Producer: Melbourne House, 48K
£6.95

Probably the definitive 'scramble' game for the Spectrum. Four rings of defence surround the alien base, each with its own problems of landscale. Missiles take off continuously guided by radar units (excellent animation) which get more accurate if you fail to destroy enough of them. Special feature allows you to reprogram the game to make your own landscape and alter the enemy's defences. Highly recommended. Joystick: Kempsoft I.

Producer: Melbourne House, 48K
£6.95

Probably the definitive 'scramble' game for the Spectrum. Four rings of defence surround the alien base, each with its own problems of landscale. Missiles take off continuously guided by radar units (excellent animation) which get more accurate if you fail to destroy enough of them. Special feature allows you to reprogram the game to make your own landscape and alter the enemy's defences. Highly recommended. Joystick: Kempsoft I.

Producer: Melbourne House, 48K
£6.95

Probably the definitive 'scramble' game for the Spectrum. Four rings of defence surround the alien base, each with its own problems of landscale. Missiles take off continuously guided by radar units (excellent animation) which get more accurate if you fail to destroy enough of them. Special feature allows you to reprogram the game to make your own landscape and alter the enemy's defences. Highly recommended. Joystick: Kempsoft I.

BEWARE BOUNCING MISSILES

Penetrator is the best Scramble type available so far for the Sinclair Spectrum. Running on the 48K model only, the graphics are truly impressive.

As with arcade Scramble it is not really your score that is of the utmost importance but how far you can get into the Scramble system. Penetrator challenges you to fly through four levels of progressive difficulty.

The first of these is gently undulating terrain with only the ground-to-air missiles to worry about. Soon after this you fly into a tunnel and you will have to move up and down with great precision.

The most difficult stage of the game is the maze with its sharp vertical drops and walls that appear suddenly in front of you.

Further still, and you come across bouncing missiles which fall down from the ceiling as if suspended on springs.

Your ship has five flight controls. Up, down, thrust, forward and brakes which have the effect of slowing down the scrolling terrain to enable you to drop down or rise up to avoid flying into an obstacle.
layability of Penetrator is greatly improved by a comprehensive list of game options. One or two players can play and you can choose the type of landscape you wish to negotiate with the "terrain editor".

The game stores your current high score and also enables the five top scores of the session to be entered.

Despite this, my overall impression was of a most enjoyable and addictive game. Definitely in the top five Spectrum games.

Penetrator is produced by Melbourne House software and is available from W. H. Smith at £6.95.

MACHINE: Spectrum 48K
Joystick: No
Supplier: Melbourne House

But Melbourne House's Penetrator is certainly a good buy for the 48K machine.

The graphics are very clear and consist mainly of lines, except for the twirling purple radar bases which signal your approach to enemy missiles.

The rugged, yellow terrain of the beginning changes to a blue cavern with very steep inclines. Then come a series of skyscraper-like blocks followed by another cavern.

SHATTERING

Penetrator moves fast but the ship's controls are sensitive enough to cope with firing and manoeuvring at the same time. The sound, too, is surprisingly good in this version.

Two features which will appeal to less resolute novices are a training facility which allows you to skip from phase to phase and a landscape-customising facility which allows you to get rid of the difficult bits.

"If you have a 48K Spectrum, then you must have PENETRATOR." So says the 'blurb' on the cover of this most amazing game. It is another version of 'Scramble', but with graphics rarely seen on a Spectrum. I must admit, I'm not an arcade fan, but having Penetrator has given me a better flavour of true arcade games. (I mean, 20p per game. It's silly!).

Even during loading, the graphics are stunning. The title page is an exact replica of the cover illustration. The code takes time to load (very poetic) but this time can be spent comparing the cover to the screen. When the loading is finished, pressing any key will present yet more stunning graphics in the form of a crescendo of coloured fireworks (I think) which rise and explode with amazing smoothness. After this, the program begins to draw (or write) the word 'Penetrator' across the screen in large joined-up letters. This can be speeded up by pressing enter. When this is done, the menu will be displayed.

