REVIEWS COURTESY OF ZXSR

Bedlam
by Bill McIntosh, Raymond Bradley, Rob Howard, Steven Taylor
Go!
1988
Crash Issue 51, Apr 1988   page(s) 108

Producer: Go!
Retail Price: 128K ONLY £8.99 cassette, £12.99 disk
Author: Beam Software

It takes many years to train a cadet in the Steller Imperium's pilot academy, and at the end of that time they very often feel that they're ready to face anything. To keep them in their place, the instructors devised one last test: the X12 fighter simulator, aptly nicknamed 'Bedlam'.

From the title screen. Bedlam offers both a one player game, plus a dual player mode in which two pilots are given the chance to co-operate in killing the aliens or, if they feel particularly mean, trying to kill each other.

There are 15 space stations, ten moonscapes and four pinball tables to breach before the budding cadets can earn their wings. Space station surfaces are immediately difficult to negotiate since they are bristling with radar installations, guns, and missiles. Further opposition is then provided by aliens vessels which swarm at the player's craft in large formations. These are shot to award the player a hefty bonus, but collision with enemy fire and static targets proves fatal to the ship, three of which are provided for the mission.

To aid in the task, there are useful items scattered around the screen: flashing diamonds are destroyed to uncover hidden objects, including extra firepower, additional lives and shields, while collision with a teleport symbol warps the player to one of the game's four pinball tables. The aim here is to gain as many points as possible, and hitting either a X2 or a X10 scoring amplification factor is the ultimate goal since the player's score in the main game is briefly multiplied by the relevant amount.

Also making their presence felt are large alien motherships. These heavily armed and armoured craft can be destroyed for bonus points and a very welcome shot of invincibility, although each time they are destroyed they become more powerful on their next visit.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: Cursor. Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: all the colour without the clash, made frantic with some fast animation and scrolling
Sound: average spot effects and poor tune
Options: definable keys and one or two players or two players simultaneously


Bedlam is an impressive game to look at: the graphics, particularly in the pinball bonus game, are colourful and have some interesting features. The gameplay, with unsuspected dangers lurking everywhere, is also unusually varied for a shoot-'em-up; by introducing motherships, magnetic force fields and pinball games, the programmers have obviously tried to create something out of the ordinary. Unfortunately the action isn't quite fast enough to make the most of all these features. Control of the spacecraft is sluggish (you always seem to be forcing the joystick) and as a result the game lacks a compulsive edge. Hardened blasters probably won't find this a drawback; others should think twice before releasing their cash.
KATI


Bedlam is a very apt name for this game, as complete pandemonium breaks loose about the poor old player's ears. Graphically the game is very good, with some nicely drawn alien battle formations zipping around equally well drawn and solid looking backdrops. One feature I particularly like is the bonus pinball tables that crop up every now and then. These not only look nice, but play just like the real thing, the ball spinning around the screen in a very realistic manner. Playability is high from the start, as huge formations of mean and bloodthirsty aliens charge down the screen after your blood. Add to that the great pinball tables, and you have a very enjoyable game. In my opinion, Bedlam is well worth the asking price.
MARK


Now this is more like it. Just lately, products coming out of the GO! offices have been disappointing to say the least, but by all accounts Bedlam could be the game to turn GO! around. Although coming from the same family as Slap Fight, Flying Shark and every other vertically scrolling variant, Bedlam has one great difference - It's NOT monochrome! Gone are the frustrating shouts of, 'What hit me?' and 'I couldn't even see that!'. The technique may be old, dating all the way back to Lightforce, but I don't think I've seen it implemented in such an impressive way before. Bedlam sure is what the title suggests: constant action all the way through with hardly any hold-ups. Its only flaw is that the game tends to speed up and slow down in unison with the amount of enemies on screen. If all you want is basic blasting fun then Bedlam could be the one for you.
PAUL

REVIEW BY: Kati Hamza, Mark Caswell, Paul Sumner

Presentation76%
Graphics77%
Playability73%
Addictive Qualities75%
Overall75%
Summary: General Rating: Probably Go!'s best release yet. The sequential and dual play options add longer lasting appeal. Sadly, ONLY on the 128k Spectrum.

