Firebird/Probe Software
£9.99 cass, £14.99 disk

The Muddy is a strange name for a mad scientist, but we know these loopy scientific types are more concerned with world domination than the stupid names their parents lumber them with. And rest assured, Mr Muddy is yer typical nasty dominating type: he and his cronies have set about making Me very miserable for a planet full of very peaceful inhabitants.

But fear not, in most stories like this a hero saves the day. Cue whirr of rotor blades and the arrival of a man-'copter called Mr Hell, who is a member of the Cosmic Hell Patrol sworn to help poor defenceless civilians and kick the crap out of the bad guys.

It's all set on a mainly horizontal scrolling planet (although the odd vertical drop has to be made), where gun emplacements, helicopters and strange creatures that look like sentient guns hassle the payer. But Mr Heli has a few weapons up his sleeve: he starts with forward and upward firing missiles and bombs. But by destroying certain parts of the scenery crystals are uncovered, and by collecting than a fair amount of cloth can be accumulated.

Once enough of the folding stuff is collected, 'shops' can be visited and such wonderful goodies as extra energy, homing missiles and extra bombs purchased. And you certainly need every weapon you can lay your hands on, 'cos the Mudders (as the hostile denizens are known) stop at nothing to destroy the pant and everyone on it (including you).

Prolonged contact with these zenophobic creatures or their bullets isn't advised, because Mr Heli will run out of go juice and lose one of his five lives. And once you reach the end of the current level don't think that's it, because as with all 'kick the crap out of ravening alien' type games the obligatory end of level nasty rears his ugly head.

Hopefully you'll have collected loadsadosh by then, so every available weapon can be brought to bear on the despicable swine. Once he's dead, Mr Heli's quest to destroy The Muddy continues on the next level (cue stirring martial music). Probe have produced some good games in their. time, and Mr Heli despite slightly jerky scrolling and bloby sprites is rather playable.

This game is no push over: Mudders are a lethal bunch. Not the best shoot-'em-up I've ever seen, but not the worst either.

MARK [71%]

Yet another game with a helicopter, but this time it isn't from CodeMasters (see the Budget section if you don't understand!. Mr Heli follows that age old format of shoot through first section, defeat end of level nasty, go on to next section. But there are a few new things on offer all the blocks in the levels can be shot to reveal icons that give extra fire power and points to help you along your way. The screen scrolls in every direction, changing when the computer feels like it, forcing you to follow suit or get killed by an on coming wall!!! All the graphics seem very chunky and awkward to move around: Mr Heli looks like an imperfect conversion from another computer. A nice tune plays throughout though. A good, fun shoot 'em up, even if the graphics could've been better.
NICK [80%]

Firebird
£9.99 cass/£14.99 disk
Reviewer: Duncan MacDonald

Yahoo! A game with helicopters in it! You know what that means, don't you - it means that I can make loads of 'helicopter' jokes, saying things like "It's a really big chopper" and then adding heaps of "oo-er"s. Brilliant. And I can make jokes about crap helicopter 'fly-boys' like Ian Botham, Noel Edmunds, Barry Sheene and, of course, Mike '9.8 metres per second squared' Smith (the wonderpilot)! What other things can I do, methinks? (You could get on with the blimmin' review for one. Ed) Oh.

Mr Heli is a coin-op conversion, essentially a left/right/up/down scrolling shoot 'em-up in which you play a massive chopper (oo-er) - except it isn't massive at all, its quite a tiny one, about two by two character squares big. The idea is very simple - you've got to negotiate the cavernous maze-like screens while shooting everything that moves and collecting the 'crystals which serve as dosh. With these you can upgrade your weapons in the 'shops'. What do you mean "Slow down, slow down"? It's all really quite straightforward. I'll start again.

"Negotiate the cavernous maze-like screens." That's obvious enough - there are loads of tunnels, and you have to move your helicopter through them, be it up, down, left or right depending on which way the screen has to be scrolling at the time.

"Shoot everything that moves." Um, I can't really make that any more obvious than it is, but I'll have a bash. Um, fire all your, erm, weapons at anything that, erm, doesn't remain, erm, stationary.

