Producer: The Power House
Retail Price: £1.99
Author: Steve Cargill

You are alone on a deadly mission: to detect and destroy any planets that stray into your intergalactic path. Your ammunition has been topped up and your breathing apparatus is ready. Everything is set for takeoff. Zooming up into the air, your craft penetrates the earth's atmosphere at a colossal speed.

But Earth's enemies, the Cargilbans (subtle reference to the programmer!), are out to stop you -and suddenly a band of their fighters comes into view. As you rush into battle, one driving thought runs through your head: 'ATTACK, ATTACK, REJUVENATE... TRANSFORM.'

The Slingshot screen shows the view from a space fighter's cockpit, glittering with multicoloured stars. After choosing a zone, you move amidst the hostile Cargillian fighters, destroying as many as possible. Then the planets come into view, and they too must be blasted; each offers a different number of points.

Get them in the sights... but once you've destroyed one planet, don't sit back on your laurels (or your Hardies, for that matter). Get out there - because here comes another.

Programmer Steve Cargill's Sir Lancelot was a Smash in CRASH Issue 11, while his Fighting Warrior was reviewed in Issue 22. Both were for Melbourne House.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: simple sprites with reasonable shading, but unimaginative colour and some clash
Sound: irritating FX for engine sound, plus a free audio track by H.E.X. after the game
Options: 48 scrolling playing areas; two choices of keys

Detect a planet, destroy it, detect, destroy, that's all Slingshot consists of. The graphics are a mixture of unimaginative sprites and blobs of shading; the sound is virtually nonexistent; and the weapon system gets really exasperating after a while, because when you fire the sights disappear into the distance! For the programmer of Fighting Warrior this must be a real embarrassment, but perhaps no software house's catalogue is complete without a trashy space shoot-'em-up…
NICK [29%]

I'm appalled by how easy Slingshot is - my first go seemed to last for ages. But I became tired of it very quickly. Slingshot might appeal to some as a budget game, but it's a dull, simple and unoriginal shoot- 'em-up.
MIKE [43%]

I can't believe that a programmer of Steve Cargill's background could lower his standards to produce such trash as this. I was immediately bored by the same old simple budget-type and there's no originality. Slingshot is definitely worth avoiding.
PAUL [29%]

Label: Power House
Author: Steve Cargill
Price: £1.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tony Dillon

Oh no, it's another of those games from Alpha Ome... sorry, Power House. What's this one like? Well, if you really want to know, it's really quite simple. Choose where you want to go on the path selection screen (really a lot of different coloured squares) and then fly there. Then enter attack mode and lots of lovely spaceships zoom forward and backwards in glorious Spec-colour and all you have to do is shoot them. If there's a planet in the area, you can land on it, fly along it like Defender and when you get to the end, it blows up. Easy innit?

At first you'll probably be pleasantly surprised by the pretty and quite detailed graphics of the ships but then you will be brought down to earth by the gameplay. It plays like a hedgehog plays frogger.