Transcript by Chris Bourne

Your Sinclair Issue 27, Mar 1988   page(s) 58,59

"'Snot fair! Dub gorbless tottie always geds to trash de ubiverse!" We let Gwyn Hughes, the man with the inflamed mucus membrane, come in from the cold to blast away at Bedlam!

FAX BOX
Game: Bedlam
Publisher: Go!
Written By: Beam Software
Price: £8.99
Reviewer: Gwyn Hughes

Bedlam - wasn't that the infamous eighteenth century lunatic asylum whose last remaining inmates now rattle their chains around Castle Rathbone?

Fitting title then, because this is enough to drive anyone dotty - particularly all you prannies who tried to load it into your 48K machines. 'Cos this is one mega-sized mega-game which requires the whole 128 kilobytes.

One for the big boys, what? just the thing I need to clear my catarrh. I've always said that a good shoot 'em up was the software equivalent of Sinex. (Course you have, Malcolm. Ed) Now if I can only get strapped into the cockpit of this Spectrum before Rachael gets back...

The instructions waffle on about this being the ultimate test for cadets at the Stellar Imperium's Pilots Academy. We'll see about that. Remember, I was massacring Space Invaders before most of you were born.

Kappow! Peeow! Zing! Whoops... Oh well, must have been the cold. Let's have another go. (More zippy sound FX!) Okay, so this really is hot stuff, but I'll soon have it puzzled. Or maybe not, because there are 15 space stations plus ten moonscapes and four special sections before you can take your 125cc spaceship out on the road. Now I see why they needed all those K.

In the style of Uridium, this is the classic scrolling formula with enough nice touches and oh-so-much speed to keep you going back for hours. The vertical landscape rolls away under you while waves of aliens swoop in.

There are deck fixtures to dodge on the stations, because at best you'll bounce all over the screen when you collide, and at worst you'll lose your life. And there are special bonus features to collect too. There's enough here to blow your mind - or blow your nose if you're like me. PARRRRP! That's wetter!

As I was saying before I creamed that Kleenex, there are four teleports which shoot you to the next level. But better than that, they also give you time off on the space station for a quick game of pinball. Keep your fingers on the flippers, because it's a handy way of boosting your score.

The aliens all use different attack patterns, and a lot of the fun is learning the best position to be in when they arrive. Get it right and you can sit there and shoot them like black-puddings in a bath. Wipe out a whole wave and you get a brief spell of invulnerability.

Use this wisely to wipe out the next invasion, and you top up your shields, so that there are stages when you should never need to dodge the nasties. There are also mega-sprites at the end of each level - talking of which, I hear Rachael returning. Cripes!

Never mind - in keeping with current trends, as well as the two players against each other option, there's an opportunity for friends to tackle the game together. But though you can't shoot your pals, you can bounce each other into danger. Which is just what I intend to do if that gormless tottie has forgotten my Lemsip. AH-CHOO!


REVIEW BY: Gwyn Hughes

Blurb: PICK-UP TECHNIQUES There are three other types of pick-up for you to collect. I is for Invincibility - an alternative to the troublesome technique of shooting an entire formation. L is for Life - and you'll be glad to find another of these, even though you do start with a generous five lives. M is Mine though. Okay, you can have it - but use this smart bomb wisely, because it goes off immediately you press fire.

Graphics9/10
Playability9/10
Value For Money9/10
Addictiveness9/10
Overall9/10
Award: Your Sinclair Megagame

Transcript by Chris Bourne

Your Sinclair Issue 55, Jul 1990   page(s) 33,34,35,36,37

THE COMPLETE YS GUIDE TO SHOOT-'EM-UPS PART 1

Where'd we all be without shoot-'em-ups, eh, Spec-chums? Well, we'd all have much smaller games collections, that's for sure! Join MATT BIELBY for an epic blast through nearly a decade of firepowered Spec-fun...

Blimey! The complete guide to shoot-'em-ups, eh? A bit of a mammoth task you might be thinking (and you'd be blooming right! It's taken me absolutely ages!). It's so blinking gigantic in fact that we've had to split it in two to save the whole ish from being packed to the gills with ancient shooty-shooty games and very little else!

So how's it all going to work? Well, this issue we spotlight those hundreds of games where you control a little spaceship, aeroplane or what have you, while next time round we'll be wibbling on for ages about those blasters where you command a man, creature or robot - things like Operation Wolf, Gryzor, Robocop (the list is endless, I'm sorry to say). Yes, I know it's a bit of an arbitrary way to divide the whole subject up in two, but it's the best I could come up.

