Over the past few months, CRASH has tended to neglect the cheaper end of the software market - the ninety-niners - in favour of critical comment on all the full-price games. So in an effort to cover every single piece of software available for your Spectrum, CRASH has decided to introduce a new section, devoted entirely to budget software (games up to £5.00 in price); Budget Bureau. Each month, we'll pick out and feature our favourite cheapies, anything with 80%+ will receive a CRASH House Hit award! Each game still has its own overall rating (in brackets), so there shouldn't be a problem choosing the best games to buy. Only Blackbeard gets a House Hit this month. Read on, read on...

Far more enjoyable is the latest Mastertronic shoot-'em-up, Star Farce (58%). This is a colourful, vertically-scrolling alien-blaster in the style of Lightforce. There's very little originality, but playability makes up for it. Worth a look, although the superior Lightforce is on budget too.

BARGAIN BASEMENT

What's going cheap this month? (Make any bird jokes, and you're dead, Ed). Certainly not Marcus Berksquawk. (BLAM!!)

Mastertronic
£1.99
Reviewer: Marcus Berkmann

This, on the other hand, is much more like it. Virtually identical in many ways to Tomcat, it's streets ahead in gameplay, looks, variety and sheer playability. Again a vertical scroller, Star Farce re-introduces that oft forgot feature of old Speccy games - colour! It's bursting with colour all over the shop, and what's more it's faster than Tomcat, and played over a larger screen. There are even 32 different levels (although judging by the first few, they're all much of a muchness).

Now, I'd admit it's not terribly original. In fact it's hopelessly unoriginal - Lightforce and Bedlam are its nearest relations. But it's tremendous fun and like all the best games, it's easy to start, hard to finish. It's odd, because Mastertronic hasn't been releasing that many new games recently, having concentrated on re-releases, and the few newies it has bunged out have been, in the main, rather ropey. But this is a fine game, as addictive as any full price shooter now on the market, but at a fraction of the price. Bargain? Bargain.

Label: Mastertronic
Author: Log
Price: £1.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer:

What is Star Farce? in one instance, it's a rip-off of that classic old coin-op, Star Force. In the other instance it's fast, colourful, playable fun and cheap.

As you have probably already guessed from the screenshots Star Farce bears a remarkable resemblance to Lightforce, which broke new ground like nobody's business when it was let loose a while back. Star Farce is better!

The plot consists of the same old trot. You are a lone fighter... blah blah blah... evil dictator (or should that be potater)... stop him... hordes of alien monsters... free the world... etc etc.

What isn't apparent from the screenshots is that Star Farce is a shoot-'em-up of the highest degree, and I'm not just saying that so Mastertronic's Andrew Wright, my bestest friend in all the world, won't break my legs. It rules over a lot of recent, and not so recent SEUs in quite a few ways.

It's colourful. Colour has been used incredibly well. I'm not going to say that there isn't any colour clash, because there is, but who cares.

It's destructive. There isn't a single item I could find that couldn't be shot. I especially like the electric power lines that explode in a chain reaction when you shoot the generators.

It's progressive. You can collect an add-on for your ship that doubles your firepower and takes the first hit for you.

It's got interconnecting levels. You can fall through holes into other levels where you are put face to face with a large mothership which appears at various places throughout each level. This has to be shot before you can get on to the next level.

It's playable. The problem with games like Lightforce is, though they boast some pretty clever graphics, they're unplayable. Star Farce isn't. It's playable and has nice graphics.

It's cleverly programmed. There are a lot of clever programming techniques involved, the most impressive being the elimination of borders on the introductory screen.

Star Farce is, by no means, the best shoot-'em-up I've ever seen, but it is a lot better than a lot I've seen recently. At this price, you'd be a fool to miss it.