Producer: US Gold
Retail Price: £7.95
Author: Mike Lorenzen and Mimi Doggett

The Psi 5 trading company carries anything, anywhere, anytime, it has to... it needs the money. At present the big dollars are earned hauling freight through the Parvin Frontier to the beleaguered mining settlements beyond.

As captain you have control of a freighter headed for that space quarter. Courses and cargoes can be chosen to maximise reward - but the larger the profit the greater the danger; space pirates are active en route, and may attempt to board. But try and avoid them and you could be forced onto a route too long for your perishable cargo.

Candidates for the six crew are available, including aliens, droids and humans. The ability profiles of potential candidates can be viewed and their suitability for the mission assessed. Select the crew with the best abilities for your journey - success may depend upon it.

The mission can now begin.

As ships captain, you sit before a two screened communications console, a space scan on the left and with the portrait of the crew member you are commanding displayed on the right. Screen indicators give weapon status, motion, speed and heading.

Using the ship's communication system, messages can be passed between departments, tasks assigned, priorities changed, commands added or countermanded. Crew members do obey orders but are a wilful bunch, and can take it upon themselves to perform tasks if not instructed quickly enough.

All departments are under the Captain's ultimate control -whilst giving orders to one department the status of another can be monitored on the icon display. From the navigation department course and speed can be set and evasive manouevring performed; a risk monitor indicates if insurmountable odds lie ahead.

The scanning department tracks and identifies other craft and works closely with the weapons section. From here target information, ammunition status and past performance of personnel can be checked. Both friendly and hostile ships can be destroyed, so they should be identified before engaging.

Equipment power is regulated from the engineering department. Engines and defensive shields (which require a minimum energy flow to operate effectively) eat into the ship's power reserve. In order to efficiently manage the ship's systems, different departments can have their power shut off to conserve energy.

The repair department undertakes damage assessment and rectification to the ship's equipment. Robodroids can help the repair department's personnel, but are not continually available as time is taken re-allocating them between tasks, collecting tools or travelling to damage sites. Certain crucial items should be fixed as soon as possible - cargo support devices, life support systems, and power reactors are essential to your operation. Should the ship ever be allowed to flounder in space with dead engines, shields and weapons, pirates can board, and loot the cargo.

Protect your ship from too much damage as repair costs are deductible from your overall profits.

COMMENTS

Control keys: left/right cursors, Caps Shift to fire and cursors plus Enter for crew selection
Joystick: none
Use of colour: lots of colour, but some inevitable attribute clash
Graphics: detailed and nicely animated
Sound: very little
Skill levels: one
Screens: one main playing screen with sub-screen detail

I was really looking forward to this strange trading game - the thing is that it's just a bit too strange for my liking. The whole presentation of the game is full of colour (and clashes), but is let down by the input method used, and the over-responsive keys. I tried all I could for ages, but didn't feel that I could get anywhere with it. Psi 5 on the Spectrum just doesn't work at all. I'm extremely disappointed with it as it's no fun to play.
PAUL

This is not a typical arcade game, but it has plenty of fast action. To get anywhere you need to persevere, due to there being so many things to monitor at the same time. The impressive instruction sheet comes in very handy for the first play, as it describes each aspect in great detail. The game itself is quite impressive, each crew member is given character and personality by well animated and colourful graphics. There's very little sound, but it's not needed and would be annoying. Overall Psi 5 is addictive with its smooth running, but it probably won't appeal to any arcade game freaks.
GARETH

From all the glossy advertising and packaging, I was really expecting a good game. As if I didn't know better! The concept is brilliant, with stacks of potential for a mega-game, but US GOLD's version is far from that. I'm not saying that it's bad, but if a game can be both mind-blowingly complicated and still have insufficient content to make it interesting, then Psi 5 is just about as good a cross as you'll be able to find. Essentially, it's a fun, but I think my general feeling, coming away from it, is one of disappointment.
MIKE

US Gold
£7.99

Now this is different! Go and deliver the shopping. Okay, so the place you have to deliver to is twelve light years away. So the van driver's an android, but what do you expect? Let's get going.

The game is divided into two parts, the first being to choose your mission and pick your crew. There are three missions to choose from, and when you've selected one you're shown the distance you have to travel, the cargo you have to take and the reward you'll get if you get the job done.

Naturally you are the captain and you must choose your five crew members. This requires some thought. You have thirty people to choose from - five groups of six people each. Each group has different skills - weapons, scanning, navigation. engineering or repairs - and you have to select your team carefully. You get an on-screen display of piccies of the thirty people and selection is by the cursor keys. Once you've selected someone there's a chance to see their records so that you can make your final decision. Who's the best? Well, that's up to you to decide. Once you've made up you mind, though, it's time to load in part two.

