Producer: Mirrorsoft
Retail Price: £7.95
Author: Binary Innovations

You're out for revenge after Sir Humphrey Bogus, inventor of the digital tea bag, said something rather unpleasant about your grandmother. Seated in a multidirectional space craft, you begin your cruise of death over a vertically scrolling lunar surface.

This moon world is encrusted with craters and enemy bases from which come a stream of invulnerable blast molecules. These circular particles compete with numerous other destructive features such as light bulbs, bombs with rotating tails, and spinning boulders to blast your fragile space vehicle into insignificance, doing more damage than Arthur Daley could ever repair.

Approaching hazards must be avoided, or destroyed; and lunar bases can be taken out by accurate fire from your blazing blasters before they send too many obnoxious weapons in your direction.

Wipe out these perils and you earn points - but if they pierce your craft's vulnerable protective skin, you lose one of your three lives. Watch out for the Mona Lisa on the third level (though even she can have her enigmatic smirk removed by a sudden decapitation) and deal some irrevocable blows to the smug-looking amities (y'know, those horrible happy badges that ageing hippies wear).

Moonstrike is the first game to use Movieload, a system developed by Mirrorsoft which displays changing text and pictures while the main program is loading.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: monochromatic - but beautifully detailed, and large
Sound: good tune and typical blasting FX

The graphics are fantastic, getting better as you progress from level to level, and the animation of some of the nasties is well done and very smooth. The general idea is very similar to Lightforce games; the main object is to destroy everything. The only thing wrong with Moonstrike is that your ship moves too slowly and so avoiding bombs becomes very frustrating. But it's an ace game.
NICK [90%]

When smooth, well-presented, vertically scrolling shoot-'em-ups such as Lightforce first appeared on the Speccy I was interested. But now, after a year, I'm sick of them because there's been no great improvement in quality or gameplay. Originality (or unoriginailty) aside, Moonstrike is boring; it's a little too difficult so there's rarely any sense of achievement, and it plays far too slowly to be appealing. But the graphics, the game's redeeming feature, are excellent: the characters are large and beautifully animated and the attention to detail on the landscape is amazing. There are a few nice touches - look out for the Mona Lisa! If you haven't got a game of this type on the shelf already Moonstrike is reasonable, but others are just that bit more playable...
BEN [67%]

The Movie-loading of Moonstrike uses humour reminiscent of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, but it's just as well there's a normal loader too; the new technique takes time and after you've seen it once or twice the hilarity begins to wear off. The game itself is a competent variation on the traditional shoot-'em-up, and the peculiar aliens such as bomb-spitting flowers and killer light bulbs brighten up what could have been tedious.
RICKY [73%]

Mirrorsoft
£7.95

Meet Professor Humpty Bogus, inventor of the digital teabag - sounds like the type of character who turns up in my Subs Club letters column from time to time. But no, he's the villain of this smidgeon-under-a-megagame game called Moonstrike. Not satisfied with the digital teabag, Bogus has also built a Tachyon Vortex on the far side of the moon, and he's threatening to blow up the earth with this superweapon. Your mission (and you're advised to stop the tape loading if you're not interested) is to breach the lunar defences and destroy the Vortex.

Moonstrike is best described as a slightly slowed- down version of Slap Fight. It's the same idea of moving your ship forward over the scrolling-down landscapes, zapping and dodging, with equally good graphics and smooth movement, but it's all done at a slightly slower pace. This should be an improvement for an aged wrinklie like me, but I found it a bit annoying that my ship wouldn't move quite quickly enough - a bit like flying through treacle.

In fact blobs of treacle are one of the enemy defences, along with light bulbs, and while these come down the screen at you there are various gun defences blasting ping-pong balls in all directions. Well that's what they look like! Whatever they are, it's best to steer clear of the foot of the screen as they carry on firing even after they've scrolled off the bottom, so if you're not careful you quickly get a ping-pong ball up the bum.

In your support you have a cross-hair sight in front of your ship, and you can use this to plant mines to blow up the gun turrets as they come towards you. Your reward for getting to the end of the first level is to face a massive turret which spits bullets in eight direction and clouds of gas just to fill in the gaps - took me ages to past the first of these, and face the pleasures of the even nastier levels beyond. A terrific space shoot-out. Buy! Bye-bye!

Label: Mirrorsoft
Author: Binary Innovations
Price: £7.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Graham Taylor

Forget Slap Fight, forget Terra Cresta, forget every top to bottom screen scrolling blast 'em up you ever saw.

Moon Strike - despite its unspeakably boring name - is the best. Not only is it smoother, more challenging, more highly detailed and generally slicker, it's funnier.