The menu could be layed out better, however, giving some indication as to what keys should be used during a game. The options available are: one-or two-player game, training mode, edit mode, save or load a landscape, and disable sirens.

The oneor two player game is self-explanatory and the training mode can place you in any of the five stages for a game with a number of lives (usually five). Edit mode allows you to design your own landscape and/or remove or add missiles and radars to your own ability. One flaw or 'bug' in the program is when you are on the return trip through the five stages (after bombing the neutron bomb store), the missiles which come onto the screen from the right tend to gather at the side. As overlapping missiles or radars automatically explode, all you need to do is control your ship through the tunnel. This is only a minor bug but it does rather take some of the fun away.

The next two commands on the menu allow your landscapes to be saved or loaded.

If no key is pressed during the menu then the computer will play a demo game (and very well, I might add) but does not recognise a customised landscape and so the ship crashes.

As I have said before, the graphics are stunning (even the radar dishes rotate separately!) and the edit facility makes game variations endless.

I need only mention one minor quirk and that is the control keys are difficult to master and no option for a joystick to be used is given. Having a joystick would improve the game greatly.

As it stands, the game is extremely good value for money and can really 'show off' the Spectrum to other, more expensive computers.

Penetrator is produced by Melbourne House at a price of £6.95.

One of the most successful amusement arcade games has been Skramble, where you pilot a craft through caverns and over mountains to a large bomb store.

Penetrator is a superb realisation of the game and had the critics raving in early 1983., The graphics are large and smooth, with sharp outlines, and the action very fast and highly addictive. What really raises the game above its fellows is the revolutionary facility to completely redesign the landscape. That, couple with the practice modes at each level, makes it one of the most comprehensive arcade games ever.

Position 40/50

Melbourne House
131 Trafalgar Road, Greenwich, London SE10
48K Spectrum
£6.95

FROM DEEP-SPACE ADVENTURES TO WORLDLY BOARD-GAMES IN MEIRION JONES' SURVEY

Less than a year ago the appearance of Scrabble on disc for the Apple caused consternation among micro owners. The program defeated three-quarters of the humans who challenged it to a dual of words. At least Scrabblers could comfort themselves with the knowledge that they had been beaten by a £750 disc-based system. Now Psion has taken even that consolation away by launching an improved version of the game with a bigger dictionary and better graphics which will run on a £150 system - the 48K Spectrum and a cassette recorder.

This illustrates the rate at which Spectrum software is improving. The latest releases include clever implementations of board- games like monopoly and arcade favourites such as Scramble, long and complicated Adventures with names like Knight's Quest and combinations of arcade and Adventure like Pixel's Trader. While serious and educational material software is still thin on the ground, programs like Hewson's Countries of the World show how much useful information can be packed into the Spectrum.

MORE ORIGINALITY

Unfortunately the standard is not uniformly high. Sometimes imagination is lacking. Bridge software still insists on marketing what it calls "an exciting game for two to six players". Yes, you guessed, it is boring old Hangman.

At other times graphics are weak. Micromega sells a version of Roulette which features a roulette wheel which looks more like a flying saucer on an off day. There is still too high a percentage of unloadable tapes and of tapes which you wished had been unloadable. Davic Games Tape 1, for instance, features a game which has Tooth Monsters instead of ghosts, which is probably the dullest-ever version of Pac-Man. The Tooth Monsters themselves are about as threatening as a pair of jelly babies.

If you want real tooth monsters try Imagine's excellent Molar Maul. This is a real nerve-tingler from the moment that an enormous set of gleaming teeth appears on the screen like something out of jaws. Armed only with a toothbrush and toothpaste you have to defend these dentures from swarms of evil bacteria.

These germs go by the name of Dentorium Kamikazium which allows Imagine to talk about "the DK Menace" - a triple pun partly at the expense of Imagine's Ipswich-based rivals DK'tronics.