Anyway, if you 're all ready, let's arm the missiles, oil the cannons, buckle our seatbelts and go kick some alien ass! (Or something.)

SO WHAT EXACTLY MAKES A SHOOT-'EM-UP A SHOOT-'EM-UP?

Well, at the risk of stating the obvious, it's a game where simple reaction times count for (almost) everything, and the actual shooting of various baddies constitutes the major part of the gameplay. It's just about the oldest form of computer game going (Space Invaders was pure shoot-'em-up, for instance), short of mad Victorian chappies crouching down inside big wooden cabinets and pretending to be chess machines. It's one of the most enduring forms too - hardly an issue of YS goes by when we don't review at least a couple of newies, and it's the rare arcade-style game (sports sims and puzzlers excepted) that doesn't include at least a small shoot-'em-up element in there somewhere as part of the gameplay.

But back to the case in hand. What we're talking about here are the pure shoot-'em-ups - games where the wiping out of waves of aliens or other baddies is everything (though let's be fair, the violence in most of these is very abstract and minimal). They easily divide into four major types, depending on how you view the action. And you can read all about them over the page.

THE FIRST EVER SHOOT-'EM-UP

Goodness knows - Space Invaders is the obvious answer, but most of the other early arcade games were shoot-'em-ups too - Defender, Asteroids, Galaxian and the rest. To find out what made it onto the Speccy first, well, we'll have to look back in the vaults and see what we come up with, shan't we?

Right, here we are with the very first issue of Your Spectrum (later to evolve into Your Sinclair), cover date January 1984. Flick to the review section and we have two Space invaders-type games, both from long-forgotten Anirog Software - Galactic Abductor and Missile Defence. The second issue (Feb 84. believe it or not) brings us such delights as Xark (Contrast Software), a Defender-type game and Alien Swoop (a Galaxians rip-off), while in issue three had Bug Byte's Cavern Fighter (a tunnel-based jobbie, like an early version of R-Type).

Hmm. Let's go back a bit further, shall we? All the early computer games mags were listings based (ie had lots of crap Basic games printed out line by line over oodles of pages, as if Program Pitstop had run rampant over the whole mag!) so we might find something in there. Believe it or not find something in there. Believe it or not, I have the very first issue of the very first computer games mag in the country sitting right here on my desk, cover-dated November 1981. There's only one Sinclair game in here (for a ZX80 or 81 - a Speccy forerunner - and taking up a whole 2K!). It's called City Bomb, and it's a sort of shoot-'em-up. Apparently you're in a plane at the top of the screen and have to bomb the city beneath you, flattening out a landing strip so you can put down safely. Thrilling stuff, eh? As for commercially available stuff, it's all lost a bit too far back in the mists of time to be sure. Still, shoot-'em-ups started emerging for the Speccy pretty soon after the machine came out, certainly by the end of '82. Throughout 83 people like Quicksilva and Bug Byte were churning out Space Invaders, Asteroids and Scramble clones advertised as 'being in 100% machine code and in colour' too, so perhaps it was one of those. Exciting stuff, eh?

RATINGS

In the great YS Guide To... tradition, for a one-off-only special occasion we've adapted our normal rating system to accommodate the shoot-'em-up theme. Here's how they work...

Alien-Death-Scum-From-Hell Factor
Are there oodles of inventive, nasty and extremely difficult-to-kill baddies all over the place (including the biggest, meanest muthas ever at the end of each level) or do you end up fighting a fleet of Trebor Mints?

Shopability
Are there oodles and oodles of well-thought-out and spectacular weapons available to pick up and use, or do you have to make do with the same crap little peashooter throughout the game?

Copycat Factor
Unusually, the lower the score the better here. Basically, is this exactly the same as every other shoot-'em-up ever (in which case it'll get a high score for being chronically unoriginal) or does it have something innovative and special about it to set it apart from the crowd?

Visibility Factor
Does everything make a degree of sense in Speccyvision, or is it all a jumbled mass of pixels, with bullets, missiles and even little spaceships winking in and out of view willy-nilly?

