Producer: Interceptor Micros
Memory Required: 48K
Retail Price: £5.50
Language: Machine code
Author: Stephen Curtis

You have been contracted by Acme (what else) Construction to go and tile the roof of Rob Rubber's roof. But this task is frustrating because Rob is a bouncer - he bounces all over the place like a manic deep sea diver in an over-pressurised suit. If he should land on you, then you're squashed fiat.

The game is played out over three screens, the inside of the house, the garden and the garage. Nothing is quite as straight forward as it first seems - stairs are all one way, a key is needed to get through the garage to the garden, and from there you go up past the tree house onto the garage roof to coiled the tiles. Tiles and key are collected by running over them, and as the tiles are deposited on the roof, they automatically appear in place, ready for you to go and collect another one. There is a panic button to press if you can't avoid being squashed by Rob, but you forfeit any tile carried at the time.

COMMENTS

Control keys: Q/A up/down, O/P left/right, SPACE to panic
Joystick: Sinclair 2,
Kempston, Protek
Keyboard play: good positions, very responsive
Use of colour: good
Graphics: good backgrounds, poor animated characters
Sound: average
Skill levels: 1
Lives: 5
Screens: 3
Special features:

What a jolly looking game this seemed to be when first looking at it. What a shame, instead of the stickman there could have been someone a bit fatter walking about for you. Playing the game is quite easy, except for the fact that Rob bounces about rather wildly and unpredictably. After discovering the way of collecting tiles to be placed on the roof and working my way back through the screens to get to the roof, something became distinctly apparent about this game - it was going to be very tedious and long-winded. This is a major let down of the game. Tiler lacks an enormous amount of content and has no instant or lasting appeal.

Tiler would quite possibly win a prize for one of the silliest scenarios ever written. Before making comments on the game itself, I would like to point out that the Hall of Fame is really frustrating. Onto the game; the background is filled up rather well and the graphics are good, but the actual characters are not over impressive. Playability is okay at first as you have to find out where to go etc., but it soon becomes repetitive - addictivity thus suffers. Not, I suppose, a bad game, but this fetch and carry type scenario is now wearing a little thin - I mean, in this case avoiding a rubber man while you tile a roof is not ultra-challenging. To fill the roof takes many tiles - you will probably lose a life while falling asleep.

Tiler is a very infuriating game. The graphics are, at first glance, very good, but they seem to look worse when you examine the two character moving around, The one-way stairs are about the only hazard in this game, you don I even have to work out a routine to get around the screens. By the time I'd tiled half the roof I had become very bored with this one.

MAKER: Interceptor
FORMAT: cassette
PRICE: £5.50

What ho! Has somebody come up with a game where you have to edit a computer mag? This should be pretty gory stuff. But no, all you have to do is tile the roof of a house. Easy? Well, actually no, because the house belongs to Rob Rubbers who can't stop bouncing around and if he bounces into you, you get squashed. There are three high-res screens, the house, the garage and the garden. The tiles are on the garage roof which is reached, for choice, from the garden. Different levels are connected by one-way stairs and you have to collect keys to pass from the house to the garage and the garage to the garden. All in all, filling your hod becomes a pretty fraught enterprise.

There are three criticisms I'd make,; neither of the figures, the tiler or Rob Rubbers, is as well defined as the background and the tiler especially can get lost against it; Rob doesn't bounce, as far as I can see, according to the physics that I was taught, so it's impossible to predict his trajectory; and when you move from one screen to the next, you have no way of knowing where Rob will be sop, there's a good chance that you'll walk straight into him, unless you're very quick with the Panic button which will take you to an adjacent screen. Even so, an enjoyable game and interesting to see one with at least one foot in the real world.

MACHINE: Spectrum 48K
CONTROL: Keys, Kemp, Sinc, Prot
FROM: Interceptor Micros, £5.50

Playing this game made me wonder where on Earth computer game writers get their ideas from. The author of this particular program must either possess an incredibly twisted imagination or spend half his life drugged to the eyeballs. Would you think up a plot like this?

As the tiler, you must walk around the house, garage and garden of one Rob Rubber, collecting tiles and taking them to the roof. Meanwhile - and here's the weird bit - Rob bounces around performing incredible leaps and cartwheels. Should you be caught underneath him you are squashed and lose a life. Now try and tell me the author of this is a sane human being.

The three scenes are beautifully drawn, from the bathtub and lights of the house, to the car in the garage and the tree house in the garden. You are a pleasant little stick-man who walks quite smoothly while Mr Rubber performs his acrobatics in equally pleasing graphic style.

You go from location to location, up and down stairs and, on possession of a key, through doors. The tiles are in the garage and you must take them to the roof of the house, all the while dodging Rob.

Unfortunately, you must collect so many of the things - you can only carry one at a time - that the game can become a routine as you repeatedly follow the same path again and again. Thus the lasting appeal of the program is doubtful, even beyond the first few days.

Controlling your man is easy enough, either with keys or any of the three popular joysticks. However you do find that getting off stairs is a problem, as you need to be at either the very top or bottom.

A pity really, because a nice, if strange, idea and some good graphics have been spoilt by a lack of variety.

I have mixed feelings about this game. On the one hand, the graphics of the locations are really superb, colourful and totally hi-resolution. But on the other, it seems that Interceptor have designed these at the expense of everything else.

As character graphics go the stickman in this game is totally unappealing and extremely hard to control. There is no variety in this game and I soon tired of it.

MARTYN SMITH

As the saying goes, 'All that glitters is not gold', and unfortunately this is very true of Interceptor's Tiler. The background scenes are very attractive, perhaps even up to Ultimate standards, but sadly the programmer has forgotten that a game so needs to be playable. Your stick-like man has a tendency to become invisible when he clashes with some of the badly chosen background colours - this is really very annoying.

There is a very limited variety of gameplay, with only you and Rob Rubber in the neighbourhood. With the time it takes to transport tiles to the roof and your adversary the bouncing Rob, this rapidly loses what little shine it has.

STEVE SPITTLE