Something to put the wind up you?

Producer: Imagine
Out of Pocket: £7.95 cass, £14.95 disk
Author: Steve Lamb (code and graphics), graphics by Alison Jeftha, music by Jonathan Dunn

Dear me, I'm afraid these Japanese scenarios areas innovative as their cars. In brief; it's the future, the mechanoid aliens are trying to invade, you've volunteered to fight them off, first in a F-14, then a helicopter. There are six levels of this and you start the game with a standard machine gun. a limited supply of bombs (useful for dropping on unsuspecting mechanoids bonces) and a smart bomb, one per life.

Naturally, after destroy a fairly large quantity of aliens a token is deposited by the alien wreckage which should enable you to kill even more of them. (About as smart as those 'smart' bombs which blow themselves up, I'd say.) These tokens provide more powerful weapons such as more bombs, lasers and missiles. By skilful use of these mega-weapons you can fight through to the end of the level where the humongous enemy they should have thrown at you in the first place lurks. These are pretty tough dudes and will take every bit of available firepower to defeat them (it's too late to wish you had picked up that extra missile token that whined past you on the previous screen). But you're such a courageous person that you attack nevertheless, because the freedom of your planet is at stake. So with the battle of the last level still ringing in your ears, you attack and hope that you survive.

Graphically Typhoon is similar to Capcom's 1943, the same style of monochromatic sprites have been used, and to my mind look just as bland, albeit more detailed. Enemies swarm around the player's aircraft causing as much trouble as possible, and generally their defences are hard to crack. Playability isn't terrible, but the combination of poor presentation and totally unoriginal format gave me little incentive to play on. A mediocre game which should never have been converted.

MARK [55%]

THE ESSENTIALS
Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: simple sprites on messy and confusing backdrops
Sound: great 128K title tune, but nothing too special during play

Another conversion hot from the arcade machine, this time it's the action packed air/sea combat game, Typhoon. And this is one conversion that has retained its addictiveness and playability on the Spectrum. There are excellent sound effects and a great tune to begin each game. The stages get harder as you fight your way through each wave of dogfights, until it is almost impossible to stay alive for more than a few seconds! From F-14 to chopper, it's non stop arcade action all the way. Ignore James Brown and the sheep farmer - try this great coin-op conversion!
NICK [83%]

Imagine
£7.95
Reviewer: Ciaran Brennan

I first caught a glimpse of Typhoon at the beginning of the year when Konami introduced it into the arcades - and what do you know? Less than a year later what should fall from the sky but Imagine's conversion of the same game! So it's chocks away as you scorch downwards towards an aircraft carrier in your F14.

The basic idea is to fly through all the six levels of the game without losing your five lives. There's plenty of enemy aircraft around to put a stop to this, so you'd better make full use of the bombs amd smart-bombs that come as standard equipment. Bombs are activated by pressing 'B', while a quick press on 'M' brings the smart bomb into action - so if you've got one of those joysticks with rubber suckers on the bottom it would be a good idea to drag it out of the cupboard so that you've got one hand free for the keyboard.

Other weapons that can be collected along the way include Vulcan bombs, Three Way bombs, Lasers, Missiles and a fresh supply of standard bombs. These are collected in the usual way by collecting icons and pressing the space bar when the weapon you want is lit.

Even when you have a full complement of weapons on board, it's still pretty difficult to get to the higher levels - mainly because of the gun emplacements that crop up along the landscape at alarmingly regular intervals. The best thing to do is to take these out as quickly as possible - and when I say take out I don't mean take them to the pictures... get them before they get you!

Another hazard to watch out for is the appearance of the enemy's mega bombers These wouldn't be so dangerous if they flew in from the front like the rest of the enemy, but they don't - they sneak up from behind, and you never know when they re going to show up, so steer clear of the bottom of the screen.

Typhoon is a better shoot 'em up than it is a conversion. There are six increasingly difficult levels to keep trigger-happy fly-boys in the air for quite some time and the graphics and presentation are above average. My only gripe is that it doesn't really add anything to the already massive catalogue of shoot 'em ups that are already available, but if you do feel the need to buy yet another, you could do a lot worse.

Definitely one for the fans.

Label: Imagine
Author: Steve Lamb/Alison Jeftha
Price: £7.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tony Dillon

When someone first breathed breathlessly (?) in my ear "The conversion of Typhoon is here", my first reaction was "Who? What? When?" Then I thought of Hurricane Gilbert, laughed a bit, and then I thought "Oh. Must be an arcade game I've never heard of."

