Producer: Bubble Bus
Retail Price: £7.95
Author: John Cain

Another game from the author of mega-selling Booty! The story is set in a strange house owned by a mad professor who invents weird and wonderful gadgets. His home is full of them, and some are very sinister indeed as our hero finds out when he unsuspectingly pays a visit during Bob a Job week.

The hapless Boy Scout trots up the garden path full of good intentions and rings the rusty bell. An old man wearing huge horn-rimmed spectacles answers the door. Just as the lad is explaining that he's come to do some good turns, the old man suddenly slumps to the ground whispering. "My pills, my pills..."

It's a race against time to find the pills which are locked away in a sale. First, sixteen keys have to be found... and there's a time limit: if you take too long then the Prof might not pull through.

Secret inventions hidden in the house are possessively guarded by bits of machinery, and the servants who help with the upkeep of the house don't limit themselves to doing the housework and a bit of gardening. The old man's minions are highly trained individuals who have been instructed to attack anyone who enters the house. With all this to contend with, the little Scout is going to have quite a hard time locating the keys and combination...

Each room in the house is filled with strange creatures and gadgets which are set on removing the young infiltrator from the premises. Three lives are supplied. Contact with the odd-ball staff is generally fatal, and jumping too far down onto lower platforms also spells death. To get around this irritating problem, the Scout must master the use of mobile platforms controlled by bellpushes. By pressing the appropriate button, a platform can be moved into place to bridge an all important gap or summon a moving platform to your rescue.

Secret passages link screens, but where they lead is a surprise in itself. Predictably, the keys and important items in the game are all carefully guarded by the scientist's minions who have no idea that you are actually trying to help their master.

COMMENTS

Control keys: redefinable
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard play: slow and unresponsive
Use of colour: lots of colour resulting in lots of colour clash
Graphics: small and uninteresting
Sound: little tunette plays throughout, good spot effects
Skill levels: one
Screens: 43

I was expecting Moonlight Madness to be a fast all-action arcade adventure/come shoot 'em up, but on loading it turned out to be a slightly disappointing Booty sequel. After the usual initial struggle to master the controls and learn the 'physics' of the game, it became quite fun to play and even addictive to a certain extent. The graphics are large and colourful but there is a lot of character clash which does get on your nerves after a while. The sound is fairly well done: there are some nice effects and a tune plays continuously. Not a bad game, overall, but nothing remarkable.

Booty was a real classic in its day, being easily the best cheapie of its time. Hasn't John Cain come down in the world! Moonlight Madness isn't anything like as good. The title screen plays a nice tune, and has got some pretty animation, but there were some pretty bad bits in the game. The main character moves at an amazingly varied pace, as if there's a force ten gale blowing to the left. When any attempt is made to move right, all the moving characters on the screen slow right down, and the man really has to slog it out against this powerful 'wind'. As far as drab, boring, unattractive, uninteresting, overpriced platform games go. Moonlight Madness is pretty good. By normal standards, though, it's dire.

BUBBLE BUS have been reknowned for their great arcade/adventures, so when I saw that they had teamed up with the author of Booty, I was really looking forward to seeing what they had come up with - the end result is extremely disappointing. The presentation of Moonlight Madness is well up to scratch; great inlay story and picture, and a good loading and title screen - but the game leaves a bit to be desired. BUBBLE BUS seem to have put this game in the wrong range. Moonlight Madness should be in the Minibus range - it has all the makings of an average budget game. The graphics are none too exciting, consisting of colourful but flickery characters. The games drawing point is the sound, and there are a few good tunes - one continuous throughout the game - and neat spot effects. To my mind, Moonlight Madness is an over-priced little game that could be beaten by many a budget title.

Bubble Bus
£7.95

Hmmm, don't like the title Moonlight Madness much, howzabout Daylight Robbery. Catchy, ain't it?

What makes this game even more amusing is that it's the first I've seen so far to receive the Sinclair Quality Control stamp. From now on I'll take it as a signed, sealed and delivered death warrant. This is truly dreadful.

