Producer: Firebird
Retail Price: £7.95
Author: Steven Dunn from a concept by David Braben

The country has been invaded by waves of hostile alien spaceships. Instead of attacking military installations, they are intent on polluting the landscape with a red virus. This kills off all plant and animal life, including humans.

Determined to counter this devastating threat, a brave pilot is strapping himself into the cockpit of his state of the art Hoverplane. This futuristic flying machine is equipped with the latest technology - long-range scanner, laser cannon and a limited supply of smart bombs. The latter can be used to destroy any aliens on the screen.

The action is shown in 3-D with wire-frame vector graphics depicting the Hoverplane and enemy ships. The contours of the tree-filled landscape are shown by a pattern of undulating squares depicting the earth's surface. The long-range scanner, in the top left corner of the screen, shows the positions of the enemy ships in relation to the Hoverplane. Gauges above the main playing area show the amount of fuel remaining and the plane's altitude. Extra fuel can be obtained by landing at home base.

The Hoverplane is controlled by thrusting the engines and rotating the craft. At high altitudes, the fuel supply is automatically cut and the plane lowers rapidly towards the ground. You move, helicopter-style, by dipping the plane's nose and thrusting.

During play, a map of the land can be displayed showing polluted areas in red. All enemy ships in the attack wave must be destroyed before the whole map turns red. Each wave contains many different aliens, including the dreaded seeders (flying saucers which hover and sometimes land, spraying the deadly virus). Also polluting the area are the high flying bombers. The objective of alien ships (chevron-shaped fighters and kamikaze pests) is to destroy the Hoverplane. Collision with any spaceship results in the immediate destruction of the Hoverplane.

If an alien attack wave is defeated, the player gains a bonus score determined by how much of the landscape is still free of the virus. An extra Hoverplane and smart bomb are awarded every 5000 points.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: the wire-frame 3-D landscape suggest movement very convincingly. Pity about the colour clash
Sound: none
Options: definable keys

My first impression of Virus was that it's extremely hard. Initially I found my Hoverplane to be most uncontrollable but, after some semblance of order was established, I managed to execute some neat aerobatical stunts. I still didn't shoot very many enemy craft though. Considering this game first appeared on the machines with a bigger byte, Firebird have done a very commendable job converting it to the Spectrum. The landscape rolls along up hill and down dale very smoothly: the only slightly annoying glitches are the colour clash between the Hoverplane and the landscape, and the appearance of the enemy craft on the map as they pass. Overall, a fast and furious blast-'em-up. After the initial control difficulties have been ironed out, it's great fun to play.
MARK [75%]

Virus is graphically excellent, the 3-D effect works well and the scrolling is smooth. The screen is a green monochrome colour with the exception of the border but as the ship is white, it does tend to clash with anything else it approaches. At first the Hoverplane is terribly difficult to control. The thrust control method is very similar to the ageing thrust games, like 1985 - The Day After and the more recent Thrust II, but with the added confusion of 3-D. The landscape moves up and down very convincingly making the game look like a wild waltzer ride! The main let down is the sound - not one beep to be heard all through the game. As we all know, an atmospheric sound effect makes a game, but with Virus you just have to use your imagination! Even so, Virus is great for all those fans of thrust and 3-D - a perfect combination.
NICK [78%]

Yet another wire-frame shoot-'em-up hits the streets. But, the addition of a smooth moving, tree-filled landscape makes Virus rather unusual. Another innovation is the strange control method which has the Hoverplane flying like a helicopter - it can only thrust upwards and therefore has to dip its nose to achieve forward movement. This is confusing at first and difficult to master and has you crashing continually into the ground. It's easier if you just use the keyboard, though. The movement of the landscape as you skim over the tree tops is surprisingly smooth and quite fast Unfortunately the attractive 3-D display is accompanied by silence - there's not even the tiniest bleep. As a result there's very little atmosphere and flying around shooting aliens soon gets repetitive. There is little if any strategy involved in Virus but even so, it's a well-presented, playable shoot-'em-up.
PHIL [79%]

What's this? Not a naughty little program that crashes your computer, no. It's the game no one thought would ever appear on the Spectrum, and it took the might of Firebird to do it. Phil South takes a look and gets the sniffles.