The first important thing a captain must do is tell the navigator exactly where you're going. If you don't do this, not a great deal happens. Once I'd worked this out, and told Nik in navigation where we were off to, I settled back and familiarised myself with the crew. There was Boris in weapons, Bluton in scanning, good ol' Nik in navigation, Craven taking care of the engineering and T3XR9 (crazy guy!) in repairs. Space drifted past the window, so I asked Nik to put the welly down 'cos we had to be on time.

The screen graphics are really quite complicated, displaying no fewer than sixteen different things simultaneously. The screen itself is divided into three main areas and the top part is divided further into two halves. On the left there's your view out of the dashboard window, on the right there's the person/thing you're talking to. The bottom of the screen is where the communication takes place. These two main sections are separated by various scanners and warning lights so you can keep your finger on what's happenin' man. How the programmers have managed to squeeze so much onto the Speccy screen is beyond me!

Time went by, and Nik kept slowing down. I remonstrated with him, but he only said "I'm doing my best" as he slowed down for the space equivalent of a traffic light. Oaf! All of a sudden, there we were in the middle of a battle (I told him we should've jumped the lights) and all hell broke loose. Messages arrived from every part of the ship, and we dodged around space, desperately trying to fight or avoid missiles. Suddenly, it was all over - Space Captain John blew it!

Psi-5 Trading Company needs a bit of brainpower and a fair amount of playing before you'll really get into it, but put the time aside, 'cos it's a cracker!

Label: US Gold
Price: £8.95
Joystick: various
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: John Gilbert

I thought this type of space trader was blasted on its way when Elite hit the streets two years ago. But no. Here's Psi-5 Trading. US Gold obviously thinks otherwise.

It's a positively archaic strategy game. And, as you'd expect, it takes five minutes just to Load in the crew initialisation section, followed by nearly another ten to dump in the rest of the game.

It being a space trade game, you're in space and looking to trade commodities of various types. Before you can start, though, you get to sort out the crew of your intergalactic space cargo vessel - the previously mentioned initialisation sequence.

Five vacancies and five applicants for each one. Sit down, put your feet up, and prepare to go through the form cards of all 25.

Each card has different pros and cons. Their ages - ranging between 12 and 270 - education, strengths, weaknesses and abilities - most of which were alien to me.

The whole thing is menu-driven and you move a highlight cursor up and down the list of options. There's no joystick option, just cursor keys and space, but each item is labeled with an alphabetic character: press that and you select the adjacent option.

Once you've chosen the crew and waited yawningly for the rest to load you can take charge of the five control centres of your rickety old ship. Navigation is controlled through a few alarmingly inaccurate course options. There's shortest path, medium deviation to port/starboard and full port/starboard circumvention. I'm sure they mean circumnaviation, but that's space for you. You've also got to choose between the Standard Course setting or Evasive Action. The latter sets the klaxxons sounding - the only good sound FX if you've got a 128 - and a warning message flashes on the screen.

The enemy aliens in the Commodore 64 screen shot on the 48K inlay card - surely there's a law against that - looks fantastic but the Spectrum aliens are puny and about as realistic as the flat star-field behind them.

Then there's the alien names. They look like the author was experimenting with a random character generator: Zeltoads, Kiffboks and Skront's. Hey, this is easy. I could do this! How about Rebtaks, Compoids and Pussprefects. I think mine were better, but then I'm like that... I don't know what each of Psi-5's aliens look like and, to be perfectly honest, I don't want to know. They all flicker over the screen so quickly that identification would be impossible if it weren't for the ship's weapon's section.

Ah, weapons. There are four types: Missiles, Blasters, Cannons, and a Thermos - a sort of firestorm which wipes out most thingies (and there I was, just about to keep my soup in it). You can either choose the order in which weapons are fired by your weapons officer, or give the order to fire at will. No matter what you do the results are highly unimpressive. Most of the time all you'll see is the number of alien craft you potted and that only if you consult the Weapons chart which give you hits and weapons expended.

If you're lucky you'll get through the mission, deliver the cargo and be able to choose another of the three main missions in the game. You could, for instance, go to Kozzar-7 with Nucliaro for $12m or, perhaps, Splyteux with Prebliks for $50m (more random letter generated toss-blanketry). Neither place intereted me and as the game's so old, and I'm so cynical, I can't say it would interest me even as a newcomer.

You see, the bad news is that when you want to start a new mission you have to Quit, at which point the program's dumped and you have to re-Load it all again.

There's a shorter-load game on Side 2 of the cassette, without the crew selection but even then the amount of time spent waiting to play the game isn't justified.

I'd rather go to Tetrasomnia - and I made that one up too.

