes. The screen shows an overhead view of the lorry and road, with traffic lights, status, steering and gears. The movement is slow and there are no other vehicles around - presumably you're driving in the middle of the night, council bye-laws notwithstanding. The irrepressible John Gilbert reckons the lorry looks like a Gillette GII razor. He's quite right, and although Juggernaut isn't a bad idea, the end result is rather dull.

Finally, a look at a few odds and ends which don't really fit any categories. One such Minder, a much-hyped trading game based on the famous television series.

You play Arthur Daley, the dodgy entrepreneur, and the idea is to buy and sell an incredible range of weird goods such as gold acupuncture needles while steering clear of the law in the form of mean inspector Chisholm.

You do that by seeking out dealers and wide boys, either at their warehouses or in the Winchester Club. Terry, as ever, gets to do the fetching and carrying, and can also be hired to mind you - an important function when dealers discover goods are stolen.

In essence the game is simply trading, with a large text interpreter enabling you to bargain with characters in authentic Daley cockney - it understands words like bent, or pony. Once you get into it there's rather more strategy involved. You have to organise Terry's time so goods get collected and delivered on schedule, while you need sufficient cash to pay for the next lot.

Minder is a pleasant romp and deserved to do better in the charts than it did, but would have benefited from a greater variety of incidents. Memory taken up with slang during the bargaining is fun at first but since it is really only window dressing it leaves you with the feeling that the game lacks depth.

Alien on the other hand, from Argus, has plenty of depth but is difficult to get into. It follows the tense cult movie in which a devastating alien invades a spaceship and proceeds to exterminate the crew.

The game uses menus to pick characters, objects and locations in the spaceship Nostromo, while plans of the decks indicate your position. The idea is to destroy the alien either in a straight fight - fat chance - or by escaping from the ship and blowing it up by remote control.

You only see the alien when you are in control of a character in the same room. The rest of the time you can hear it as doors and ventilation grilles slide open, or your scanner picks up the presence of a living creature nearby. That makes for tremendous tension in the play, and the one drawback is the simplicity of the graphics which works against the otherwise strong illusion of involvement. Fans of the film will enjoy it. Others may find it tough going.

We have made no mention of some of the plethora of spin-off titles in the sports arena which might come under the umbrella of simulations. Those are generally disappointing, especially in comparison with the arcade based sports games. Two, which play quite well, are Steve Davis' Snooker and American Football from Argus - which has the added virtue of not involving a famous personality. Nick Faldo's Open is a lovingly programmed simulation of the course at Sandwhich which suffers from one horrible flaw. The closer your ball is to the flag on the green, the more difficult it is to judge the angle at which you should strike it. In fact, the reverse should happen.

It is heartening to see arcade games taking on more elements of strategy in their play. Arcade-adventures such as Knight Lore or Gyron - if you can categorise those masterpieces at all - have as much to do with logical thought and planning as they do with swift reactions. That argues a growing maturity, both among games publishers and also in public taste, as computer owners look for more than a quick joystick fix from their hobby.