FAX BOX
Game: Virus
Publisher: Firebird
Price: £7.95 cass/£12.99 disk
Reviewer: Phil South

Last year, everyone at PCW was heavily impressed by a game on the Archimedes computer, a game called Zarch. This convincing tour de force was masterminded by the creator of Elite, a guy called David Braben, and at that time no plans existed to port the game down to even the high end 16 bit machines like the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. But now Firebird has produced 8-bit versions... including one for the 128-48K Spectrum!!!

Any attempt to bring such a game to the Spectrum could only result in a desperately shoehorned. graphically-inferior pie of old doodahs, couldn't it? Well, actually it's not a billionth as bad as anybody here anticipated, with all the original gameplay surprisingly intact.

You are in control of a terrific little spaceship, a bit like the one in the old asteroids game only this time instead of being in cheap black and white and 2D, this little devil is in wondrous colouramic 3D. You are charged with a task of ridding the planet of the aliens which are spraying the planet with a deadly virus. There are many different types o' aliens, and you have to zap them all in order to clear a level. Your score is a percentage of how much of the planet is left uninfected.

As you jet away from your start-up position, you notice immediately that beneath you is a brilliant 3D wire frame representation of the planet, scrolling neatly under you. As you move, the square scrolls, revealing hillier sections with trees whipping by, and your scanner in the top left of the screen shows that some aliens are pursuing you. You've got to blast the little beggars, you see, but that's only if you've got enough fingers left after controlling the ship to press the fire button on the keyboard. Yes, the controls are a trifle tricky, but if you've got a joystick interface (all are supported) then it makes it a little easier. Shooting with a keyboard button and flying the ship with the joystick can be a little bit like rubbing your head and patting your belly simultaneously though.

This is a very entertaining game, and even if you can't really get into the gameplay of shooting down the aliens, just flying around the landscape learning to fly your hoverplane against the planet's gravity is a fun game in itself. And finally, an interesting fact. It's been said by Telecomsoft that it never intended to program the game on the Spectrum but the programmer of the Spectrum version, Steve Dunn, just sent it in. Steve was so impressed by the demos of Zarch on the Archimedes at PCW that he set to programming in machine code. Blimey! Next Firebird'll say that it was written in binary on the back of an airmail envelope with a stub of pencil and a slide rule! Hah! Only kidding, choplets And, if that's Steve's first effort of machine coding on the Speccy, all I can say is his Basic programs must have been brilliant! Take it from a dude who knows... Virus on the Spectrum IS the state of the art.

Label: Telecomsoft
Author: Steven Dunn
Price: £8.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Jim Douglas

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh! 3-D GONE MAD! My brain can't cope! Virus may well be the best game this month, but it's so difficult to play it makes my head hurt.

Anyone who has stuck together the pages of Commodore magazines with dribble upon seeing screenshots of the Amiga version should be damned impressed by this. As well as being a fantastic conversion of the game, it does things never before seen on the Spectrum.

Virus began about eight months ago on the Archimedes machine. It used to be called Zarch and it was packed so full of fab 3-D graphics that no-one even dared a Speccy conversion.

Well now it's here and it's truly brilliant. The game shows your craft, in the middle of the screen and the world moves in true three-dimensional perspective around it. It's like having a helicopter following you around, beaming what it sees on to the TV. As a result, you've got a ship that can literally fly in EVERY direction, and you've got a much more precise view. In games where you view things through the cockpit it's impossible to tell how close you are to objects. Here you can actually see it.

The controls take ages to get used to. You can rotate on a vertical axis and pitch forwards through 180° from ahead and upright to backwards and upside down (like half a loop-the-loop on-the-spot). You propel yourself with a thrust stream that comes out of the underside of your craft. So in order to get anywhere, you've got to pitch yourself forward and thrust. Fine. Did I mention the gravity and inertia that pull you down and prevent you from stopping? No? Well, they make things just a tiny bit more difficult. So until you've crashed into the ground 200 times, there really isn't any point in trying to get to grips with the game as such. Eventually though, you'll get the hang of flying in straight lines and you'll decide that it's time to kill something.