Typhoon is a little known (to my knowledge) Konami arcade game that we also had a demo of on our Megatape 8. The game is thus. Fly forward Afterburner-fashion for a bit, blow up a mothership, fly forwards Flying Shark-fashion for a bit, blow up another mothership, fly upwards a bit more, do a bit more flying forward, blow up a few more more things and then you've done the game. Well, actually it's a bit more than that.

Typhoon is actually two games stuck together and, unfortunately, neither are in any serious danger of going anywhere above the the "Oh, that's pretty OK" mark on the SU Commentometer. The first section, as I said before, is an Afterburner jaunt down through the various cloud layers until you emerge above an aircraft carrier, somewhere out at sea.

As you fly groundward, waves of enemy fighters emerge from the clouds and launch missiles at you, which are pretty easily avoided. Past all the fighters and on to the carrier, the idea is to get in about five direct hits on the missile launcher, which is a bit more tricky considering that the launcher is doing it's job (launching missiles) so you have to get between the missiles, fire, and then get out.

A moan about the graphics on this section. The update of the sprites is quite smooth, but the update on the backdrop is terrible. Whether this is close to the arcade I don't know, but it's still terrible. Also, the plane still holds it's completely horizontal position. How odd!

The second level is the one we were lucky enough to get on Megatape 8, the Flying Shark level. You now have left your F-14 behind and are flying a helicopter over a long vertically scrolling landscape that gradually gets more and more heavily defended until you reach the mothership at the end, which is no more than an electric barrier, erected to stop you from passing. This needs to be shot down by continual bombardment while you avoid the waves of planes and helicopters that fly on from all four sides, fire at you, and the fly away again. On top of all that, there are ground turrets that have to be bombed by pressing B on the keyboard.

At some point during this stage, icons float fro top to bottom. Collect these and you get an extra weapon, fro a Vulcan (?) ) through things like lasers (very useful), 3-way fire, smart bombs and missiles. The smart bomb is a pretty handy thing to have because it kills everything on screen, including bullets.

This level is difficult. Not because there's a lot of frantic activity going on at the same time, nor is it because of the response (which is very good), but because of the colour system used - blue and black - which makes it very difficult to see bullets, the enemy, yourself, the score, the TV/monitor... or in fact anything else. This does tend to lower the playability level quite a bit.

The following levels are merely the first and second repeated in different orders.

Typhoon is quite a good game and one well worth taking a look at, though the monochrome colour scheme might cause some problems, as it nearly always does.

Imagine go carrier-bagging.

Blow along in this tough airborne blast, complete with six levels of ever-escalating action.

Things start off quite tame, with an Afterburner-style sequence of shooting waves of enemy aircraft attacking head-on, and missile-dodging. At this early stage you don't lose any of your initial five lives if you get hit, but neither do you get any points...

After a short time, the scene moves to the skies above an aircraft carrier. Head-on still, you're faced with the same job of dodging missiles, but you now have to shoot the missile launcher on the aircraft carrier. Not difficult once you know how to time it, but the missiles rob you of a life if they make contact.

Once you've destroyed the aircraft carrier the scene changes and the game becomes a vertically-scrolling shoot-em-up where you pilot an armoured helicopter doing battle with attacking helicopters, jets and anti-aircraft turrets. Apart from your front-firing guns you can also drop bombs ("B" on the keyboard) and smart bombs ('M' - one per life). And look out for collectable weapons, while you're at it.

Reviewer: Rod Lawton

RELEASE BOX
Spectrum, £8.95cs, $14,95dk, Out Now
Amstrad, £8.95cs, £14.95dk, Imminent
C64/128, £8.95cs, £12.95dk, Imminent

Predicted Interest Curve

1 min: 75/100
1 hour: 80/100
1 day: 75/100
1 week: 60/100
1 month: 20/100
1 year: 10/100

Spectrum 48/128 Cassette: £7.95, Diskette: £14.95
Amstrad CPC Cassette: £8.95, Diskette: £12.95

BY HELL HE COPPED A JET

If it's not a film licence it's a game licensed from the arcades. Ocean/Imagine seem to exist on such deals. The latest is Typhoon from Konami, a high-speed jet/helicopter shoot-'em-up.

The game idea is a traditional one - shoot anything that moves, if it doesn't move shoot it anyway - if it can't be shot, collect it. There are six levels of action to be played until the final conflict with the mother ship. The first two as an F-15 jet fighter battling it out against enemy jets and a aircraft carrier.

AFTER BLADE

Opening levels are followed by a series of seascapes infested with war boats and submarines.

Additional weaponry is collected by shooting enemy supplies. And for really tricky situations there is a smart bomb which annihilates everything on-screen in one go, but it can only be used once.

Typhoon is by no means an original game, the Apache helicopter sections resemble a poor attempt at Thunder Blade. While the let sequences owe their origins to Afterburner.