Imagine's punsters are at work again on the cover of Arcadia where we are told we are fighting against the "deadly menace of the Atarian empire". Perhaps this explains why Sinclair owners have shown such enthusiasm for Arcadia because the game itself is just a lacklustre version of Galaxians. Much better is Imagine's Schizoids.

If, like me, you have always wanted to be a bulldozer, Schizoids is the game for you. You are a bulldozer in outer space and your job is to push tumbling cubes and pyramids into a nearby black hole without falling in yourself. Perhaps this nearby anomaly in the space-time continuum affects the wavelength of light. At any rate the game itself is only in black and white.

Pixel is another company which cannot resist veiled messages. Trader is part space Adventure and part arcade game. The Adventure, trading commodities between different worlds, is more convincing than the crude skill tests such as finding the right orbit when approaching a planet.

Trader may well be bought as much for its attractive packaging - which includes a survival guide for the would-be Trader - as for the game itself. After buying supplies for your first trip you set out for the planet Psi where the inhabitants - yes, Psions - who look like a cross between Clive Sinclair's beard and a muppet ask you tiresome questions such as "What is the formula for carbon monoxide?" or "What is your first name?". Entering "Clive" as an answer elicits the response "What a strange name". So, for that matter, does any other reply.

If disaster should strike, a caption will appear saying "Is this the end...?" The answer is "No" because Trader is a trilogy so there are another two complete parts to load from the tape. There are many more traditional text Adventures of the "Go south, open door, take gold" variety but the narrowness of the replies they will accept is often irritating.

DOWN THE MINES

Mikrogen's Mines of Saturn starts with a cheery "Have fun" and then proceeds to ask questions like "Tunnels lead N, S, E and W - what will you do?" Attempts to answer "N" or "go N" or even "go n" will not wash. It must be "go North" or nothing. At least Phipps' Knight's Quest has a 120-word vocabulary to help you on your damsel-ridden way to a castle in the air.

Everest by Richard Shepherd Software is more of a strategy game than a straight Adventure. You have to take enough food and rope to climb the mountain and cope with every hazard. I enjoyed the climb but I never reached the summit - partly because the Sherpas are not what they used to be.

When Sir Edmund Hillary climbed Everest for the first time he managed to find a Sherpa called Tensing. The time when you visit a Nepalese hill village to recruit porters you are asked to choose between Sherpas with names like Keith, Brian, Ron, Tim and Paul. Presumably they are ex-hippies, lost on the road to Katmandu.

Things obviously still are what they used to be down at Mikrogen. If Andy Capp sends you into fits of laughter Mad Martha might just raise a smile. It is the same old story, boy meets girl, well, hen-pecked husband meets axe-happy wife - all very predictable. Mikrogen also sells arcade games like Cosmic Raiders - a competent impersonation of Defender with a long-range screen and grabbers.

Melbourne House's variation on the same theme is called Penetrator. The display looks more like the arcade version of Scramble. A training facility to help you build up specific game skills is a good idea. C-Tech's Rocket Raider is yet another competent variant on similar lines.

Artic offers a suicidally fast asteroids game called Cosmic Debris. Still in the arcades, both Elfin Software and Quicksilva produce robot battles which are of the Pac-Man-meets-Tanks variety.

Elfin's Tobor has the more exciting opening titles but loses on points to Quicksilva's QS Frenzy whose exotic science-fiction plot seems to offer a better justification for the game.

Speaking of Tanks, DK'tronics 3D Tanx was one of my favourite programs in the whole batch. You can track you gun barrel from side to side and adjust the elevation as you lob your shells at four lines of moving tanks which can fire back at you. Although the opposing tanks at first appear to be crawling across a structure that looks more like Brighton's West Pier than a battleground, this is one of my four games you might catch me paying to play in an arcade.