The game would be dull were it not for the excellence of the programming and the wryness of some of the humour. Things begin well with the loading screen, more of a movie actually. Some sort of awesome programming technique has been used to enable the game to be loaded whilst the screen tells you - with words and moving pictures - the plot of the game. The effect is not unlike the graphic bits in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and it's jolly good fun.

The plot? Forget it - just assume mad professors and saving the world an' stuff and that you have carte blanche to total everything. That's all that matters.

Unlike Slap Fight, Moon Strike isn't too serious about itself. Some of the shapes you need to destroy are of the conventional alien sort, bubbles, saucers and the rest. On the other hand there are some decidedly bizarre obstacles in your path, the product of an imagination possibly even more deranged that Matthew Smith's. Watch out for the dentures, note also the light bulbs which float down-screen at you (the way the underlying landscape is distorted through the glass is amazing), and finally you see the Mona Lisa. Yep old Mona herself can be bombed into oblivion.

Now all this wacky stuff could backfire were it not for the fact that the graphics are superb, not only is the movement smooth but the objects are large and detailed. More even than that, somebody in the development team can draw and draw well. It makes all the difference.

There are other good things about Moon Strike. I found it a great relief to have a game which, although being fiendishly difficult doesn't shove you back to the beginning again if you fail.

Moon Strike has only one failing - it isn't an original overall concept. Actually it's a stunningly unoriginal one.

In every other respect, though, it's a winner - brilliant graphics, smooth scrolling animation and challenging gameplay.

Shoot the moon with Mirrorsoft's mono masterpiece.

If you thought New Zealand was a land of sheep rather than shoot-em-ups, this vertical scroller from NZ team Binary Innovations just might change your mind. The story so far: mad scientist Humpty Bogus has moved on from inventing the digital teabag and landscaping the Moon, now he's going to destroy the Earth. Unless, that is, you can blast through the prof's lunar defences and bomb his Tachyon Vortex super-weapon.

If you're loading the 128K version you'll have to read the inlay for that, but 48K users can catch it as MovieLoad - an illustrated story which unfolds as the game loads. Clever stuff this, and witty too - but then so's the game itself.

At first glance, Moon Strike is nothing new. You fly up a strip of terrain half a screen wide, shooting airborne nasties and bombing static gun-emplacements. Crosshairs a fixed distance in front of your craft act as bomb sights line them up on a ground target, pull back on the stick while pressing fire and then veer off to one side - almost everything on the ground fires at you so flying in a straight line is unhealthy. Fight your way through a whole level of this plus a very nasty fort at the end, and you're onto the next level.

So far so Xevjous-ish, you might think, but graphically the game is full of surprises. You can buzz the Mona Lisa, dodge the flak from deadly coin-slots and blast the marauding light bulbs for all your worth. The scrolling window is all in mono admittedly, but the detail and visual flair of the terrain are very striking. If the wacky humour of it distracts you at crucial moments, well that's all part of the fun.

But don't get the impression that Moon Strike's all graphics and gimmicks: there's plenty of lasting gameplay too, even if it's not so immediately obvious. The action's quite slow if you're watching over someone's shoulder, but once you're in the pilot's seat you'll find it plenty fast enough. Moon Strike's not really about reflexes it's more about weaving through swarms of enemy bullets, using the tiniest of gaps in fire patterns to escape certain death - and this can get very hairy indeed.

Though the flying hazards don't appear in any particular formation, the layout of the ground targets is constant. Learning the game helps your progress a good deal, but the earlier stages aren't a doddle even when you know them well. The forts at the end of each level remain a nasty problem, and only split-second timing will get you past them intact.

There's no particular element of the game that you couldn't find elsewhere - graphics and loading sequence to one side - but Moon Strike does combine those familiar shoot-em-up components exceptionally well. Very addictive, witty and nicely judged too!

Reviewer: Andy Wilton

RELEASE BOX
Spectrum 48k, £7.95cs, Reviewed
Spectrum 128k, £7.95cs, Reviewed
No other versions planned.

Predicted Interest Curve

1 min: 80/100
1 hour: 70/100
1 day: 70/100
1 week: 70/100
1 month: 60/100
1 year: 30/100

Spectrum, £7.95cs

Humour's a tricky area for programmers, but New Zealand duo Binary Innovations were spot on with the visual gags in this vertical scroller. As you blast and bomb your way through swarms of light bulbs, coins, pizzas and 6502 central processors. You'll also be struck by the care and attention they've put into the gameplay. You'll need nerves of steel to pick your way through the hail of slow-moving enemy bullets, and split-second timing to destroy the volcanic end-of-level fortresses. Satisfyingly mindless destruction this is not: you'll need your brain in gear right from the word go. As for the distinctive black and white graphics, these might not appeal to Light Force fans but they're effective and witty.