Producer: Domark
Retail Price: £9.95
Author: Vektor Grafix, from an Atari coin-op

Is the Force with you? It had better be if you'regoing to survive the waves of Empire tie-fighters and their deadly missiles, and then take a plug at the massive Deathstar. And, as in the megablockbuster Star Wars movie of 1977, the Deathstar must be destroyed if your rebel planet is not to be torn asunder.

You fly a small X-wing fighter. A force field surrounds it, giving protection against nine impacts from fireballs, and later collisions with laser towers and trench catwalks on the Deathstar's surface. But each strike reduces its shield strength.

An onboard laser, aimed with the cursor, is your own defence, and can take out enemy fighters, laser towers, bunkers, trench turrets and approaching fireballs, amassing points through destruction.

If you can deal with all the dark Empire's fighters and their missiles, you have to aim for the Deathstar itself. There your X-wing must be steered between a series of vertical laser towers, while countering yet more fireballs.

And you're still not home and dry and Mark Hamill. Yet more fireballs fill your forward view, and again these must be promptly blasted; shield-ripping barriers can completely destroy your craft. Survive these terrors and you can unleash a photon torpedo into the Deathstar's exhaust port (how predictable that its one vulnerable spot is difficult to get at). If you miss, you can circumnavigate the Deathstar to fire a second shot.

Complete this mission, and there's another, harder game - just like the film, if it's worth seeing once it's worth seeing 64 times. And Domark already has licences for Atari's coin-ops of The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi, the two cinema sequels to Star Wars - Spectrum versions are promised for 1988.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: simple and effective vector graphics
Sound: famous Star Wars tune at beginning, but NO in-game sound
Options: definable keys, easy/medium/hard levels

So many pseudo-Star Wars games are out now that the market must be close to saturation. Domark's official Star Wars conversion is an excellent copy of the arcade game and makes one or two graphical improvements on Starstrike - but if you've got the latter and not much cash, Star Wars may seem too similar to be worth buying.
BYM [92%]

Many a happy hour has been spent blasting away with the old arcade favourite when I should have been doing something more constructive. And Domark has reproduced the arcade game fairly faithfully for the Spectrum, right down to the character set. But the jerky graphics spoil it, and the in-game silence detracts from the atmosphere as well. True, it's very playable, but the cursor isn't self-centring - a major irritation - and there have been many shoot-'em-ups with more appeal and better presentation. Sadly, Domark's version of the once-great game offers too little too late
ROBIN [69%]

The Spectrum Star Wars isn't quite as good as the coin-op - or, come to that, some of the other Star Wars-like games such as Realtime's three-year-old Smash Starstrike. But it's not to be missed; the graphics are fast, though the lack of sound is a real loss, and the gameplay is excellent. The unfortunate thing is that it's too similar to Starstrike.
MIKE [90%]

The Hit Squad
£2.99 re-release

You take control of Luke Skywalker in his X-Fighter ship and must destroy one attack wave after another of deadly enemy fighters. Wave one has Luke flying out in deep space with a number of the Empire's Tie Fighters to be shot. He then dives down to the Death Star to fly through deadly laser town which grow up from the ground: a 50,000 bonus is given if all towers are destroyed. In the final scene Luke dives into a trench and must hit the exhaust port to cause the Death Star to explode.

The wire frame graphic style is incredibly similar to the arcade machine and all the gameplay has been converted intact. After a little practice all the attack waves can be mastered - which kills the long-term appeal of the game. However, you can get plenty of enjoyment from Star Wars.

Domark
£9.95
Reviewer: Jonathan Davies

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, hordes of people who should have known better flocked down to their local arcades to experience the latest in coin-ops... Star Wars! A sit-in cabinet, vector graphics and even speech. What could be more up-to-date?

