Producer: Imagine
Retail Price: £7.95
Author: Jonathan Smith

Imagine's latest coin-op conversion, Terra Cresta, casts you as the pilot of a Terra Cresta fighter - a futuristic spaceship capable of great destruction. Your mission is to destroy the alien fighters and ground installations which threaten your people. A planet's surface scrolls beneath the Terra Cresta as alien forces launch head-on attacks, and constantly double back to strike from behind. Armed with super lasers, you blast and shoot everything in sight.

The aliens fire rockets and missiles at your ship and they may be either air-to-air or ground based. Constant evasion is required as the missiles are equipped with a homing device. Also, alien craft are not confined to set flight patterns, and appear at random from all sides of the screen.

Numbered silos appear on the ground. Destroying one of them earns you extra parts or weapons for your fighter. These extra pieces of equipment are fitted to your craft by positioning it below the component as it is blown from a silo. Once the craft has been upgraded it is possible to enter Formation Mode, when the component modules separate and increase fire power: the Terra Cresta can then fire arcs of laser energy rather than single bolts.

As the game progresses and more and more extras are bolted onto your ship, so firepower increases until finally it turns into a massive blasting machine, equipped to take on the ultimate robotic opponent which appears at the end of the landscape.

Extra points can be scored by killing the dinosaurs that romp around on the ground, and in true arcade style the left-hand portion of the screen contains a highscore to beat. Your three lives are represented by pictures of ducks. If an alien scores a hit on the Terra Cresta a life is lost unless an add-on has been collected from a numbered silo, in which case the extra equipment is forfeited.

COMMENTS

Control keys: definable - up, down, left, right, fire
Joystick: Kempston, Cursor, Interface 2
Use of colour: unremarkable but effective
Graphics: fairy good with neat backgrounds
Sound: possibly the game's best feature
Skill levels: one
Screens: vertically scrolling play area

I feel that this is the most successful of the many vertically-scrolling shoot 'em ups that we've seen over the last few months. Despite the tiny playing area and the high level of difficulty, I really enjoyed playing this for the short time that I had with it. There is little similarity between this and the arcade original - okay, so the same enemy must be overcome, but the layout isn't similar at all. Having said that, the game plays very well in its own right. I'd recommend this - it doesn't really look much but it is well playable
BEN

This game is virtually identical to us auto's Xevious, with the major difference that this is much more fun to play. Colour has been used effectively to depict the many different types of terrain, and the sound effects and music are excellent. The gameplay is very fast, and a lot of concentration is needed while dodging missiles. The only thing that I don't like is that one mistake sends you straight back to the beginning - very frustrating. This is amongst the best shoot 'em ups that I've played on the Spectrum, although a two-player option would improve it.
PAUL

Shoot 'em ups often rank among my favourite games, and Terra Crests is no exception. Though the graphics are tiny, the scrolling is amazingly smooth and the whole game is very playable. In the playability stakes, Terra Cresta is very well catered for. It's well presented, both in the packaging and on screen, and its things like this which go a long way towards making a game good value for money. I don't know about the accuracy of the conversion, but if you fancy a slightly unoriginal and expensive shoot 'em up - that's quite a lot of fun - Terra Cresta's your game.
MIKE

Imagine
£7.95

There are some things in the world you just can't get enough of - England test centuries, peanut butter and Star Trek to name but a few. And where the Speccy's involved, it's funny how certain themes come up again and again and again...

Like howzabout this one then. "You are captain of the Terra Cresta. Fly your space fighter up the planet as the surface scrolls down towards you. Eliminate the alien forms, rockets, missiles and structures which stand in your way and attempt to destroy them." What sort of game do you think that is? Arcade-adventure? Strategy? No, oaf, it's another riproarin' gookzappin' lipsmackin' thirstquenchin' megascrollin' shoot 'em up? Bring in the autofire joystick. James. (Yes m'lord.)

Imagine doesn't faff about with its zappers. No mystical quest for you to journey on, at great personal risk to you, your family and everyone else in the known universe. No voyage of justice to vanquish the evil alien foes who've invaded this once proud whatnot. No, just "de gooks are dat way - go get 'em".