"Collect the crystals which serve as dosh." Right, that could do with a bit of illumination, I suppose. Everywhere you travel in this subterranean labyrinth you'll see little blocks. Sometimes there are a whole load of blocks bunched together, and sometimes there are just two or three - but they're scattered all over the shop, and what you have to do is shoot them. Having been shot, a box will release a large 'crystal' (except in some cases it won't - I'll get to that). These 'crystals' then float downwards and settle on the floor, unless there's no floor, in which case they float of the bottom of the screen and out of reach. Each time you catch a 'crystal' (not hard to do - almost impossible not to, actually) your dosh rating bar (top centre of the screen) is winged up by 100 credits and you begin to have purchasing power.

"You can upgrade your weapons in the shops." Right! You know I said that some of the boxes didn't release a 'dosh crystal' when shot? Well, that's because some of them are in fact 'shops'. Shooting them produces an icon with a picture of a weapon and a price emblazened on it - a bomb with the price 400 for instance. Touch this icon and, presuming you have enough cash, you will be credited with this extra weapon and therefore have the added firepower to progress further, kill more nasties, collect more crystals, buy more weapons and thus progress further. Kill more nasties, collect more crystals, buy more weapons and thus progress further. Kill more... hey, I could turn this into an infinite reading loop. (But you won't. Ed) Erm. Anyway, there's a myriad of nasties to be avoided - some of them drain your energy, some of them just get in the way and some of them actually nick all the lovely weapons you've bought (the blighters). Fight through miles and miles of tunnels and you'll be confronted by the end-of-level nasty. It's big and it's bad and it's almost as indestructible as Captain Scarlet - but eliminate it and it's time to move up a level (of which there are four).

Mr Heli is converted from one of those cutesy, colourful Japanesey coin-ops (you know, where everything - humans, machinery and animals - all look like Marine Boy). And yes, the graphics on the Speccy are cutesy too. But there's one thing that's missing - colour! Now I don't normally whinge about games coming out in monochrome, but I really do feel that this one could have done with some (even a lot of) colour to lend it more atmosphere. The caverns and nasties have too much of a 'squarey' feel to them. Another grumble is the 'difficulty spread'. I found that it was rather easy to get to the end of the levels - but maybe I'm just too skill for my own good.

Anyway, it's not all gripes. Mr Heli is a bloomin' addictive little sausage and it's also very big (big, big, big). Helishly big in fact! Ho ho. Oh drat - I forgot to insert my helicopter 'jokes'. Here's one before I go. What's the difference between a helicopter and Anneka Rice's bottom? (I don't really think they want to know. Ed)

Label: Firebird
Author: Probe
Price: £9.95 £12.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tony Dillon

Engine one on. Woop. Engine two on. Woop. Rotor engage. Chug chug chug chug chugchagchugchug wugga wugga wugga wugga. Go Mr Heli go!

And go he does, through three levels of explosive multi-scrolling mayhem. Bullets fly (and so does Mr Heli) enemies die and not a single bit of colour clash or flicker. Excellent.

Mr Heli was an amazing arcade game. Not graphically or sonically amazing (even though it does have a pretty addictive soundtrack), but it was amazingly playable. You are a little helicopter who happens to wear 'DM's (my kinda chopper). You're no ordinary helicopter (I'd guessed that much already - The rest of the world). You are a helicopter with a mission. Your mission, save the world (Didn't Queensryche sing that one?). There is, as usual, a huge evil force that is trying to take over the world of Mr Heli, and Mr Heli has to go through three levels, each three parts long and wipe out everything.

First section has you flying through a cavern, that twists and scrolls in all four directions, though not all at once, of course. Aliens fly on from random directions and you have to take them out. To start with, this isn't too easy, as all you have is a pathetic little single shot gun and an upward firing missile launcher. As you fly along, taking out certain areas of the walls results in crystals falling from the destroyed areas of scenery.

Collecting these crystals provides you with money, and the more money you have the better weapons you can buy (when you are offered them at certain points in the game). A fully armed Mr Heli consists of bomb launchers, three way autofire, a shield, four homing missile launchers and an upward firing missile launcher. With that little lot, you're about as close to being indestructible as you can get.

The second section in each level is a push scroll maze. First find and activate the lights by shooting them, which isn't easy because you can't actually see anything when the lights are off. Make it to the end of the maze, and you get to fight the nasty mother alien, who is big (a third of the screen) and deadly. Kill it and, guess what, you get to the next level.