Well, the years have passed and even though Gauntlet and Marble Madness have been and gone, the hordes keep filling the battered old Star Wars machines with ten pees, determined once more to destroy the Deathstar and save the galaxy from the evil empire. Leap into the cockpit of Luke Skywalker's X-Wing fighter and battle your way to the Deathstar knocking down TIE fighters left, right and centre. Then skim over the surface of the planet dodging between towers and zapping their tops for a few extra points. Finally it's down into the trench, where you must avoid barriers and enemy fire to plant a laser bolt in the exhaust port and blow up the Deathstar.

Gripping stuff, but how does it play? Fans of the coin-op will be pleased to hear that all the fast and furious action they relish has been retained, though perhaps a bit more jerkily than they may remember. All that's missing really is the sound. There isn't any! (Apart from a moving rendition of the Sfar Wars theme tune at the beginning, that is.) The programmers use the old slows-it-down-too-much excuse, but in these days of AY-3-8912 sound chips I'm afraid it seems more like laziness!

Apart from that, this is a near-perfect conversion from the original, and in this sense it has been well worth the wait. The question is, of course, is it worth buying? Addicts of the arcade machine will love it, but I'd have thought they'd already have a copy of Realtime's Starstrike, which is very similar and has been out for ages.

As a game in its own right it stands up well against the millions of other vector graphics shoot 'em ups knocking around at the moment. The only problem is that wiping out the Deathstar is a bit of a doddle, so you'll find yourself looping round the levels several times per game. Other than that, what can I say ? Go get a copy, and may the force be with you - unless you prefer Weetaflakes!

BARGAIN BASEMENT

Once again RICH PELLEY leaps into the driving seat of a number 39 bus and zooms off to Cheap City...

Hit Squad
£2.99
Reviewer: Rich Pelley

I don't like to boast or anything, but I met Darth Vadar once - he came to my school when I was about six and I sat on his knee. Impressive? Hmm. Perhaps I should tell you about the game instead.

Well, it's a conversion of the ever-popular coin-up (from a long, long time ago in a... etc) - a 'vector' graphics job incidentally (ie spooky see-through 3D graphics). There're three main bits - firstly bombing around space in your spaceship shooting down Tie-fighters and fireballs, then zooming through the towers on the surface of the Deathstar (blowing the tops off for extra points), and finally flying along a trench inside the Deathstar shooting more fireballs, locating the exhaust port, blowing up the planet and scarpering pronto. And, er, that's it really. The entire caboodle's a 'look out of the window/fly into the screen' job. It works well (if a little jerkily) and is pretty much like the coin-up apart from the severe lack of sound - something to do with there being "no sound in space". (No, really.) Another reason to get 'peeved off' is that it's pretty simple to complete the thing, so you can easily find yourself looping round the levels quite a few times.

But not until you've had your three quid's worth out of it. (That is unless you prefer to spend your £2.99 on a cuddly Ewok instead.) (Eh? Ed)

Coming, erm, now actually, to a cinema near you...

THE COMPLETE YS GUIDE TO FILM AND TELLY GAMES

Knowing full well what a square-eyed bunch you are, we thought it was about time you were given the facts on film and television licenced games. Once again, JONATHAN DAVIES was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

(Cough. Deep, manly voice.)

'In the beginning there were loads and loads of Speccy games. Loads of them. They sold all right, but not exactly in enormous numbers. The trouble was, you see, that none of them seemed particularly exciting. They had nothing that caught the public eye. They were just computer games. Had no 'cred'.

Then a small cog within a long-since-extinct software house had an idea.

"Why don't we give our next game the same name as an incredibly popular film? Then everyone would buy it just because they'd seen the film and they'd foolishly think the game would be just as good. How about i, eh?"

"Er, we could do, I suppose."

"Great."

"But what if the film company finds out? They might sue us or something."

"Oh yeah."

"Tcha."

"I know - we could ask them first."

"That's a point. Go on then."

"What? Me?"

"Yeah. Give them a ring and ask if they'd mind."