Bedlam
Go

An ex-YS Megagame from 1988, this is a Uridium-style vertical scroller available in 128K only (from the merry old days when that seemed like a fairly smart thing to do). It's fast, clean and simple in look (which is the only way to handle a vertical scroller), and the 128K allows colour to be used in fair smatterings - no danger of the incredible 'disappearing ship syndrome' here, folks. Set over a series of 15 space stations and 12 moonscapes (with four special bonus sections thrown in there too) it's pretty blooming massive to say the least. One nice touch is that you don't just have to dodge alien waves, but watch out for sticky-up deck structures on the surface which constitute extra hazards too. Teleports (multiloads to you and me) shoot you to the next level, but while they're doing their stuff an excellent mini-pinball game kicks into amuse you (neatly, points earned here add to your score). Not as spectacular as some of the other stuff in this guide, it's nevertheless fast and playable - the way a good shoot-'em-up should always be.


REVIEW BY: Matt Bielby

Blurb: VERTICAL SCROLLERS One obvious option for a shoot-'em-up, and one that's used all over the place, is the vertical scroller. This is where the action is viewed from a God-like perspective above it all, looking down on everything from a distance. The action scrolls up (or on the very odd occasion down) the screen. This has some advantages - it's easy to lay out complicated attack formations and the little spaceships can he the simplest blobby shapes and still function quite well but it can suffer from some rather major flaws too. The first is that the shape of your average TV or monitor is all wrong. Think about it - you're trying to present portrait-shaped action (taller than it is long) on a landscape-shaped screen (wider than it is tall). In a coin-op, which is where 85% of vertical scrollers originate, there's no real problem with this because you can easily build a cabinet with a tall thin screen to contain the action, but in Speccyvision the programmers have to waste large portions of the side of the potential play area to reproduce it Subsequently, all the sprites have to be fairly small to fit in, and on most TVs become next to invisible. You've effectively castrated the game before you've even started. There's one other major problem too - the background. Since most scrolling Speccy games have to be largely monochrome, any sort of backdrop (say a forest which you're flying over) can cause real problems. You'll be safe (but probably rather bored) if the programmer opts for a simple black starfield over which all the sprites will show up well, but anything beyond that courts disaster. All too often overzealous background artists, small sprites, even smaller bullets and the sort of slightly crappy TVs most of us use with our Speccies conspire to render your brand new vertical scroller virtually unplayable. Don't think I've got a total downer on them though - despite all the limitations some of the real classics use this design. Xenon, anybody? Clear backdrops, that's what vertical scrollers need. (So Gemini Wing's a sorry loser.)

Blurb: THE 'INTO-THE-SCREEN' JOBBIE Although occasionally attempted with reasonable success by budgeteers like CodeMasters, these often constitute a less than satisfying experience. All too often someone responsible for coin-op licence acquisition will pick out an arcade favourite with a giant hydraulic cabinet - say an Afterburner or Thunder blade - with little thought as to how it's going to translate to the home computer. (Not very well, usually.) Thus most 'into-the-screen' shoot-'em-ups are technically impressive and rather brave attempts to reproduce the thrills and spills of the original, but almost inevitably doomed to failure. Robbed of 3D, moving cabinets, and whizzo graphics, the limitations built into the game become abundantly clear - there's little real feeling of speed (difficult enough to create even with a rolling road as reference point, let alone without one), oodles of almost identical levels and very little to actually do. Boring. Videodrome, here we come - it's 'into the screen' time with F-16 Fighting Falcon.

Blurb: THE FLIP-SCREEN Not all that common, but these can work very well indeed - check out Raf Cecco's Cybernoid duo, for instance. The thing seems to be that if you dispense with trying to write decent scrolling routines (since the background doesn't move at all - you simply progress across the screen until you get to the far end, when a new one flashes up with your little ship in its new starting position) you can spend a lot more time making everything else very pretty and colourful and inventive. Thus flip-screen games have some of the best, clearest, most colourful graphics ever seen on the Speccy. On the minus side however there's the disconcerting, disorientating bit where your ship flickers off the right hand side of the screen, only to reappear on the far left of the next one. But they can be incredibly addictive (it's always a temptation to try for 'just one more' screen to see what it looks like) and, in the case of the Cecco games at least, can strike a fine balance between mindless blasting and working out the best route past each new obstacle. They're still pure shoot-'em-ups, but slightly more cerebral ones. Flip screen a la NOMAD - no place to run to, no place to hide. (It's a bit like playing Murder In The Dark really.)

