Producer: Alpha-Omega
Retail Price: £1.99
Author: Simon Morris

Plot, ha! Who needs a plot? Look, there's just no way you are going to stick to any sort of plot together around a game like this.

Just look at the basic material. There is a robot ostrich running along a wooden conveyor belt shooting things. Now naturally there are a few conceptual problems here. Why would anyone make a robot ostrich? O.K. so some nutter builds an ostrich. Just about the least likely thing he is going to do with it is give it a laser canon and put it on a hostile wooden conveyor belt.

So what do you do? Well, our ostrich has to get past forty waves of aliens as it waddles along the belt. It can move left and right, jump and fire. The meanies move in different ways depending on the wave it's on. Such lethal doobries as aliens, rocks and ghosts come at our intrepid ostrich. But, fortunately, our metallic hero represses his natural urge to bury his head in the sand, and blasts away. Trouble is, the laser only fires horizontally, and, as the laser is attached to his head, this means that anything at knee level is a bit of a poser.

Contact with any of the meanies results in the loss of one of your three lives. Some even fire back! It's just not fair. After forty waves of this mindless violence the ostrich arrives at his destination. Then of course he starts all over again.

COMMENTS

Control keys: CAPS SHIFT left, Z right, SPACE fire, ENTER jump.
Joystick: Sinclair, Cursor
Keyboard play: reasonable
Use of colour rather drab
Graphics: uninspired
Sound: minimal
Skill levels: one
Screens: one

Come back Jeff Minter, all is forgiven. ALPHA OMEGA have again produced a package with excellent presentation but containing a game that is very basic. The graphics are very small, basic and very unanimated. At first glance Oblivion seems just like one of the old Jeff Minter games - just a case of blowing up everything that comes in your direction. The game features some nice touches, but I'm afraid there's no denying it, Oblivion is not very good at all.

Yeah! This is the sort of game that I can really relate to man. Mindless blasting may have gone out with flares but there is still plenty of fun to be had from it (and flares are coming back in anyway). ALPHA OMEGA haven't really raised any eyebrows in the trade (except in disgust) but I think they may have hit the nail on the head here. The graphics are a little on the dull side, and sound-wise there's nothing here that is new, except for a few well placed spot effects. I'm not too sure that I'll be playing this for long, but it'll certainly brighten up your afternoon.

Ha, ha, ha. An ALPHA OMEGA game. After the tremendous success of Captain Slog, and Dekorating Blues, I really expected a lot from this game. It gave me everything that I looked for; bad graphics, appalling sound, and a total lack of playability No, not really. Like Dekorating Blues, there is a lot of effect on the title screen, but the game lacks somewhat. Like a lot of the average budget games on the market, I think that it's playable for a few minutes, but then gets infinitely boring.

Alpha-Omega
£1.99

Pow-ee' Zap' Ker-rang' Oblivion doesn't come with any sounds effects, so good ol' me bungs 'em in for free. Trouble is Oblivion doesn't come with much of anything.

The star of this game is an ostrich (you heard, bird brain), an ostrich with no name and a miner's lamp disguised as a ray gun strapped to his bonce. The long necked one has three lives and can move laterally, giving it slightly more manoeuvrability than a Sunday lunch. It has to travel between two unnamed cities (everything in this game is anonymous) avoiding many evils falling - light bulbs, exploding grapes and 'thin wobbly things'. Some of these, like the space ships, zap you, but many, like the spooks, just have to be avoided. This is done by jumping cos ostriches, like dodos, can't fly. And like dodos, this game's in severe danger of extinction.

Alpha's own blurb says of Oblivion that to describe it is completely impossible. Which shows a conciseness we wish the programmers had used. Condemn this to oblivion, if it wasn't an ostrich, this game would be a total turkey.

Label: Alpha Omega
Author: Simon Morris
Price: £1.99
Joystick: various
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Graham Taylor

Oblivion is well, pretty bad. Actually Oblivion looks like the sort of game software houses use as the 'demo' for easy-to-use games creator programs (that don't sell).

It's probably distantly related to some of Jeff Minter's ideas but really is as thrilling as a lecture on flower arrangement.

The front end of the game is misleadingly neat, big graphics for the joystick and keyboard select options - currently toggled choice waggles. Pretty slick you think. But no.

You are an Ostrich. Pretty macho eh? You have to walk or run across dozens and dozens an dozzzzennnnnssss of screens.

Each screen with a small troup of tiny non-animated sprites (well they sometimes bounce up and down a bit. Sometimes your bird jumps over them, sometimes you shoot at them.

On and on I passed through many levels, retired from the profession, bought a cottage had grandchildren and died and still it went on.

Forty different levels and not a one less than completely dull.

I know it's budget but honestly I'd rather go to Billingham.

Alpha-Omega
£1.99

This isn't "the best pure arcade game I've ever seen," as the cassette inlay claims, in fact it isn't anywhere near it. But if you're looking for a very simple old-fashioned shoot 'em up of the sort that was popular about three years ago then this is probably right up your street.

Oblivion reminds me of a Jeff Minter intergalactic Llamas type shoot 'em up. You control what looks like an emu who walks from left to right across screenfulls of ghosts and spaceships and aliens who are all approaching from the opposite direction and are ready to blast the tail feathers off you if you're not equally quick on the trigger. As I mentioned, it's all very Minter-ish, with a moving background of stars to give an outer space effect, and your emu bounces around quite nicely as he spits fire across the screen. It would be nice it you could fire and walk from left to right - you can slow down your walking, which results in you sliding backwards to the left hand side of the screen, but you don't actually change direction so you're a bit limited in manoeuvreabillty.

It's the sort of game that doesn't require amazing graphics to be effective - its simply a question of whether or not you enjoy this type of simple target shooting. The game only supports a fixed set of keyboard controls or a Kempston joystick so you should bear that in mind if you're going to buy it.