"Oo-er. Cripes. Okay then." (Dials very long trans-Atlantic phone number.)

"Hullo. We'd like to name our new game after your film and we were wondering if it was okay by you. Right... yes... oh, I see." (Cups hand over receiver.) "They want us to give them lots of money."

"Erm, well in that case we'd better." (Removes hand.) "Yes, that'll be fine. We'll send you some right away. Bye."

"Super."

"But. er..."

"What?"

"How are we going to come up with a game that's anything like the film?"

"I don't know really."

"How about if we have a bloke walking around shooting people?"

"That sounds fine. I'll program it right away."

And so the film and telly licence was born. It... cough. Choke.

Oops. There goes the deep, manly voice.

Anyway, film and telly games, eh? Everyone's doing them these days, as they're one of the few remaining ways of making serious money with computer games. Run a grubby finger down the charts and you'll find nearly all the top-sellers are film and telly licences. (Or arcade conversions, of course.)

But why do we keep buying them? After all, just because a game's named after a really brill film doesn't mean it's going to be any good, does it? Surely we aren't buying them simply because of the flashy name on the box?

Erm, well in the old days, software houses assumed this to be the case, and chucked out a stream of absolutely appalling games with 'big name' titles. Things like Miami Vice, The Dukes Of Hazard and Highlander were all pretty dreadful, but it was hoped that they'd sell on the strength of their names. But we weren't fooled. Oh no. The games didn't sell well, and the companies were forced to think again.

Eventually they came up with... the 'bloke walking around shooting things' idea. And they've used it more or less ever since. Lucky then that they tend to be jolly good all the same, and sometimes come up with the odd original idea to spice things up (like The Untouchables did, or perhaps Back To The Future Part II).

RATINGS

As always seems to be the case, the trusty YS ratings system doesn't really seem adequate when it comes to film and telly games. So here's what we've put together instead...

LIGHTS
What does it look like? Nice? Or not very nice at all? (You mean are the graphics any good? Ed) Er, yes. That's it in a nutshell. (Then why didn't you just say the first place? Ed) Erm...

CAMERA
How does the general atmosphere compare to the film or telly programme the game's meant to go with? Have programmers just taken a bog-standard game and stuck a flashy name on it? Or have they made an effort to incorporate a bit of the 'feel' of the original?

ACTION
Does the plot follow along the same sort of lines as the film or telly programme? Is there plenty action-packedness? And is the game the same all way through, or does it follow the original's twists and turns?

CUT
Um, how does the game compare to all the licences around at the moment? Is it better? Or worse? In other words, is it a 'cut' above the rest? (is that really the best you can manage? Ed)

STAR WARS
Domark

Actually this is more of an arcade conversion than a film and telly game, but we were a bit desperate. It's the game of the really old arcade game of the film, you see, but it just about sneaks into our definition of things. It's actually quite good as film games go as it makes an excellent attempt to stick to the film's plot without getting too bitty and generally crap. Also, and most critically, it doesn't have a bloke walking round shooting things.

You're Luke Skywalker, and what you've got to do is destroy the Death Star. This means firing up your X-Wing fighter, flying through space warding off enemy TIE fighters, then flying over the Death Star picking off towers and finally flying through a ventilation duct (or something) to take out the Death Star's heart at the end. It's laid out as a 3D wire-frame shoot-'em-up which was impressive when it appeared in the arcades all those years ago and still plays well today. The only weird thing is that it's pretty easy to complete all three levels, whereupon you wrap back round to the first and end up destroying the Death Star 20 or 30 times per game. Spooky.

Label: Domark
Author: Vector Grafix
Price: £9.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Graham Taylor

Star Wars, the Spectrum edition is the first of a trilogy of coin-op conversions from Domark.

In principle this is good. In fact if you look at the screen shots that advertise the the game you may notice that there is almost no visual difference between the Spectrum and the ST versions.

The reason is the coin-op uses vector graphics - the graphics are for a coin-op primitive - but they're very, very fast!