JOIN THE PROFESSIONALS

Artic's Combat Zone is another ambitious attempt at a Tank game. Your target and the landscape - a few pyramids on an invisible plane - look like refugees from Psion's Vu-3D program. They are very simple three-dimensional shapes but they change position smoothly and realistically as if you were walking past them in some world inside your Spectrum.

You and your opponents fire fragments of cubist paintings at each other but the abstraction is not so important as the fact that you are playing the first real Spectrum game in three dimensions - Vu-3D itself is a Psion program which allows you to build up three dimensional objects on the screen and then rotate them, or float them towards you and back again. In effect it is a crude version of the mainframe programs which create the effects for films like Tron.

ET makes an appearance too in an Abbex Adventure with voices called ETX. Unfortunately after loading pages of instructions about how I should phone home ending with the advice that I should treat any MI5 man who appeared as an enemy, the tape self-destructed.

This left me with an unnerving impression of "the strength of Britain's security services.

The secret police are certainly important in DK'tronics strategy game called Dictator. The setting is a banana republic. The instructions ominously point out that "your rule is measured in months". You have to balance political factions, army, secret police, peasants, landowners, guerillas and superpowers if you are to survive.

Breaking into embassies would doubtless be all in a day's work for a dictator. So for all prospective saviours of the nation, Sinclair's Embassy Assault will come in useful. It is very much like those maze games which present your view. standing in the maze. Instead of trying to avoid a minotaur, this time you are looking for secret codes and the like.

All this is enough to send you back into the arcades but Jet Pac's creators have moved from the arcades into home computing.

Ultimate Play the Game's Jet Pac puts you into the position of an astronaut who has to build a rocket from the pieces he can find sitting on clouds around the screen. The scenario is not entirely convincing but it makes for a good game. The same cannot be said of the simulations by CCS.

CCS's representations of the oil business, Dallas, running a printers, Print Room, and of international aviation, Airline, may be realistic but they are not very exciting. Although these were originally designed as training for middle management, livelier presentation would not necessarily have made them less useful. Hewson's simulations of air-traffic control, Heathrow, and the Nightflite flight simulator are more convincing.

Board-games seem to transfer particularly well to the Spectrum. Psion's Scrabble has already been recommended. With its four levels of play and 11,000-word dictionary it can offer almost as tough opposition as you could want. There are also two different approaches to that old favourite Monopoly.

Automonopoli offers a continuous display of the part of the board around your current position. This display moves smoothly when the dice are thrown. Do Not Pass Go from Workforce has a less interesting display but at least shows the whole board all the time. Automonopoli allows you to personalise the program with the names of players and both programs give the option of being either a board for humans to play on or of letting the computer join in as a player. In each case the computer becomes a soft opponent once you have reached the stage of building houses and hotels.

If you have ever wandered into a rundown dockland hotel or pub and been confronted by the sort of balding drunk who says he used to sail the seven seas and boasts that he can name the capital of any country you care to choose, I can reveal his secret. At home he has a Spectrum with Hewson's Countries of the World up and running on it.

At the touch of a button it will remind you that N'djamena is the capital of Chad or that Yaounde is the capital of Cameroon. In the corner of the pub someone with probably be playing a video game not unlike Firebirds.

Softek's Firebirds is a Galaxians-type game distinguished by good croaking noises from the birds. Still on the subject of sound effects Workforcé's Jaws Revenge is very noisy and fun. The graphics are great. You are a shark and you are after the divers and- boats which are after you.

Mined Out from Quicksilva is a very strange version of Mines. It is subtitled "Rescue Bill the worm from certain old age" and if you find a way through the first minefield you then have to rescue damsels in distress. Someone at Quicksilva has been playing too many Adventure games and it is beginning to show.

The last words on the cassette packet read "the image fades to soft focus which is replaced by waves falling on a rocky shore, except in Bill's dream there are no waves or soft focus..." It is certainly time that software cassettes carried a government health warning.

One of the first games issued for the Spectrum, by Sinclair favourites, Melbourne House, Penetrator has stood the test of time very well. Despite the huge software base that now supports the Spectrum, Penetrator is still probably in the top ten or so of most playable and most addictive games.

