Producer: Argus Press
Retail Price: £9.95
Author: Binary Design

Just how do you avoid post-holocaust hassles? You seal up the portals in space and time which were ripped open when the bombs went off, that's how! To do this, though, you need to pacify the Eight Minds by returning their Character Items to them, and then seal the Portals Through Time by casting the correct spell…

The game starts in your living room, where you must find a weapon. So, you need to search behind the bookcases, under the settee, in the bins, and so on, until you find a gun and some ammunition. Thus equipped, you are ready to face the rigours of time travel. What this amounts to is yet more tramping around, searching everything in sight. There are many different time zones to explore, each with a distinctive graphical style.

To complete the quest you must find objects which will appease the Minds. The Minds will then feel in a generous mood and give you a rune or two. These runes must be correctly assembled in a cosmic pattern. Fortunately, scrolls can be found which give you a clue to the correct orientation of the runes, and you are also told how close you have got to the correct orientation.

You can move your character left or right and up or down ladders. You can also leap left or right, fire whatever weapon is in your possession or enter an options mode. This gives you access to a scrolling menu at the bottom of the screen which can be used to search, pick up, use or haggle with any minds you might meet.

Travelling around the three screens of a time zone is simple, you just go through various doors and openings. Getting between time zones is a little trickier - you either have to cast a spell, which uses up precious runes, or wait until a time portal shows up. These turn up at regular intervals, so like many aspects of life, it's basically a case of being in the right place at the right time...

COMMENTS

Control keys: definable: up, down, left, right, fire
Joystick: Kempston, Cursor, Interface 2
Keyboard play: a bit sluggish
Use of colour plentiful, at the expense of clash
Graphics: a little primitive
Sound: minimal effects
Skill levels: one
Screens: 21

The graphics in this game are varied - some screens have lots of colour and detail, while others look like a bad case of whitewashing. The animation is fine but nothing worth shouting about. One annoying feature is that although your character always carries a gun, it's useless until the bullets are found and loaded. This can result in several very short games. The bullets and just about anything else are found by detailed searching. This leads to a very slow and frustrating game, and it's this lack of pace that spoils an otherwise well executed game. There's plenty to do but none of it is all that interesting. Suffice to say that those Interested in long, drawn out and difficult arcade adventures will find something to their liking. Others are less likely to be impressed.

Time Trax is a strange game to play and until you begin to understand how the game works it can be very unrewarding. If you stick with it and learn the 'physics' of the game it can become quite playable, however. The graphics are on the small and undetailed side but they are quite adequate. There is a lot of colour on screen, so when your character walks around a fair bit of attribute clash is generated. The sound is poor: there are no tunes and the use of effects is minimal. If you like strategy games then this one may well be for you, but as there is very little in the way of arcade action I couldn't play Time Trax for too long as it got fairly monotonous.

What a strange game Time Trax is. At first it looks extremely complex and off-putting, but a few minutes play reveals that this is quite a simple little game to play. The graphics look very Young Ones-ish, and all the little characters are drawn with accuracy - but a bit too small for any decent animation. The screen layout is very smart and the options mode is extremely easy to use. I felt that the game was instantly addictive but the appeal soon wore off after a few games. The instruction book is well written and reveals all the little quirks of the game. The idea of swapping time zones was quite good, but I still wasn't too impressed with it.

Argus Press Software
£8.95

When is an arcade adventure not an arcade adventure? Why, when it's Timetrax, of course. It's just the same old post holocaust rune magic and sci-fi time portal hopping scenario that we all know and love.

You find yourself in control of a little man in a hat, who goes around the different levels, platforms to you, in search of the magic runes to imitate the Cosmic Pattern. It seems the Cosmic Pattern is a kind of willow pattern on the celestial breakfast plate of the universe, and Dark Forces (they never go by name) are afoot to nobble the fabric of time and space... well, just for fun, really. You search round the objects on the different platform levels, a la Impossible Mission, looking for weapons and the runes by the use of a duckshoot-style menu.

In your travels through the time portals (huh, you don't see one for hours, then two come along at once) you must seek out the eight minds, and pacify them by restoring items of lost property. Then you've gotta seal off the portals through time and reset the fabric of the universe. Tch! And what're you gonna do after lunch?

