Producer: Bug-Byte
Memory Required: 48K
Retail Price: £6.95
Language: Machine code
Author: Leigh Hugill

Space Pilot Luke Warm is stranded on his crippled spaceship after one of his less successful space battles. It isn't his day either; although the emergency space shuttle is ready to go he has neglected to keep the fuel rods on the shuttle. They are scattered about the stricken ship and Luke must be guided around to collect them all. Unfortunately (the key word in any computer game) the damaged ship has sent the various automated devices wild. Can Luke avoid the nasties, collect all the rods and be ready in the shuttle bay before the damaged ship falls into the nearby star?

Stay Kool is another JSW clone, but this one does not aim to let Willy go, even providing a room called 'We must perform a ... WHAT?' as part of the clone effect. The ship is formed of a series of interconnected rooms containing platforms, and varied nasties that bounce up and down or slide from side to side. Luke is a small white figure in a large fishbowl helmet with a healthy jumping ability. Items to be collected flash. Below the playing area can be seen the title of the room, number of items collected, rising temperature and lives which convert into winged angels after deaths. Among the features of the game there are tractor beams which force Luke to rise along with them, teleport rooms and amongst all of this 50-screen game there is a Loch Ness Monster!

COMMENTS

Control keys: Q/W left/right, B to SPACE to jump
Joystick: Sinclair 2 and Kempston
Keyboard play: responsive
Use of colour: good
Graphics: above average
Sound: poor and not much in the way of spot effects
Skill levels: 1
Lives: 5
Screens: 50

I always thought it was Bug-Byte's policy to release only very good games such as Turmoil and Rapscallion. But Stay Kool isn't up to their normal standard. The graphics are good but but aren't mind-blowingly brilliant and the sound is almost nonexistent. The idea is similar to Manic Miner/Jet Set Willy but the actual game isn't up to the standard of these games. Stay Kool is definitely not addictive and because of this I found that it wasn't very playable. It may appeal to people who especially like platform games but to the everyday gamer it's really a bore. Overall not up to the standard of other Bug-Byte games and certainly not one of the all time greats.

There's no doubt in my mind that this game will be compared to Jet Set Willy, and in fact it makes little attempt to disguise the similarity. The screen layout is so much like Jet Set Willy in the sense that two-thirds of the screen has been used as the playing area and the bottom third as a text and information area; it wouldn't even surprise me if the same screen display routines hadn't been copied from the host program at some point. There are some distinct differences though and probably the most obvious one is the standard of the graphics - they are not as good by half and they flicker considerably. Graphics are quite varied and well drawn, however, and the game makes full use of the colour capabilities of the Spectrum, but it is disappointing to see how many character blocks are left undisguised which gives an unpleasant chunky feel to the game. There doesn't seem to be much sound maybe because it would slow the game down even further. l can't see why Bug-Byte has published this game as it is nowhere near their previous high standard.

It's difficult at this late stage to say whether yet one more JSW copy is playable or not. After all, if a game is good, it doesn't matter if it looks like something else, but after so many versions one does get a bit tired and therefore the copy has to be very good. Stay Kool is not a good copy, and its humorous attempts to copy the Matthew Smith literary screen style is not particularly appreciated either. The pace of the game seems slow and generally the idea is uninspiring, in other words, it offers nothing new to the type like Technician Ted or Brian Bloodaxe. A surprise really, coming from Bug-Byte and a disappointment.

Roger: This curious melange of mystic, prehistoric and scatological imagery, varying from a pterodactyl's lair, vampire lemons and the occasional sewage processing installation is really just one more competent multi-screen platform game. Trotting from room to room and jumping are both accurately controlled. There's a well-defined geography and a huge assortment of life-depriving nasties. As usual, the purpose is, to collect objects and accrue an even higher position on the 'Hall Of Scum' chart.

It's entertaining to play, I suppose, but stunningly short on originality. You can almost imagine some programmer discovering a mixed bag of graphical leftovers discarded in his machine memory and deciding that it would be a pity to waste them. If lack of some consistent theme doesn't bother you very much, then by all means attempt to avoid that final plunge into the cess pit. 2/5 HIT

Dave: They just keep on coming, wave after wave of them, the Manic Miner clones. This should-have-been-a-budget-game from Bug-Byte was one of the first bite the dust. 2/5 MISS

Ross: Bug Byte are still trying to come up with another Mathew Smith type success but this Jet Set clone just isn't the answer. This won't even compete with Technician Ted 1.5/5 MISS

PRICE: £6.95
GAME TYPE: Arcade

What has happened to Bug Byte? There was a time when you could rely on them for excellent games. Their latest one, Stay Kool, is no fun at all. In the face of the excellent new releases on the market this month it is worse than no fun, it is pathetic.

In another lame take off of the Jet Set Willy theme you move from room to room collecting objects. The problems are ingenious, the rooms are nicely named, the graphics are not bad, but the idea is stale, stale, stale.

Stay Kool is produced for the 48K Spectrum by Bug Byte, Mulberry House, Canning Place, Liverpool.

ZX Spectrum
£6.95
Arcade Adventure
Bug-Byte

Everyone raved about Manic Miner but what Bug-Byte seem to have forgotten is you must put some oomph into the graphics if you want to get away with this sort of thing. Silly jokes about police boxes and doctors are not enough.

Bug Byte
£6.95

Chuckie Egg 2 managed to add a couple of new features to the standard platform format, but Stay Kool is about as unoriginal an addition to the hordes of JSW clones as you can get. In fact, you could even say that it's more of a Manic Miner clone than of the more modern JSW. There is one room in Stay Kool that is more or less a straight copy of one in MM (I think it was called Return of the Kong Beast, or something like that).

Even the graphics are a step backwards, for although the various 'monster' sprites are animated adequately the figure of Luke Warm (the hero of the piece) is pretty slow moving, and very flickery.

The plot of the game, such as it is, is that Luke's spaceship has been damaged in a battle and that Luke, in order to launch his escape pod must rush around the ship collecting fuel pods before the ship overheats. The logic of all this seems pretty dubious when you actually see the sort of rooms that the ship contains, but what the heck, it's only a game.

Most of the rooms are quite well designed, being hard enough to require a bit of thought, but not so hard that you die instantly. And, as in JSW, you don't have to collect the objects in each room before moving on to the next, so if an object seems too hard to reach you can carry on exploring and come back later. And, as a matter of fact I did find the game interesting enough to want to carry on wandering through the rooms. Despite the simplicity of the game it is well enough designed to hold my attention. In fact, it's not a bad game at all really, it's just that it's so clone-like that I can't really get very excited about it. If it were a budget game say, £1.99/£2.50 it would be excellent value, but for £6.95 it's not top of my shopping list.