Blurb: THE HORIZONTAL SCROLLER This is the other main option, and usually a much more sensible way to go about things. Not only is the screen the right shape, but you can have a very complicated and pretty bottom and/or top bit to it (the ground, or the edges of a tunnel, say), while leaving the bulk of the play area relatively free from obstructions. Most the great shoot-'em-ups (but by no means all) are built like this, including the Your Sinclair all-time fave raves like Uridium and R-Type. Game over, man! (Well, Game Over II to be precise.)

Blurb: GIANT ALIEN MUTHAS FROM HELL A few good end-of-level baddies can make a shoot-'em-up, a lack of them break one. Let's look at a few typical monsters, shall we? Dominator: Impressive pink mouth affair firmly in the R-Type mould, and nicely animated too - the eyes blink and teeth move. Unfortunately the rest of the game didn't live up to it. Mr Heli: A giant eye thing with lobster claws - not bad, the grey and yellow graphics don't help it to stand out as much as they might, do they? Silkworm: This is the other way to do it - not a giant fixed mass (like the other two) but a moving baddy in the vein of stuff you've already met on that level, but bigger. This super chopper is delightfully guppy-like.

Blurb: HOW TO DESIGN A SPACESHIP We cant really express how important a good central sprite can be - after all, other sprites may come and go, but you're looking at this one the entire time! Halaga: Hmm. Your basic Space Invaders/Galaxians thing - not too impressive, is it? Sidearms: Anyone able to tell me what's meant to be going on here? It just looks like a bit of a mess to me! Answers on a postcard please. Dark Fusion: A-ha! Now this is more like it - simple, clean design, easy to see but not too distracting. It's the biz.

Blurb: SO, YOU WANNA WRITE A SHOOT-'EM-UP? Would you believe it's not as hard as it looks? (Actually, the way loads of people seem to write shoot-'em-ups it doesn't actually look all that hard anyway!) Here are a few of your central ingredients... The Main Spaceship A little square box thing with another square box on the front will do fine here - nice and simple and to the point. Alternatively you could go the whole hog and stick as many spikey bits as possible all over it so the sprite looks 'interesting' from all angles. Enemy Spaceships Nothing wrong with a whole squadron of polo mints zooming through space towards you - after all, it's the cunningness of the attack formations that counts! The Name Something gun-like sounds good and hard (say Side Arms or Armalyte) though anything vaguely aggressive-sounding will do (Eliminator, Dominator, Xecutor, H.A.T.E). If you're desperate you can always go the pseudo-scientific route (R-type, P47, Ultima Ratio), opt for an animal name (Salamander, Silkworm) or go for that old standard, the meaningless, vaguely futuristic-sounding word (Triaxos, Xeno, Zynaps, Xarax, Sanxion, Uridium, Xevious). Lots of 'Z's and 'X's are good. Background Nice and complicated is fine - let your imagination go wild. Don't worry about bullets (or even smaller enemy squadrons) getting lost amongst the mass of background detail - you can always pass it off as 'challenging gameplay'. Collision Detection Don't make it too easy for them! It's perfectly all right if any alien coming within inches of the player kills him dead, while he needs to blast baddies six times for any effect to be felt Again, it's all in the cause of challenging gameplay!

Blurb: EVERY SHOOT-'EM-UP EVER Ha! You've got to be joking - I started working on it and got up to 150 names - and I was only half way through the poxy thing! Forget it!

Blurb: SHORTS Blimey! Space doesn't go very far when you've got a subject as big as this, eh? So, dotted across the next four pages, we've squeezed some mini (mini) reviews into snazzy white blobs (just like this) - not wham-bam classics, but all good representatives of a type…

Alien-Death-Scum-From-Hell Factor73%
Shopability76%
Copycat Factor72%
Visibility Factor88%
Overall83%
Transcript by Chris Bourne

Sinclair User Issue 72, Mar 1988   page(s) 30,31

Label: Go!
Author: Beam Software
Price: £8.99
Memory: 128K only
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Jim Douglas

US Gold, it has to be said, is a constant source of confusion to me. Bedlam isn't a licence deal, it isn't a film, in fact it's not a tie-in of any description. In fact, if it wasn't for the fact that there isn't a single innovation anywhere in the program, you could call it original.