MACHINES: Spectrum/C64/Amstrad
SUPPLIER: Accolade
PRICE: £7.95
VERSION TESTED: Spectrum

There are two ways to trade in space. Elite placed you alone in the cockpit. Whether you were bartering or blasting, you took overall control of the situation. Psi 5 tries for an even more ambitious format, much closer to a Star Trek scenario. You become a fully fledged Captain, commanding a full crew.

I doubt that there has ever been a more ambitious game on the humble Spectrum. If ever a concept cried out for disk access, this it. But until the +3 arrives, the first adventure for tape users will be coping with Psi 5's multi-load. This is made all the more tricky by an apparent crash once the crew is loaded. But don't panic; flip the tape, hit LOAD "", and soon you'll be ready for take off.

The secret of success in Psi 5 lies on the ground though. If you don't obtain the right crew, it'll lead to problems when you're light years from home. Your ship has five posts to fill, in different departments, and six individuals to choose from in each case. It's up to you to decide whether the expert with blasters who knows next to nothing about missiles is a better bet than the multi-weapon expert who lacks field experience.

Even more ambitious is the way that the potential crew have individualised characters, detailed in their reports. Can you afford to take on the engineering genius who is headstrong and has had arguments with superiors in the past? Will you have time to keep an eye on a navigator who is slow to initiate actions and goes to pieces under stress?

With all these decisions it obviously makes sense to choose the simplest mission to start with. This won't pay too much, but there's less risk of getting lost in space or attacked by pirates if you play things safe. After that it the treacherous second load and you're underway. Even blast off is a tricky business, but at least the instructions suggest the ideal sequence, and you'd be advised to follow it.

Psi 5 doesn't present you with the elaborate graphics of Elite, you can watch through the view-screen as that unidentified shop swoops in and lets you know that it's also unfriendly. Mostly though it's a mass of menus and messages, which can take a little time to learn, but at least they avoid the confusion of keys that would take an Einstein to understand.

You just need left-right and select to contact a department, and then a system of sub-menus lets you issue commands. Let's suppose that you're happily underway when that pirate appears. Contact the navigator and bring the ship to a halt. Now request scanning to examine the ship. Sit tight until it tells you what you're up against and the best choice of weapons, then move post haste to the weapons officer. Tell him to fire at will, using the relevant form of attack.

Play for a while though, and you'll eventually feel like Captain Kirk, taking messages from the crew and learning whether you made the correct choice. Psi 5 has a few ragged edges, but it's good to see something of this scope attempted on the Spectrum. It's exciting and different, and you should give it a try.

ARE YOU DECISIVE? COULD YOU COMMAND A SPACE FREIGHTER? DO YOU HIRE THE GLORK OR FLIGRONK?

US Gold
£9.95

Commanding a star freighter for the Psi-5 Trading Company isn't as easy as it's portrayed in games like Elite. The problems lie in the fact that you have to carry perishable cargo to far flung parts of the galaxy, in a scrap heap of a ship that's crewed by a collection of galactic oddballs, while being shot at by every pirate in the sector.

Having selected the easiest option (nothing's easy in this business!) of carrying 'nucleric' 120 parsecs to Kozzar-7, it's time to interview 30 candidates for your five crew positions. For each position you have six weirdos to choose from and can even punch up their record, but I doubt that'll help you. Since trial and error will sort out the good from the bad and the ugly, I opted for a 200 year old hairy Glork to handle the weapons, a man-hating Palagonan to scan space for enemy ships, a yellow blob called Yenx to navigate, the green scaly Fligronk to man the engineering department and finally T3XR9 to repair things (since he's a robot I thought he'd know what to fix and when). With the crew in position and me in the captain's chair, we headed for the stars.

The screen display is a mass of windows, instruments and displays as you issue orders to your crew that show your exterior view, speed, compass, damage and supply gauges, a picture of the crew member you're talking to and their controls.

You can select the crew and then their actions from duck-shoot menus and order engineering to get power through to the standard systems, navigation to plot a course and accelerate, scanning to search and identify other ships and weapons and repair to standby. That's just to get started!

The fun and games really start when another ship approaches. If it's a friendly ship and you accidentally fire at it you could break a long standing treaty but if it's an enemy you can't afford to leave it alone. Now you must act quickly as scanning must get a fix before weapons can fire any of it's four weapons either at a specific target or at will. The battle is shown in your view window but you probably won't get a chance to watch it as things really heat up. Messages flood in from your crew as systems are damaged and need repairing.

If you survive you may get a chance to organise repairs before the pirates strike again. Fail, and you'll be destroyed and the pirates will ransack your ship. Either way your mission report will count up the profits or losses of your mission as it deducts repairs costs, casualties and lost allies from cargo profits, early bonuses and bounty for zapping the Chilank, Zeltoad, Flarkan and Trantot pirates.

There's no doubt that Psi-5 Trading Company is an excellent game but is anyone good enough to play it?