Producer: Unique
Memory Required: 48K
Retail Price: £5.99
Author: Jose Manuel Gutierrez

This new game from Unique is from a Spanish software house called Ventamatic, whose games Unique are marketing in Britain.

Vertigo is a large maze complex shoot em up in the manner of Doomsday Castle, Pyramid etc. There is a visual resemblance to Jetpac and Jetman in as much as 'you' are a space suited character with a jetpack on your back, equipped with a laser in hand and ready to deal death to the numerous Martians.

The object of the game is to get through the labyrinth of Martian Tunnels by locating the seven keys which open the treasure chest at the end. Each tunnel, or room, is guarded by Martians that fly about trying to kill you off (by contact as usual). To get out of each section of the tunnels you must destroy all the guards first. Doing this opens up the doors, either horizontally or vertically. The room may have some standing platforms and one or more trenches in the floor. These are often useful to duck into when threatened by a low flying alien.

Having finished a screen, it clears and returns alienless and with all doors open for you to move into the next. Before this, the map appears which shows the location of all the rooms. There are 256 of them. There are also several different types of alien with varied characteristics, and your man is one of the largest graphics of its type in any shoot em up game.

COMMENTS

Control keys: alternate keys bottom row left /right, 2nd row thrust, 3rd row to fire
Joystick: Kempston, AGF, Protek
Keyboard play: very responsive, at times over-responsive
Use of colour: good
Graphics: smooth, fast and detailed
Sound: good tunes, not continuous sound but well used
Skill levels: 1
Lives: 3
Screens: plenty of precedents, but generally well implemented
Originality: well worth considering, generally above average

This is the best of the Ventamatic games I have seen, even though it doesn't have a loading screen. Vertigo is fun to play and the graphics are really nice, especially your man who looks like Jetman's elder brother (he's so huge)! The sound isn't too bad and it contains little tunes here and there, like the now immortalised theme tune from Star Wars when you ask for instructions. It's inevitable that this will be compared with Pyramid and rightly so as it bears a strong resemblance. The controls are responsive and well laid out, though when you are changing rooms they become over-responsive. All in all, a good challenging game, not exactly up to Pyramid's high standard, but certainly worth considering.

What first struck me about this game is the size of 'you' - you're enormous! But well detailed and you move exceptionally fast. Aliens are varied, colourful and come in hordes. You don't stand a chance with that many because for a start off you are an easy target being so big, and secondly you move so quickly, it's difficult to line up a shot. It's unusual to have a map which shows you where the keys are and where you can gain extra lives. An L in a room indicates an extra life if you can reach it in time. On screen these appear as hearts. The map also adds a maze game element because you have to find the best route to get the keys and then reach the treasure at the end. I think the man moves about much too quickly and totally spoils the playability of the game, and zapping aliens tends to get a bit boring.

Vertigo has very fine graphics which are well coloured and move very smoothly, as do 'you'. But your man is difficult to control as the responsiveness to keyboard or joystick is fast and over violent. Added to this is your size which makes it hard to avoid aliens. Otherwise the game provides a lot of scope for wholesale destruction with some strategy element thrown in with the massive maze of locations.

MAKER: Ventamatic
FORMAT: cassette
PRICE: £5.95

A curioss dose of Spanish arcadia that's on the whole slightly more rewarding than a week's vacation in Majorca. Although clearly a distant cousin of Jetpac, Tuneles maintains it's credibility by framing the action in a format not entirely dissimilar to Fantasy's Ziggy hit, The Pyramid. Screens of uglies alternate with a display of inter-locking cells which reveal your current game position. The ultimate aim of the game is to travel to the final cell located in the upper left hand corner of the screen. Exactly what this display represents though is unclear, as the instrucciones are in an unrepentant Spanish tongue (luckily the gameplay is easy enough to suss out). Initially I thought it might depict a massive starship but that seems a little too obvious. More likely it's a network of ghastly coastal resorts with the final room no doubt containing a much needed medi-kit and a return ticket home! Lending support to this theory are the denizens of the cells who are both fiendish and Spanish in appearance. There's a swarm of bearded waiters, plates of paella, fly sprays and hungry crabs (which I'm told are rife in Benidorm). The assault is unrelenting. Thankfully there's a full range of familiar joystick options to help get you home.

MACHINE: Spectrum 48K
CONTROL: Keys, Kemp
FROM: Unique, £5.99

Vertigo is a strange cross between Berzerk and Jet-Pac.

It has you travelling through a maze with a large number of interconnecting rooms: these rooms contain aliens who attempt to bounce into you. Your objective is to collect seven keys which have been placed throughout the maze.

After you have killed all the aliens in a particular room you are shown a map of the maze. This has your position, and that of the keys marked on it. Some extra lives are also available in a number of the rooms; these are also marked on the map.

Once you have collected all of the keys, they must be taken to the trunk in the top left-hand corner of the maze, and you can then exit.

Your man is equipped with a jet-pac and a laser gun, he is also incredibly large, (approximately one third of the height of a room). Although he is very well drawn and moves smoothly, controlling him is very difficult and the aliens have a nasty habit of bumping into various parts of his anatomy, as his size makes it almost impossible to dodge them. For some reason the aliens are not as well drawn or animated as the impressive-looking rocket-man.

Vertigo appears to have a fairly limited variety of aliens; as even the small amount of rooms I visited contained aliens identical to those in other rooms.

Unfortunately, the program can also be 'broken-out of' accidentally when you are viewing the instructions or entering your name in the score table; this should not be possible! This, combined with the obvious derivative elements, has given Vertigo a tacky feel.

Overall, due to control problems and poor presentation. I must give what may have been a reasonable game a definite thumbs down.

This game appears to be a cross between Jetpac and The Pyramid. It comes from Spain, recently the breeding ground of some very nice games, and is basically a mega-shoot-em-up.

The game's graphics are clear, smooth and well-drawn and the sound is above average. At first the game is intolerably difficult and I suppose one could easily get very bored, especially since there is an annoying jingle every time you die.

I persevered to other rooms, but not to much satisfaction.

ROBERT PATRICK

Just as the instructions look like they've been written using a phrasebook (I quote 'At last the man is arrived to Mars'), so this game appears to have been constructed from Ultimate's back catalogue.

PETER WALKER

Elements of Vertigo are very impressive, like the large animated main character and the number of rooms to explore.

However the major drawbacks, of the screens being repetitive and the task you have to complete being a straightforward treasure hunt, make this a slightly disappointing program.

BOB WADE