The things that are wrong with Star Wars the Spectrum version are not technical.

Technically the 3D vector graphics are at least as fast and impressive as those on the excellent Starglider. Not only that, but the colour appears virtually attribute-clash free. Awesome. But...

Imagine playing a fast shoot'em-up in complete silence. Not a bleep or buzz or pathetic whine. No dramatic explosions, no nothing. Imagine blasting things to bits without a single noise to register a hit. Nothing.

The reason for all this silence is technical. It seems that using the 48K sound slowed the game up so much that Domark felt it would be too slow to play.

Perhaps so, but this problem only arises on the 48K mode and any 128K music would be absolutely fine. Problem solved? Well, no there isn't a special 128K version. For reasons best known to itself there is no 128K music and so no way of escaping the silence. This decision by Domark is, how can I put this, a serious mistake!

I found playing the game in silence very off-putting. It almost put me off the game.

Star Wars is three games in one. It's based, like the coin-op, on three scenes from the original film. These are: flying in space blowing things up, flying over the planet blowing things up whilst dodging towers and then flying down the channel trying to survive long enough to reach an exhaust port which will, as in the film, blow the Death Star to bits.

In game terms this translates into lots of vector stuff, a nice illusion of hurtling at great speed and mucho zapping.

Difficulty level translates into the 'select your Death Star' option in the opening screens.

Choose the easy level and you get to miss the 'dodging the towers' bit entirely, the mighty Empire forces are about as threatening to your health as a small boil and rush towards your gunsights saying 'kill me! kill me!' if you get through all the sections of the game and obliterate the Death Star you move on to the next, more heavily defended, one - the equivalent of selecting a higher level of difficulty on the opening screen.

If you play at the easiest level you will almost certainly make it through to the last section of the game. This is good in that you can see all the sections of the game but bad in that it's a bit too easy for my taste. At later levels it's quite challenging but not completely impossible.

If you can live without any sound, in almost all other respects this is a mighty conversion and faithfully recreates the coin-op.

At £9.95, though, Domark isn't doing anyone any favours.

If you don't know the plot of this one, you must have been buried up to your neck in sand on Tattooine for the last ten years. This is the game of the great science-fiction action adventure of all time, George Lucas's Star Wars, based on an Atari coin-op and converted surprisingly well to the Spectrum.

Taking as its scenario the last section of the movie, where Luke Skywalker attacks the giant Death Star space station in his X-Wing fighter, the game uses vector graphics to represent enemy TIE fighters, asteroids, and the Death Star itself. This could well have been a case of "May the farce be with you", but in fact the animation is impressively fast and smooth.

Having seen off the TIE fighters, steering your cross-hairs around the screen and blasting them to bits with your lasers, you have to manoeuvre between blasting laser towers then fly along the Death Star's trench to drop a bomb down its plughole.

With three skill levels to CQmplete, Star Wars isn't a difficult game to complete, but it's very well done and if you should add it to your collection.

Domark force their way in.

Imperial oppression rears its ugly head once again and this time the bad guys have got a battleship the size of a planet. Unsurprisingly, the rebels' answer is to send you out in a pint-sized fighter to take on the massed forces of badness (more or less) single-handed. All you've got to do is trash some enemy TIE fighters, blast the tops off a whole bunch of towers, fly the length of a heavily defended trench at top speed and hit a tiny duct at the far end. Piece of cake, right?

Well, yes it is actually now you come to mention it. In fact, for a full-price game in 1988 released across all major formats it's almost insultingly easy to see everything Star Wars has got to offer. That's not to say that it's a bad conversion from the cult vector graphics coin-op - far from it, in fact - but rather that the original is, to say the least, past it.

For a start, there are only three stages to the game. Once you've shot the TIE fighters, towers and that final duct it's round again for more of the same. You're meant to keep trying for ever higher scores - blasting the tops off all the towers, hitting that duct first time every time, and above all surviving longer - but where's the variety to keep you playing? Increasing difficulty levels might have cut the mustard four years ago when the original hit the arcades, but nowadays you're entitled to expect a little more.