There are plenty of possible targets. The storyline (mercifully brief) is that aliens are invading and spreading their horrible redness all over the place like so much chicken-pox. You've got to put a stop to it.

A map can be called on to the screen so you can see just how far the infection has spread. There's a radar scanner in the top left hand corner of the picture so you can track the bad guys, as well as keeping an eye of your home base in case you need to re-fuel.

There's a fair number of bad guys in the game. It gets progressively more difficult, starting off with one alien craft spreading the Virus. Once you've dealt with him, you go to level two with more aliens, the level three and so on until the whole world is full to the brim with the little beggars.

The speed that the author has managed to achieve is very impressive. The ground scrolls beneath you and rises and falls. It's a bit like Digital Integration's ATF, but much more advanced.

Although it's always remarkably unproductive, you can spend a few highly interesting moments just zooming around at ridiculous speeds and then crashing into hills.

Virus is by no means a verbatim copy of the Archimedes game, or of the ST on for that matter. It is easily the best combination of 3-D graphics innovation and straightforward, high-tension combat. The strategy element isn't enough to bog you down, but it's vital that you pay attention to the map if you're going to get anywhere in the long run.

There's no question. It's definitely well worth buying.

Firebird, £7.95cs, £12.95dk
Atari ST version reviewed Issue 11 - ACE Rating 981

Converting a game that was developed on the Acorn Archimedes sounds like an impossibility, but that's what they've tried to do. All the features are here: hoverplane, seeders, mutants, fighters, pests, trees, rolling landscape. However, the hard part is getting the control of the hoverplane right, to make it as responsive as in its Archie and ST versions.

Sadly they haven't quite managed to pull it off. It's a valiant effort and Spectrum owners should still take a look at it because there's nothing else quite like it for them.

The ship control is much more awkward without a twin-button mouse, so getting familiar with them will take longer. Anybody who's played Virus on the ST is bound to be disappointed, but this stretches a Spectrum about as far as it can go in this direction. A nice try but no cigar.

Spectrum 48/128 Cassette: £7.95
Amiga £19.95

A LOT LESS BOVVER

Massively overrated in some quarters this graphically impressive shoot'em-up made its apparently overwhelming, 32-bit debut on the Archimedes as Zarch. Over eight months later the ST version showed 16-bits could match it pretty much perfectly, a feat now repeated by the Amiga game.

As for 8-bits, the Spectrum bravely ventures into the arena as well.

Basic gameplay is, in fact, identical on all machines: take-off in your hoverpad and blast everything in sight. The hoverplane is protected by an indestructible shield which costs fuel to recharge; run out of fuel and the shield goes on holiday. Land back at base and fuel rises to maximum. Smart bombs are earned only at certain point levels however, while firing the laser cannon costs a point per laser bolt.

Finding enemies to blast is done via a long-range scanner which distinguishes between Seeders (these spread the Virus), Mutants (hoverplane-like enemy), Bombers (like Seeders but more effective), Pests (missile-like enemies) and Fighters (like Mutant but better armed). The quicker virus spreaders are killed, the smaller the area infected by them and the higher the end-of-level bonus.

What makes Virus special is its wraparound 3-D landscape, and awkward control system. The former is displayed in areas often too small for comfort in combat, while the latter can be mastered with practise.

On the Amiga, Archimedes/ST-style graphics are retained and provide much of the pleasure in playing the game although gameplay remains limited and, once control is mastered, repetitive.

Sonic improvements are significant, with explosions and gunfire so much better - there are even some new effects such as water splashing under the thrusters.

On the Spectrum sound has been completely banished, along with solid colours and water, but the 3-D landscape still moves surprisingly fast - if jerkily - and is nice to watch. As for gameplay, there's no mouse control but keys were easier on the others versions anyway so the control challenge remains much as before. Without the dazzling graphics, however, the gameplay's weakness is even more obvious and it's unlikely you'll come back to it too often after completing a few, very tough levels.