Producer: Silverbird
Retail Price: £2.99
Author: Robert Gill, Fred

When the demons of Octan were destroyed, everyone rejoiced at the demise of the most cruel and evil rulers the universe had ever known. Unfortunately, one of them escaped destruction, and plans to destroy all sentient life. A brave young pilot is charged with the mission to travel the eight planes of the planet and destroy this evil threat.

As your craft journeys over the vertically scrolling landscape, the demon's henchmen maker their presence felt. These are dealt with by a swift jab on the laser button while inanimate obstacles need to be exploded by missiles.

Shooting silos reveals lettered icons. When collected, these endow your craft with extra weapons, points and bonus lives.

At the end of each level you encounter one of the demon's mammoth servants. Survive to the end of the eighth stage and you meet the Demon of Octan himself.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: Kempston
Graphics: unexceptional monochrome
Sound: mostly spot effects
Options: definable keyboard

Mediocrity is the name of this very average, shoot-'em-up from Firebird's budget label, Silverbird. Tedium begins to set in almost as soon as you start playing. The demonic minions swarming around the player's craft are well-drawn, but the turgid control method, coupled with the slow rate of fire, soon kills any enthusiasm that might be lurking at the back of your mind. The budget sector of the market has come up with some great games. Unfortunately for Joe Public, this isn't one of them.
MARK [40%]

Despite its rather bland name, Octan turns out to be a fairly good quality smooth-scrolling shoot-'em-up. The green background is rather garish with a particularly nasty pattern of rectangles that looks like a very naff brand of wallpaper. Gameplay is reminiscent of Xevious but the extra bonus icon feature demands thoughtful play rather than mindless violence. The caterpillar-like aliens at the end of each level are neat, but the fast and furious action gets repetitive after a while. Shoot-'em-up fans looking for some cheap fun should enjoy it.
PHIL [61%]

BARGAIN BASEMENT

Come on down! The Pryce is right! (Groan - Ed) Once again Nat Pryce single-handedly guides us through the treacherous world of the budget game.

Silverbird
£1.99
Reviewer: Nat Pryce

The last demon of Octan, an 'orrible place that's even grottier than Bristol Parkway Station, is giving you a lot of trouble, so you've decided to teach him a lesson he won't forget in a hurry using, as usual (yawn), a huge ship armed to the teeth, or jet intakes rather, with lasers, missiles, shields, nuke blasts and shock waves.

You've probably guessed by now that Octan is yet another vertically scrolling monochrome blaster of the build-up-your-weaponry sort. Surprisingly enough (it surprised me anyway) Octan is great fun. The scrolling, graphics, sound, kiddy FX (very important, those) payability and addictiveness are all top notch and the game is very difficult, and tantalisingly frustrating at the same time. It's great fun, and if it was just a teensy bit (a lot actually) more original it would certainly get an eight. As it is, I think it deserves a large, spiky seven.

Label: Silverbird
Author: Robert F. Gill
Price: £1.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Jim Douglas

I think there must be an, "Easy to Use Vertical Scrolling Shoot-Out Development System." doing the rounds of the industry at the moment. Well, to tell the truth, ever since Lightforce emerged everyone has been cranking out lookalikes. US Gold had Bedlam, Softek had Xecutor and there were even Budget releases like Zeppelin's Sabotage and Powerama from Powerhouse.

The last two share an uncomfortably large number of features with Octan, Firebird's addition to the troupe.

As you can see from the pictures, we're talking seriously attractive graphics here. If they were standing in a bar, you'd buy them a drink (God knows, I wonder about you sometimes - GT). The scrolling floor beneath the base-relief hi-tech alien battlecruiser is remarkably pleasing. Not only does it scroll downward doing fantastic imitations of acres of crazy paving, but when you move from side to side, it all moves sideways with you. Oo-ee-oo! Crazy paving gone crazier!

Still this is all a bit by-the-by, as even a digitised Picasso (who he? - TD) couldn't save a program with iffy gameplay. Not that Octan has iffy gameplay. Lordy, no!

When you get going, there's a definite impression that everything is a little sluggish. It's tricky to get out of the way of the aliens and you can only fire one shot at a time. Pretty soon, though, you'll realise that it's just you that is the slowcoach. Everything else is shifting at a fine pace. The immediate problem is to turn your ship from a passive dustbin into a psychotic killing juggernaut.

By bombing the pyramids which litter the alien ship's surface you can make letters appear. Each letter corresponds to a different feature on your ship, which can then be enhanced. You've got to collect three of each letter before anything interesting happens. You can double your laser-fire, drop more bombs or get some more lives. The big problem is that these pyramids are nearly always situated right in front of a gun installation which will fire upon you as soon as you're in range.

The aliens are marvellous. Although unbelievably nasty, they actually look quite cute. My favourites are the Starfish shaped things which swarm around in, um, swarms, grinning away and bashing into you.

At the end of each level (which is bloody tough to reach, and impossible for me to pass) are two huge fireball spitting baddies - again, nicely defined and thoroughly menacing.

Octan is by no means perfect, the controls sometimes feel a bit plodding, even when you've collected your 'speed-up' icon, but that said, it's a supremely polished game with fab graphics. And for £2.99, you can't really go wrong, can you?