It's all very presentable stuff, you understand-the coin-op's been slavishly copied right down to the wire-frame lettering, and the ST version even has the original's sampled speech - but the biggest selling point must surely be the tie-in itself. If you really want a game called Star Wars then this has to be the one for you. If you'd prefer a game you'll still be playing in a year's time on the other hand, try looking elsewhere.

Reviewer: Andy Wilton

RELEASE BOX
C64/128, £9.95cs, £12.95dk, Out Now
Ams, £9.95cs, £14.95dk, Out Now
Atari ST, £19.95dk, Out Now
Spec, £9.95cs, Out Now

Even though this review is specifically for the Atari ST (the scores certainly are) the Speccy version is definitely mentioned in the review text.

MACHINES: Atari ST, Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC Range, BBC (inc. Electron and Master)
SUPPLIER: Domark
PRICE: £19.95 (ST)
VERSION TESTED: Atari ST

Classic film, classic coin-op, classic game - that's Star Wars.

There can be very few of you reading this, that have not either seen Star Wars the movie, or played Star Wars the coin-op. Even today, with all the technical and graphical breakthroughs that have been made during the four years since the coin-op appeared, it still remains a classic and is regarded by many as the best game ever to grace an arcade hall.

Now, as the film says, the story continues with the release of Star Wars the computer game.

The first version to be launched (no pun intended) is for the Atari ST, and what a little cracker it is! Who says that vector-graphics are dated.

If you own an ST and loved the coin-do then what are you waiting for? Go out and bag a copy now. If you really haven't played the original, then read on... both of you!

With the Empire's forces closing in for the kill, Luke Skywalker, a young fighter pilot, is the Rebel's only hope of survival. The Empire can only be defeated by destroying the Deathstar, a gigantic man-made planet, which is about to blow the rebel's home planet out of existence.

Although Darth Vader, leader of the Rebel forces, believes the Deathstar to be indestructible, the rebel's computers have unearthed the one weak spot in its design, an exhaust duct leading right to its core.

As Luke Skywalker, your aim is to get a shot at the duct, but first you must annihilate a handful of Empire fighters, destroy the planet's ground-based laser towers and bunkers, and, finally, fly along the heavily guarded trench that surrounds the Deathstar.

At the end of the trench lies the exhaust port. The Deathstar can only be destroyed by planting a proton torpedo in the port as you zoom over it at high speed while, at the same time, using vast quantities of "The Force" to avoid laser cannon fire and the horizontal barriers that lie in your path.

Miss your target, and you are faced with the unenviable task of staying alive for a second complete circuit of the Deathstar before getting another shot at the port. If you hit the spot, however, you can sit back and enjoy the sight of the Deathstar exploding into a thousand little bits, and then its back to base for another bout of Empire bashing before tea.

Throughout, the game has been well coded, with great attention to detail. Consequently it captures the frenetic mood and perfect playability of the original right down to the digitised speech and sounds in all the right places.

The sad thing about Star Wars is the disappointment of the eight bit versions.

The 64 version gets close to it but fails to really simulate the feel of the coin-op. Sure, this is probably in part due to the sluggishness of the 64 in producing 3D vector graphics - BUT, however you cut it, Star Wars is not going to rank as one of the 64's best coin-op conversions this year.

The Spectrum version is much better - benefiting from the superiority of the Speccy in generating fast 3D routines. Somehow, from Star Glider to Alien Highway the Speccy licks the hell out of the 64 on fast 3D games. Star Wars Spectrum version reflects this.

On the minus side as far as Speccy is concerned the sound effects are virtually non-existent - which is a great shame.

Star Wars, the computer game, will be a hit with fans of the Film, the coin-op, and fast action arcades, in other words, everybody.