The game is a fairly faithful 'steal' from the arcade favourite, Scramble and, despite the obvious limitations of the Spectrum, even using the full 48K, stands comparison very favourably with versions on dedicated games machines. The object of the game is to fly your fighter through a series of caverns, all stoutly defended by guided missiles and policed with radar bases and 'paratroopers'. As the jet starts on the screen, the landscape begins to scroll inexorably from right to left - once your mission has started, it is impossible to stop for more than, at most, a second, as more hazards, in the form of missiles and difficult jagged terrain, appear before you.

The program starts with the usual attractive Melbourne House loading screen and, once loaded, after a fine display of screen fireworks, a menu offers a choice of three modes: play, train or create. The trainer mode is a welcome innovation - because of the complexity of the cavern system, it is very useful to be able to acquaint oneself with the layout whilst being able to squander an infinite number of lives. There are various tricks and techniques which need to be learned in order to make progress and the trainer is ideal for this. There is a choice of practising on any of the four continuous stages of the game, and once a stage has been completed, you are automatically moved on to the next phase, and so on. Throughout your practice, a score is kept, depending on the number of missiles, radar bases and paratroopers destroyed, so you can check on how your skills are improving before you dare to move to the game proper.

The actual game is for one or two players and each one of the players' five lives starts with a rousing battle stations. The use of sound, although fairly limited in nature (jet sounds and explosions), is good, particularly when amplified. The keyboard control layout is one of the now standard types, with Q/A for up and down, and P/O for thrust/brake, which are sensible for finding in a hurry. Your weapons systems comprise bombs (any key on the bottom row) and missiles (P again, when pressed rapidly, which is quite an annoyance when using a programmable joystick, since the stick has to be jerked rapidly to differentiate between fire and thrust). The use of a joystick does simplify movement tremendously, since the game requires a fair amount of dexterity on the keyboard. Unfortunately it is a programmable stick which is needed, since there is no option offered for any of the standard joysticks.

The graphics are fairly unsophisticated, compared with the best offered by Ultimate and Quicksilva and it would be interesting to see the quality of a 1984 version, on this score.

Once you have negotiated all four phases, your task is to destroy the neutron-bomb store, and then return the way you came. Easily said, but it will take you many many hours of play on the trainer before you get anywhere near proficient enough to even reach the bomb store, much less destroy it and return to base. However, such is the addictive quality of Penetrator that you will keep trying, again and again, if only to better your top score. There is a high score table provided, of course.

If you are finally triumphant, or if you find the cave system just too difficult, the game boasts a unique customising option, which enables you to simply edit the landscape and bases to your own liking - as easy or as tough as you can manage, with as many or as few missile bases as needed. Once created, a landscape can be saved to tape, so in effect Penetrator consists of a series of Scramble-type games of differing degrees of difficulty at the player's whim.

One of the Spectrum classics and, hopefully, one of the first games to be upgraded for the QL!

Melbourne House's Penetrator is a splendid version for the 48K Spectrum of the arcade favourite, Scramble in case you don't know (where have you been for the last few millenia?) Scramble is a game where your fighter soars across a horizontally scrolling landscape of caverns and narrow mazes, dodging ground-to-air missiles and flying saucers. You can bomb the buildings on the precipitous slopes below. Almost all the features of the original are included in Penetrator, and there are a few extra ones besides.

Due to your ship's ability to fire at airbourne aliens or missiles and bomb the radar installations on the ground, Penetrator has six control keys. Fortunately they are distributed sensibly around the keyboard and the P key has been ingeniously programmed to thrust and fire depending on how long you keep it pressed - making life a lot easier!

Penetrator has five phases of action, ranging from open-air ground attacks to edge-of-the-seat manoeuvering along narrow corridors redollent with missile towers. A delicate operation, but it can be pulled off if you stay as far forward as possible at all times.