Fresh from the arcades, Terra Cresta is the latest of many similar scrollers to hit the Spectrum in the past few months. In this one the idea is to pick up bits of hardware on the way to fortify your ship, while of course annihilating anything that moves. The graphics are in the now familiar mould of Uridium and Light Force, with the playing area restricted to the right hand side of the screen. The music's good too - that pschht klangaklanga pschht stuff that drove Cobra fans round the bend. There's only one snag - it's all so slow.

Ah, the old programmers' problem - do you go for whizzy graphics or superspeed? The Spectrum won't let you have both. Imagine has obviously weighed the pros and cons, and gone for the whizzy graphics. This makes the game very hard to play. If you're to get anywhere you'll need a very sturdy joystick and a great deal of luck.

Along with the mistake (I think) of making the first wave of flashes as difficult to get past as any in the early stages, its doziness makes Terra Cresta hard to recommend.

Still, if you're into stunning graphics rather than fast gameplay, this may well be just what you've been looking for. Me? I've always preferred living life in the fast lane.

Label: Imagine
Author: In-house
Price: £7.95
Joystick: various
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Graham Taylor

Terra Cresta is one of a crop of arcade conversions that have cropped up recently.

It's getting difficult to tell them apart. Playing Terra Cresta, for example, is more or less the same experience as playing Xevious.

It features a predominantly yellow background, the sprites are pretty smooth and the whole thing is quite detailed.

And, actually, there are few reasons to choose this one over Xevious (see page 23).

The idea is to fly along killing things. Now I know this doesn't sound all that novel and quite honestly it isn't easy to find anything very original to say about the concept.

But the one thing Terra Cresta does have going for it is it's extremely difficult. Not only are there waves and waves of aliens which swoop down on you lobbing air mines at odd angles, but some of the aliens venture back on to the screen from below, just when you think you've got past them.

There is slightly more to it than continually prodding your Fire button. The main feature of the game is the way you can build up your ship by blasting numbered silos. At each one you can add something to your ship. When, finally, your ship is completely assembled you get a crack at a robot which appears after each pass of the planet surface.

By the third pass only your ship in ultimate souped-up form can handle it. Lest this sounds like a complex element in the game, it isn't really: it still all comes down to blasting.

Graphics are fair, sound is the usual pseudo two-channel wobbly stuff and I guess if you're a big fan of the arcade machine you'll be pleased. I didn't actually dislike it and maybe I'd have been more enthusiastic if I hadn't seen Lightforce and Xevious first. It's certainly very hard indeed but somehow I couldn't get very enthusiastic about it.

Imagine
£7.95

Another arcade conversion from Imagine, this time of a space shoot 'em up that reminds me a bit of Gargoyle's Lightforce. You control a spaceship flying over the scrolling surface of a planet guarded (stop me if you've heard this one before) by wave upon wave of aliens who will swoop out of the sky and try to blow you all over the place. Plus, at the same time as dodging and firing back at the aliens you've also got to destroy the weapons silos on the ground which are adding to the fun by lobbing bombs into the sky.

Needless to say, all this skyborne action keeps you very busy, but as you pick off the silos you are rewarded with additional weaponry that helps you blast your way through to the final stages of the game where you'll probably be trashed by a huge robot-ship.

It's all fairly standard shoot 'em up action, professionally presented but not exactly oozing with originality, for some reason (probably to keep the conversion as faithful as possible to the arcade original) the playing area occupies only the right-hand side of the screen, while the rest is occupied by the Terra Cresta logo and score tables. As a result the graphics in the small playing area, though reasonably well drawn, are pretty small and require close attention to keep an eye on what's happening. I know it might mean a less faithful conversion, but it might have made a slightly better game if the programmers had used the whole of the screen for playing it - as it stands it looks a bit like you're only getting half a game since one half of the screen is virtually useless.

There are no major faults in Terra Cresta but without a bit more originality it's not likely to take over as anyone's favourite shoot 'em up.