£1.99
Mastertronic

There seems to be something about people from the other side of the Iron Curtain that makes them devise fiendishly difficult puzzles for us Westeners to blow our minds trying to solve! I mean, look at Tetris, and good ol' Ernst Rubik, and now this! Mindtrap (as you've probably gathered from the title) is of those disgustingly addictive, simple puzzle games that seem to hold your attention for weeks for no logical reason whatsoever!

Each screen has a set of blocks, of different colours. All you have to do is swap them around into columns of one colour each; the colour for each column is shown at the bottom. You control a frame which can contain four of these blocks at time; this can be moved about the screen, and fire and left or right rotates the colours in either direction. Don't worry about the appalling explanation; the idea is incredibly easy to pick up.

As I said before, Mindtrap is fiendishly addictive; the only moan I have is the ridiculous password system; OK, so it's fairly secure, but who wants to type in a 32 character line of what looks like random characters just to get onto the next level? The graphics aren't exactly stunning, but then they're not usually on this sort of game! A lot of mental effort is required on Mindtrap, particularly on the higher levels; you need to move quickly and think at the same time. It's very addictive, though, and well worth buying.

BARGAIN BASEMENT

Never a man to miss out on a spicy low-pricey, Jonathan Davies sifts through this month's batch of good, bad and downright ugly budget games.

Mastertronic Plus
£2.99
Reviewer: Jonathan Davies

If there's one thing budget labels always seem to do well, it's these little puzzley things. ones featuring coloured blocks seem to crop up particularly frequently and, as chance would have it, Mindtrap is one such game.

In this case, you move the blocks around by rotating groups of four of them through 90° about a central axis, if you see what I mean. The ultimate aim is to get them all lined up in columns of the same colour before the timer runs down, at which point you'll move onto the next of the 999,999 levels.

Eh?

Yeah, there're rather a lot, really. Shame they couldn't make it to 1,000,000 which would have been quite an achievement, but that still works out to about (prod, prod...) 25 screens for every byte of free memory. Not bad going. You're not expected to sit through from start to end in one sitting though. Good Lord no. There's a password system (32 letters and numbers to scribble down per level), so you can split up the (prod, prod...) 40,000-odd hours it would take to complete them all into manageable chunks of, say, four hours a day. Keep that up every day and it would take you (prod, prod, prod...) 27 years to finish the game. Not bad for a couple of quid.

I'm hooked. Buy it.

Virgin Mastertronic
£3.99
081 960 2255
Reviewer: Jonathan Nash

My prowess with puzzle games is legendary. The number of swaggering letters that arrived after Mental Block appeared on the cover tape, claiming that the game was so easy even a badger could complete it was, oooh, quite large indeed. But I defy anyone to shout me down on Mindtrap. It's blimmin' tricky.

The first thing is, it's got nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine levels. (Oh, go on! Ed) No. it's true. It really has. (Blimey, eh? Ed) The second is, although the idea is to rearrange mixed-up dice so they're in nice neat coloured rows, you can only manipulate 'frames' of four dice at a time. This means that, inevitably, you twiddle the vital cube off into the ether before you realise what's going on, then spend the next twenty minutes mucking everything up to get the blessed die back again. What fun.

Actually, it is quite good fun. but incredibly frustrating. The time limit is very generous, but the different levels have a habit of restricting your moment with loads of invisible walls. Bah. Also, the gameplay's very limited - just move the cubes. No extra features are added until Level Thirty, when another layer of dice pops up.

The main problem with Mindtrap is that you're often more likely to succeed by swapping dice madly and randomly than if you sit down and think the level out. And that can't be a good thing, unless you really enjoy moving things madly and at random. 'Can you escape the mindtrap?' asks the blurb. The answer is, regrettably, who cares? Not me, that's for sure. It's back to Level Five of Logo and yah boo sucks to the rest of you. (How terribly ill-mannered. Ed)

Label: Mastertronic
Author: ?????????
Price: £1.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tony Dillon

I can't understand why Mastertronic should have tried to put a plot to what is nothing more than an enjoyable arcade puzzle game, but try they did. Basically, we're told you are trying to keep the world in some sort of neat tidy order. This is difficult not because of political problems or certain attitudist racial inequalities. (Get on with it - JD). No Sirree. The reason it's very hard to keep the world in some sort of neat working order is because somebody keeps leaving all the lovely coloured blocks in a mess.

And so your task is to rearrange all the blocks and place them in rows of colour corresponding to small markers at the bottom of the screen.

Just because you're a real stickler for detail and order, you have decided that the only way you can rearrange the blocks is by rotating them within blocks of four. This is done by positioning a cursor over a group of four blocks, holding down the fire button and pressing left or right to rotate the group of four left or right.

To add insult to injury, you are restricted to the amount of positions you can place the cursor. The places you are allowed to centre the cursor on are marked with a dot, and the places you can't aren't. It's pretty annoying when you think all you have to do is rotate a certain block of four to finish the screen, and it turns out you can't because you can't actually put your cursor over it.

And that's the game. Well, not quite. For the first thirty levels, that's the game. Then the fun really starts. The game goes 3D. Then you have two planes to play on, taking blocks from one plane to the other. The number of planes increase as you work your way through the challenge, which could be pretty tough, taken as there are 999,999 screens.

The game is simple, and for this particular game, it's a problem. With a game of this type, there are only so many different types of puzzle you can come across, and once you've worked out all the little tricks, you find yourself flying through the levels at an alarming rate. So much so that the game becomes boring through repetition. I can't see anyone other than AS playing this through to the end.

But that's what they said about Rubik's Cube.

Graphics are simple and functional. Sound is simple and functional. A simple functional game. Worth checking for a challenge, but MENSA won't use it.

Mastertronic
Spectrum/Amstrad £2.99

Shades of Erno Rubik and his Cube here, partly because this is a very compelling 9,999 level puzzle game, and partly because the programmers, Messrs Selakovic and Beciric, sound as if they might - just might - be of Eastern European origin. In it you have to shift a jumble of numbered squares into ordered rows by rotating groups of four around fixed points. Also, after level 33 you have to switch blocks in three dimensions which, as you can imagine, is well tricky. Screen display is naffness incarnate, but gameplay makes heavy demands on the old cerebral logic centres and is strangely addictive.