The graphics are fab. Well detailed and smoothly animated, sure, but when you see the amount of stuff on screen at any one time, you'll be amazed. Not an ounce of flicker, not a touch of jerkiness. I was impressed, and that's saying something. (Yes, its saying you were impressed, isn't it? - JD).

It plays really well too. Addictive, fun and fast, though never frustrating. Mr Heli has got it's difficulty level set perfectly. Well done Probe.

A near perfect conversion, bar the lack of colour. Perhaps not quite a must buy but fans of the coin-op should check this one out.

Spectrum 48/128 £9.99
Amstrad CPC £9.99
Commodore 64/128 £9.99
Amiga £24.99

The Amiga's graphically identical to the ST, right down to the jerky scrolling, and slight sound improvement, including a realistic rotor sound. In general feel and look, the CPC, also, is close to the ST. Though blocky, the colourful Mode 2 graphics are bright and well shaded. Scrolling is smoother and distinctly faster than on the 16-bits, and music is close to the jolly ST.

Spectrum: a few colours on the status panel but the playing area is monochrome. Some of the graphics are blocky and all use very scruffy shading: generally ugly to the eye, despite reasonable scrolling. On the Commodore, though a little lacking in colour and detail, backgrounds are good and scrolling is smooth. Sprites are excellent, coloured and shaded cleverly. Title music is Jazzy and jovial, effects are smart, and above all, the game plays well. It's far from easy but the difficulty is set as a challenge rather than a frustration.

Spectrum
£9.99

Thwoppa thwoppa thwoppa to you too, you little Heliman. Yes, there's one thing that's sure when an arcade machine hits the streets, and that's the conversion will appear shortly after.

Mr Heli is an Irem coin-op, and a very sweet one it is too. Unlike the raw thrash metal power of R-Type (another Irem coin-op), the hero of Mr Heli is a cute little chap, with little short legs and a small prop on the top of his head. The tone of the game is less R-Type and more New Zealand Story (ie. CUTE).

The aliens you shoot are cute, the scenery is cute, the damn explosions are cute! By far the most cute thing about Mr Heli is the cute music, a sort of wild eyed "gosh aren't we having a good time, chaps" Caribbean bop.

Conversion-smiths of this Microprose sure-fire hit are Probe, and this was apparent to me even before the credit came up on the screen. The title page has the same balls on it as Firebird's Savage, also by Probe. I must say I find their overstippled "more colours for less graphics" a bit weird myself, but they look alright and do the job on the Amstrad version anyway.

You control Mr Heli, who hovers or walks along the scenery. In hover mode he fires bullets out of his gun, plus he launches missiles out of the top of his head, which is very handy for wasting aliens which drop down from above, or breaking power-up crystals out of the rocks in the cave roof.

When in walking mode, he still fires bullets, but also lobs apple bombs. Yes, apple bombs (what are these Japanese game designers on?), little explosive Golden Delicious which ignite on contact with the ground or aliens, and make that nicely animated explosion.

After blasting through the levels, Mr Heli meets with a big alien (no surprises there) which he has to zap a LOT until the baddie pegs out. Then it's onto the next level.

I like Mr Heli, although at the beginning I thought it was just the sort of thing I'd hate. But you know, even a hard nut like me has a soft centre. It's a good cheerful game, and a brilliant blast to boot

All computer conversions have three long levels of the coin-op, and the C64 has the added bonus of an extended third level combining features from other levels of the arcade machine.

THE COMPLETE YS GUIDE TO SHOOT-'EM-UPS PART 1

Where'd we all be without shoot-'em-ups, eh, Spec-chums? Well, we'd all have much smaller games collections, that's for sure! Join MATT BIELBY for an epic blast through nearly a decade of firepowered Spec-fun...

Blimey! The complete guide to shoot-'em-ups, eh? A bit of a mammoth task you might be thinking (and you'd be blooming right! It's taken me absolutely ages!). It's so blinking gigantic in fact that we've had to split it in two to save the whole ish from being packed to the gills with ancient shooty-shooty games and very little else!

So how's it all going to work? Well, this issue we spotlight those hundreds of games where you control a little spaceship, aeroplane or what have you, while next time round we'll be wibbling on for ages about those blasters where you command a man, creature or robot - things like Operation Wolf, Gryzor, Robocop (the list is endless, I'm sorry to say). Yes, I know it's a bit of an arbitrary way to divide the whole subject up in two, but it's the best I could come up.