In the Umpteenth Century, fighter pilots are sent through the X12 simulator as a final stage in their training. The machine - known as Bedlam - simulates the toughest, roughest down-right nastiest combat experience they are ever likely to face.

Bedlam, surprisingly, is a space shoot-out.

It looks like a predecessor to Lightforce, void of the advances in graphics and gameplay. When you consider that Bedlam is 128K only, and over a year longer in the making, this isn't really on.

You pilot a small craft toward the top of an apparently endless scrolling landscape, attacked - as ever - by apparently endless screaming hordes of aliens.

Your ship moves around at an uncomfortably rapid rate, making precision flying virtually impossible.

There are nice touches; the aliens dive and swoop in quite exciting patterns, and the action is fast. There is also a very peculiar - though admittedly surprising - feature. If you fly over the letter "T", the screen will change and you'll find yourself in a bonus section which is, in fact, a game of pinball. Quite what this has to do with being trained for cosmic dogfighting I can't see.

There is a two-player option, too, allowing pilots to cooperate in fending off the bad guys. Yes. You have seen this feature before in Executor.

Bedlam is definitely competent, undoubtedly addictive but equally it is unoriginal bordering on the plagiaristic, and graphically no great shakes. You can pretty much make up your mind from the screenshots.


REVIEW BY: Jim Douglas

Overall7/10
Summary: Fast but unoriginal. Difficult but not very challenging. Bedlam it may be, new it isn't.

Transcript by Chris Bourne

ACE (Advanced Computer Entertainment) Issue 6, Mar 1988   page(s) 52

Go! Create some havoc.

Pinball games are not something you expect to find in the middle of vertically scrolling shoot-em-ups. Bedlam, however, is one such vertical scroller, and the four pinball games incorporated are designed to increase the players' score during the main game. This consists of taking charge of a spaceship (viewed from above) and attempting to complete the 26 levels of the game - which is, apparently, really a fighter simulation cooked up by the heads of the Stellar Imperium Pilots Academy, where you are a cadet. The various levels involve attack from both ground-based installations and waves of airborne aliens, and contact with any of these results in the player losing one of his initial five lives.

Extra fire-power is available to the player who manages to pick up any of the firepower symbols that appear on the ground at set places throughout the game. The programmers have been very considerate, and included an option that allows the player to take up the game again from the point he reached last time. That said, Bedlam adds nothing new to the shoot-em-up theme. You'll have to be very determined to fight your way through to the end - and it doesn't take long once you've learnt the wave formations.

Reviewer: Andy Smith

RELEASE BOX
Spec 128k, £8.99cs, Out Now
Amstrad, £9.99cs, £14.99dk, Out Now
C64/128, £9.99cs, £11.99dk, Imminent
IBM PC, £19.99dk, Imminent

Predicted Interest Curve

1 min: 70/100
1 hour: 80/100
1 day: 90/100
1 week: 70/100
1 month: 30/100
1 year: 10/100


REVIEW BY: Andy Smith

Blurb: SPECTRUM VERSION Great use of colour makes this a very good-looking game. The scrolling is adequate and the animation is fine. Gameplay is good if you're playing solo, but it tends to be a little tricky in two-player mode. If you're a real fan of this sort of game then check it out, though even shoot-em-up diehards could find the interest waning early.

Blurb: AMSTRAD VERSION Gameplay is a lot tougher, as your ship moves around a lot more slowly. It's more colourful than the Spectrum version, but that's only to be expected. No pinball tables available on the Amstrad version, making it a very average - and missable - shoot-em-up. Graphics: 8/10 Audio: 6/10 IQ Factor: 2/10 Fun Factor: 7/10 Ace Rating: 678/1000 Predicted Interest Curve 1 min: 70/100 1 hour: 72/100 1 day: 68/100 1 week: 60/100 1 month: 30/100 1 year: 10/100

Graphics8/10
Audio5/10
IQ Factor2/10
Fun Factor7/10
Ace Rating739/1000
Summary: Absorbing fun for a while on the Spectrum, but not so on the Amstrad. Even on the Spectrum the fall-off's rapid though.

Transcript by Chris Bourne

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