It's a bit of a shame about the lofty pretentiousness of the scenario of this game, 'cos it's actually not a bad little number. playing a little like a cross between Impossible Mission and Shadowfire, and looking like Tau Ceti and Frankie Goes To Hollywood, it's possibly as hard to complete as all four of them put together. It's a good idea to read the manual thoroughly before you play, as there are a lot of things to consider before wading into it. Especially important is the Cosmic Coordinates Table, which in temporal displacement circles is a sort of bus timetable.

Okay, the concept s a bit on the laughable side, so flippin' what! I think it's a good game, and anyone who says it isn't is lookin' for a rune up their nostril.

Label: Mind Games
Author: Binary Design
Price: £9.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: Kempston, Sinclair, Cursor
Reviewer: Clare Edgeley

At first sight Time Trax looks like Activision's Little Computer Person with its cut away view of a house, loo, bed, even dustbins, all in place... and somewhere the owner is wandering about.

Actually, you lurk more than wander and it's not a house, it's the latest in bomb shelters (all three floors of it!) and the bomb's just dropped.

Time Trax, notwithstanding its incredibly detailed graphics turns out to be awfully tedious. The game is controlled through a number of icons and scrolling windows where you can choose whether to Look, Take, Drop, Swap, etc. It all takes time and as it's best to start off with a weapon and ammo, you spend the whole of the first screen searching every piece of furniture for them. Yet there are so many places to look it quickly becomes irritating and repetitive.

The storyline is seemingly complex but basically what you've got to do is defeat evil and balance the world's equilibrium by returning to the Eight Minds their Character items - tiles. Various flickering baddies pursue you, hence the weapons. If you've got no protection, they tend to drain your energy and in a remarkably short time you'll die of sheer exhaustion.

Having armed yourself, you set off to find tiles and. by trial and error, present the right tile to the right Mind. In between there are spells and potions to find and use, the Guardian of the Runes to dodge and time zones to explore. There are seven zones in all taking you from 50,000BC to 21,000AD, and the graphics in each are nicely different.

All the while you must use the scrolling windows to Look for handy objects and Take them. There are also charms which Restore energy. Charm a character when trading articles. Open some objects and Banish others.

A lengthy booklet is enclosed with detailed descriptions of how to play. But once I'd read it I didn't feel much the wiser. And you won't solve the game quickly. I'd need heaps of patience, much more, I suspect, than I'll ever have.

Label: Bug Byte
Author: Binary Design
Price: £2.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tony Dillon

In this limp-wristed programming monstrosity which can only be loosely termed as a game, you play a jerky little sprite who has to find some missing objects that belong to the 'most powerful minds in creation'. What's wrong with it, then? For a start, there are many different locations all of which look like bad attempts at a cross between Impossible Mission and Jet Set Willy. The main character is small and badly animated and designed. And the menu system doesn't really do very much a waste of time.

Mind Games
£8.95

This is one of those games for budding Einsteins, in that it requires you to think about several possible actions and options for each problem encountered.

The manual supplied with the game is ten pages long and is written in rather small print, the first page is given over to the plot and the rest are descriptions of possible actions. They recommend that you read it carefully before playing and it is a good idea.

It is a very frustrating and challenging game there are elements of many other programs within it, including a well animated and colourful action area of the screen. The animation is a bit on the slow side though but it's certainly not just a simple arcade game.

The display is broken into sections and the largest, top half of the screen, is the three level action screen, here your character walks, climbs, jumps and shoots at other beings. Mind you, try as we could we were unable to find the pistol which was supposed to be on the start screen.

Below this is a set of windows which give the items found and carried, eye display, visual display, energy display, time, tiles, ammunition, function and menu choices. The Menu window is perhaps the second most important in that it allows you to perform many tasks not immediately possible from the action screen, such as Look, Take, Use, Drop, Swap etc.

There are potions and spells to find and use, time portals to transport you to another era, weapons to discover and their ammunition, chests, keys and eight minds which have to be given their correct item. There is even a variation of the 'Mastermind' type of game thrown in at the end!

A real mindboggler of a game, this one reminds me of Swords and Sorcery, but it is a much more complex and well designed game. Not really suitable for those who want a simple shoot 'em up but if you found the Wally games a doddle and have a few millenia to spare try Timetrax.