PITFALL II
Activision
Memory: 48K
Price: £7.95
Joystick: Sinclair, Kempston, Cursor

Do you ever get that sinking feeling? Seven flights of flickering yellow ladder and a cold bath in a subterranean river should be enough to give you the shivers, and that is about all you will get from Pitfall II.

A gigantic playing area of straight tunnels and dead ends, peopled by fuzzy white bats, dwarf condors, and spermatozoic sea snakes awaits you, as you guide Pitfall Harry on his quest to rescue Rhonda, his niece.

Control is not easy, and when Harry reaches ladders and pits he falls at a frightening speed. You must keep holding the joystick to the right or left and watch him inch sideways as he plummets, hopefully avoiding bats and finding a safe ledge before he hits the bottom. There is clearly scope for strategy here, but there is so little you can do to avoid the nasties that the exercise will probably become boring long before the problem is solved.

GAME TYPE: Arcade

Somehow there is more disappointment in encountering a bad game with a misleadingly good write-up on the cassette sleeve than there is in simply encountering a bad game. Pitfall 2 sounds very promising. Vampire bats, poisonous frogs and deadly electric eels all sound exciting and challenging.

In point of fact, the game is not much fun. The frogs are OK, although they hardly move. The scorpions have all the convincingly animated reality of a picture being dragged along the ground, and the bats are little more than shapeless blobs recognisable as bats only because they move around in the air rather than on the ground.

Your aim is to move around the underground caverns, collecting the gold bullion in order to gain points, and finally collecting the Raj diamond. Some of the graphics are good, for example the underground rivers and waterfalls. Scrolling from screen to screen is not smooth, but performed in a series of jerky steps.

Pitfall 2 is produced for the 48K Spectrum by Activision.

Activision
£6.95

This is a nifty little number and is of the Arcade Adventure sort. Pitfall Harry must find his niece Rhonda, his cat, Quickclaw, and the Raj Diamond as well as gathering up all the gold along his journey. You are Pitfall Harry and travel through many scenes containing balloons, caverns and various dangers such as bats, frogs, and scorpions. You start off with 4000 points and aim for a perfect score of 199,000.

The best thing about this game is that if you happen to die along the way, you are transported back to the previous red cross, which you pass over during your mission. This means that the game is virtually endless and although your score declines when you get killed, once it reaches zero, that's it. With a lot of practice, the ideal score could perhaps be reached. As with all these games, annoying tunes are played along the way, but luckily there is an on/off button. Pitfall iI is also compatible with all major joysticks.

The graphics are adequate, but I feel could be a lot better to match the standard of the rest of the game, but all in all, a good buy and stimulating.