The traditionally weak story line goes as follows. You play a lost boy scout who's wandered up to the mad professor's house. The prof himself answers the door and then promptly has a heart attack, gasping that you must find his pills, that are in the safe, that can be opened by the sixteen keys, that are scattered around the house, that also needs a combination, and the staff in the house are none too friendly to strangers. Take my advice, let him die!

Either this program is written in compiled Basic or the programmer is only up to the half-way stage in a Tim Hartnell classic. The... movement... is... very... jerky... and has a tendency to stop

at infrequent intervals for no particular

reason at all. The programmer hasn't used masks on any of his sprites either, so when you or one of the prof's henchmen walk past anything, it's obliterated. Plus, it's very slow and sluggish and surely by now platforms are a little long in the tooth for full-price games?

Included in the features is a standard redefine keys option. Unfortunately, you can't redefine all the keys. Try the popular left/right - A/S and you'll find that you keep saving the game and entering doors you don't want to while walking. Trés confusing

Maybe Bubble Bus had a touch of Moonlight Madness when it picked this one for its new release.

MACHINE: Spectrum
SUPPLIER: Bubble Bus
PRICE: £7.95

John Cain had a lot of success with the budget-price Booty. But it's doubtful whether Moonlight Madness will repeat his success.

If it had been a budget game - and I wouldn't mind betting that's what it was intended to be - Moonlight Madness might have got a better reception. But at £7.95 it's a rip-off.

And that's a shame because Bubblebus has put out some nice product over the past year, including a great budget title called Classic Invaders on the Amstrad. But MM does not cut the mustard at this price.

It tells the story of a young lad who arrives outside the old oak door of a mansion demanding: "Bob-a-job, Mister." Could he be a cub scout by any chance?

The door has been opened by an ancient scientist who promptly collapses, gurgling "My pills."

Your task is to get his life saving pills out of the safe which can only be opened with 16 keys and then by cracking the combination. Get the idea? A succession of screens packed with ladders, platforms and puzzles follows.

The puzzles are fairly entertaining, the graphics are fairly crude. There's nothing really new here.

Bubble Bus
£7.95

I always used to hate, loathe and utterly detest Bob-a-Job Week when I was a cub scout, and Judging from the scenario of this latest Bubble Bus title, things haven't changed much over the last twenty years. Having wandered down a huge drive to an old mansion, you ring the bell whereupon your call is answered by an even older man. He explains that he is a mad professor and is somewhat surprised that you have got even this far, having managed to avoid his guards and booby traps. Such is his surprise that he promptly drops down with a heart attack although not before blurting out that his pills are locked in the safe and you will need sixteen keys to open it.

Honestly, the lengths some people will go to in order to avoid paying up but you nobly decide to do your good deed for the day and try and get the pills. The mansion consists of a series of doors, switches, platforms and monsters and your task is to wander round, collecting the keys and generally avoiding getting killed. If you are standing next to a door, pressing fire will move you through into the room behind. Stand next to a switch though and the fire activates the appropriate mechanism. Not all of these are beneficial so the temptation to go round pressing everything in sight must be avoided. Typical effects include building extra platforms, activating lifts and mobilising monsters. Getting to where you want to go often requires both timing and planning. One annoying feature is that certain doors lead to a row of eight doors with a large pair of eyes above. This is some sort of maze and it is possible to get out again, it just takes some patience. So frustrating is this element of the game that two people who tried the game thought it was a bug and reloaded the game (there is no way to abort your current game).

Other features are annoying too. You can redefine the keyboard but the pause and music on/off keys are not affected so I found that every time I tried to move right, I paused the game. This is just bad programming and something that should have been picked up in play-testing. The game looks and plays very much like Booty which is no great surprise as John Cain wrote them both. Like Booty, Moonlight Madness would be all right at budget price but is not very good value as it stands. Keeping to the boy scout theme, be prepared before you buy this one.