Anyway, if you 're all ready, let's arm the missiles, oil the cannons, buckle our seatbelts and go kick some alien ass! (Or something.)

SO WHAT EXACTLY MAKES A SHOOT-'EM-UP A SHOOT-'EM-UP?

Well, at the risk of stating the obvious, it's a game where simple reaction times count for (almost) everything, and the actual shooting of various baddies constitutes the major part of the gameplay. It's just about the oldest form of computer game going (Space Invaders was pure shoot-'em-up, for instance), short of mad Victorian chappies crouching down inside big wooden cabinets and pretending to be chess machines. It's one of the most enduring forms too - hardly an issue of YS goes by when we don't review at least a couple of newies, and it's the rare arcade-style game (sports sims and puzzlers excepted) that doesn't include at least a small shoot-'em-up element in there somewhere as part of the gameplay.

But back to the case in hand. What we're talking about here are the pure shoot-'em-ups - games where the wiping out of waves of aliens or other baddies is everything (though let's be fair, the violence in most of these is very abstract and minimal). They easily divide into four major types, depending on how you view the action. And you can read all about them over the page.

THE FIRST EVER SHOOT-'EM-UP

Goodness knows - Space Invaders is the obvious answer, but most of the other early arcade games were shoot-'em-ups too - Defender, Asteroids, Galaxian and the rest. To find out what made it onto the Speccy first, well, we'll have to look back in the vaults and see what we come up with, shan't we?

Right, here we are with the very first issue of Your Spectrum (later to evolve into Your Sinclair), cover date January 1984. Flick to the review section and we have two Space invaders-type games, both from long-forgotten Anirog Software - Galactic Abductor and Missile Defence. The second issue (Feb 84. believe it or not) brings us such delights as Xark (Contrast Software), a Defender-type game and Alien Swoop (a Galaxians rip-off), while in issue three had Bug Byte's Cavern Fighter (a tunnel-based jobbie, like an early version of R-Type).

Hmm. Let's go back a bit further, shall we? All the early computer games mags were listings based (ie had lots of crap Basic games printed out line by line over oodles of pages, as if Program Pitstop had run rampant over the whole mag!) so we might find something in there. Believe it or not find something in there. Believe it or not, I have the very first issue of the very first computer games mag in the country sitting right here on my desk, cover-dated November 1981. There's only one Sinclair game in here (for a ZX80 or 81 - a Speccy forerunner - and taking up a whole 2K!). It's called City Bomb, and it's a sort of shoot-'em-up. Apparently you're in a plane at the top of the screen and have to bomb the city beneath you, flattening out a landing strip so you can put down safely. Thrilling stuff, eh? As for commercially available stuff, it's all lost a bit too far back in the mists of time to be sure. Still, shoot-'em-ups started emerging for the Speccy pretty soon after the machine came out, certainly by the end of '82. Throughout 83 people like Quicksilva and Bug Byte were churning out Space Invaders, Asteroids and Scramble clones advertised as 'being in 100% machine code and in colour' too, so perhaps it was one of those. Exciting stuff, eh?

RATINGS

In the great YS Guide To... tradition, for a one-off-only special occasion we've adapted our normal rating system to accommodate the shoot-'em-up theme. Here's how they work...

Alien-Death-Scum-From-Hell Factor
Are there oodles of inventive, nasty and extremely difficult-to-kill baddies all over the place (including the biggest, meanest muthas ever at the end of each level) or do you end up fighting a fleet of Trebor Mints?

Shopability
Are there oodles and oodles of well-thought-out and spectacular weapons available to pick up and use, or do you have to make do with the same crap little peashooter throughout the game?

Copycat Factor
Unusually, the lower the score the better here. Basically, is this exactly the same as every other shoot-'em-up ever (in which case it'll get a high score for being chronically unoriginal) or does it have something innovative and special about it to set it apart from the crowd?

Visibility Factor
Does everything make a degree of sense in Speccyvision, or is it all a jumbled mass of pixels, with bullets, missiles and even little spaceships winking in and out of view willy-nilly?

Mr Heli
Firebird

Here's a different approach - the cutsie shoot-'em-up. Mr Heli is a tubby tittle helicopter (that's him in the middle) with a mission. Note the square blocks above and below him - you can shoot these out to reveal oodles of energy giving crystals and extra weapons. Like a cross between R-Type and Super Mario Brothers, it worked very well indeed (pity about the lack of colour though).