Producer: Infogrames
Retail Price: £9.95

Swamped by gangland crime, the New York Police Department hires a mercenary to rub out the city's contract killers. But they won't be no pushover.

Killers appear on the streets, at windows and on the apartment block roofs of a decaying downtown zone. An arrow at the bottom of the screen shows which way the mercenary you control must move to find your next target, but doesn't give the killer's vertical position.

Once the hoodlum has been found, you can get him in your sights. A killer must be hit within three seconds after an onscreen countdown begins. And when killers lurk in difficult positions extra time is given to blast them.

But if the baddie isn't shot before the deadline, you get it instead and lose one of your three fives. At higher levels the hoodlums become faster in their reactions.

And killers never come quietly - they return fire if given half a chance. Enemy bullets can be dodged, giving you an extra three seconds of grace - but such evasive action can't be kept up forever. A bar indicator shows remaining dodge time.

Still, you're paid good greenbacks for each contract successfully completed.

Some despicable killers hold hostages, so great accuracy is essential if you're not to plug an innocent victim.

Now get out on those mean streets...

COMMENTS

Control keys: Q up, S down, O left, P right. SPACE to fire, ENTER to dodge, number keys to pause
Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair
Use of colour: monochromatic
Graphics: excellent, despite slightly jerky scrolling
Sound: limited to gunshots
Skill levels: progressive
Screens: scrolling play area

Infuriating and slow it may be, but Prohibition isn't bad; I was absorbed by my first play. But when things begin to get a little hot under the collar, the gameplay falls apart - your cross hairs jump when a shot is fired, so accurate shooting (not easy to begin with) becomes impossible. Graphically it could have been much better: the background is nicely drawn but it's spoiled by the horrible scrolling and badly-defined mobsters. And the sound is another major letdown. Prohibition is disappointing - implemented properly it could have been brilliant.
BEN

The police failed so it's -all down to you. Good luck - you'll need it! Prohibition has some of the best graphics I've seen on the Spectrum for a long, long time, but the lack of colour and sound are a pity. Infogrames have a real winner here - if only there were a little tune at the start...
NICK

Other than the gangster theme, there's no tie-in between this game and real Prohibition (the US ban on alcohol in the Twenties), which is slightly misleading. The title suggests images of fast shoot-outs and smuggling operations but the real thing is tedious. It consists only of shooting and dodging - and though it's very easy to get into, there's no challenge or depth to Prohibition. And the monochromatic graphics aren't as highly detailed as in other games that use this technique.
ROBIN

Infogrames
£9.95

Hi there. You may know me. The name's Sprog, Sam Sprog. Okay, so you don't know me, but that's not important right now. What's important is that they are after me. No, not the inland Revenue, but - the Mob. They're everywhere, and - wait a minute, who's that at the window?... BANG!... Aaargh! Caught in my prime by an... uhhrrr.

Poor guy, caught in his prime by an uhhrrr, and just as he was about to tell you all about Infogrames' new shoot 'em up, Prohibition. The idea's this - you control a gunsight which has to be manoeuvred across several run-down Chicago tenements to pick up and despatch a gangland killer who's trying to do the same to you. It's hard - first you have to find the critter, and you only get a few seconds to do it. But all is not lost, as you can reach the required block (usually made up of two columns of five or six windows) before the clock starts. If you don't find him in time, rest assured that he'll find you. And it's not just a case of find the window and blast the bad guy, oh no. They don't just fire out of windows - they fire from the rooftops, the fire escapes, the attics, the basement grills, from the street and even from under manhole covers!

The graphics are black on white, although the pavement is pink(?) Everything's very well defined, and if the scrolling's a little jerky, it doesn't detract much from the gameplay. I also like the way that the baddies, when killed, either slump forward or get blown backwards. And whenever you fire a shot, the sights move slightly off target, as they would in real life. One gripe is that there's barely any sound, and the music's nonexistent. And the gameplay definitely reminds me of an arcade game that did the rounds a while back. In all, though, it's an entertaining enough reaction test from those clever chappies across the channel. Hang on, who's that in the window? it's our Ed! What's she doing up... BANG!... oh, that's what she was doing. Caught in my prime by an... uhhrrr!

Label: Infogrames
Author: In-house
Price: £9.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Jim Douglas

Ah, the virtues of simplicity. The first thing that is great about Prohibition is that the plot is utterly simple. You move a gunsight around and try to take out as many members of a rival criminal gang as possible.

And as an added consideration you have to try to off any members of the general public who might be held hostage.

That's it. Total game plot.

Sounds a bit dull? Wrong wrong wrong. Prohibition is a classic example of an utterly simple game idea which has been perfectly executed.

It works like this. Over a backdrop of a dingy New York street of tenements several Spectrum screens wide you move your gunsight. Suddenly, seemingly (but not actually) at random, a face appears at a window - find the face, move your gunsight over it and Fire. Kill as many of the bad guys as possible.

The basic problem is where is the next killer going to appear? You get a clue by some arrows flashed up at the bottom of the screen - they tell you vaguely the right area to look in but mostly it's up to you. Your time to find that face is limited - numbers tick away the moments until the killer has got you lined up in his sights and... well you can guess the rest.

The reason Prohibition works so well is the dodge factor. It has the same sort of nervous appeal that hide and seek used to have when you were young. Dodge is the hide bit - in Dodge Mode you won't be hit by anybody but it uses up bullets and, more importantly you can't Fire at anybody in this mode. This means you have to watch the timer constantly and make a judgement about whether you have enough time to find and kill the bad guy before it gets too late and you should have dodged instead. Usually you get it wrong - but it's that constant 'Shall I risk it?' that makes the game thrilling.

Technically there is some clever stuff going on in the game - incredibly detailed backgrounds have to be scrolled yet the effect is achieved pretty smoothly. The sheer excellence of the graphics means that after a few moments you automatically ignore the fact that they are only in black and white. It could almost be a digitised photograph of a real New York street scene, so realistic is the detail and so authentic is the atmosphere of crime and decay.

There is, you begin to realise a pattern to the appearances of the bad guys - obviously you can learn it and move your gunsight cursor into the correct position ever more quickly. The snag is as you get better so do the enemy - not only do you get more and more of them at ever faster intervals but hostages start to appear (mainly distinguishable by their lack of nifty hats). This means you have to waste precious extra microseconds figuring out - having found a face a window - whether to shoot or not. It's time you don't have.

Yes, it's a pity the game is only black and white, yes the sound could have been better, yes it's a very simple idea but yes I really liked it.