While the arcade version has a fuel gauge to keep your eye on, this has been replaced in Penetrator by a 'danger level' indicator: if too many radar bases are missed, this counter increases dramatically and the enemies become more intelligent - if the level reaches RED ALERT, then look out! You must now avoid guided missiles and crafty aliens who hide behind rocks away from your line of fire and swoop down on you when it's too late to hit them.

The graphics incorporated into the game need only one word of introduction - stunning! It's all hi-res, and so well animated that the rotating radar bases almost slip into three dimensions as they spin on their turrets. The explosions are satisfying and your ship's laser blaster can keep up easily with your twitching finger even if you're the fastest arcade gunner in the West! Unfortunately, you are limited to two bombs at a time - which is a pity as there's so much to hit. The sound, too, is excellent, especially the sirens, explosions and game tune.

The sound and graphics add to Penetrator's addictive qualities, but the actual game is very challenging and difficult, which can only be a good thing. The changing phases maintain interest, as does the incorporation of a mission which must be carried out rather than just blasting aliens all day. This task confronts you in the fifth phase, where you have one chance to bomb an alien base down a narrow chasm - miss and your ship obliterates colourfully on the end wall of the caves. If, on the other hand, you manage to hit the thing, you are rewarded with thousands and thousands of points and a lengthy fireworks display which is pretty at first but becomes tedious. Even then the fun's not over! Now you have to get all the way back to your own base by negotiating all four phases in the opposite direction.

Penetrator, though lengthy, is a first class loader and boasts an excellent starting picture just like the drawing on the cassette inlay. A nice menu is printed and then you're into the actual battle. If you should find all the action a little too much, then there's an excellent training mode where any phase except the final bombing run can be practised with infinite lives at your disposal (must cost the training centre a fortune in ships and parachutes!).

Of all Penetrator's first-class features, the most outstanding is the redefining command. If you ever master Penetrator (can I have your autograph?) the addiction isn't lost: with this feature you can change the landscape (floor and roof) and the position and numbers of both missiles and radar installations in the ground. Each new landscape can be SAVEd on tape and then LOADed back at any time. Thus, you can have hundreds of different versions of the game in your collection and make it as easy or difficult as you like. One point to note, however, is that accurate positioning of the missiles is imperative, as any uneven surface below their foundations causes them to explode automatically during the game and creates errors in future explosions.

There are little or no criticisms to be made about Penetrator. If you're an arcade addict, then Melbourne House have a real winner for you here. As the caption on the inlay says, 'If you have a 48K Spectrum, then you must have Penetrator!'

Penetrator is my pick of Scramble-type games for the Spectrum.

It succeeds in being immensely playable yet very difficult and horribly addictive.

Nice touches include a large number of radar scanners which constantly rotate as you fly over them. These are worth more than points, for unless you blow them up, they collect data about your flight plan and enable missiles and enemy paratroopers to track you more successfully.

This is shown in a danger level indicator on your console. The more radar scanners left operative the more likely the missiles are to blow you from the sky. There is only one way to reduce the danger level, blowing up the enemy's neutron bomb store. Four stages to the game before you meet the neutron bomb HO and try to return to base.

Your controls are very responsive - they need to be - up, down, thrust, brake, fire and bomb.

There has been a lot of careful thought gone into the way the controls work. Thrust and fire are on the same key but operate independently and the whole bottom row of the Spectrum keyboard is given over to bomb.

You can customise your own Penetrator maze. The game allows you to build up your own scenario with radar installations, missiles, caverns and steep hillsides. But it is a time consuming exercise so it's well worth saving the finished product.

In view of all this effort on the part of the marvellous Melbourne House programmers, it's a pity they didn't curb their keenness for presentation techniques a little.

The firing rockets and slow writing out of "Penetrator" is pleasant the first time but pales a little when you are keen to get on with the game and improve your score.

But this is my only criticism of a well-conceived piece of software.

It runs on the 48K model and costs £6.95.