Producer: M.A.D.
Retail Price: £2.99
Author: Jeff Minter

The Droid Wars are over, but the vengeful losers are intent upon attacking the Home-world with a retaliatory holocaust. They must be stopped.

You have control of a multi-directional green command craft supported by three drone fighters. At first these adopt a clustered grouping around the command ship, but on higher levels they go into symmetrical formations and move in different patterns.

Each craft has a blaster that can fire independently (and in later space regions they can fire in different directions).

Some aliens move predictably and others randomly; some drop bombs and others fire lasers. Some have to be blasted several times before they're destroyed, and then can spawn other aliens. There are 30 waves of attackers, and all aliens within a wave must be destroyed before the next can be tackled.

A periodically pulsing 'zapper' line scans the screen from top to bottom. If the command ship is on the line when it pulses, you and your drone craft are destroyed.

COMMENTS

Control keys: Q/A up/down O/P left/right, SPACE for fire
Joystick: Kempston, Cursor, Interface II
Use of colour: lots of it
Graphics: simple and plain
Sound: little
Skill levels: one
Screens: plenty to hold your interest

Voidrunner is in the classic blast-'em-up mould. Like most of the Jeff Minter games I've seen, it's fast, colourful, and above all weird. Controlling the ships is easy, but keeping out of the way of the aliens is hard. I wasn't very impressed with the graphics - after playing the 16K Commodore version I felt more could have been done for the Spectrum. But the game isn't bad, and if you want an addictive blast you could do worse than buy this.
MARK

It's hard to describe Voidrunner's graphics as anything but poor - small, ill-defined clusters of pixels that don't seem to represent anything. And once I got over that shock I found Voidrunner a very poor Centipede variant. The inlay suggests this is a highly innovative shoot-'em-up, but the reality is disappointing. Controlling the four ships is quite easy and the keys are very responsive, so the game is simple to get into and playable for a while, but it's hardly addictive. Centipede games can be fun if you want to wallow in an afternoon's nostalgia, but there are better ones, and I expected a bit more of a game with the brains of Jeff Minter behind it.
ROBIN

At first sight Voidrunner looks very drab. But playing it converted me! The speed is just right: verging on the impossible, but fast enough to encourage you to keep going. My only gripe with the gameplay is my index finger, which took quite a battering after the first level. I was a bit disappointed by the second stage, which is basically a reversal of the first; but it's no cop-out, as the reversal calls for entirely different playing techniques. This is the first of the cult Minter games I've played, and I'm waiting for more…
MIKE

M.A.D.
£2.99

Double hoopy hot stuff! All you (slightly) wrinklies out there will probably remember Voidrunner as an all time Commodore classic from Jeff Minter's vivid imagination. Many eons later, here's MAD's Speccy conversion - and it's one of cosmic wonderousness!

The first thing to say is that Voidrunner is no relation, poor or otherwise, to Bladerunner. It's made up of pure violence, going back to the good old days when Speccy programs were lovely and violent and Speccy players were glad of it. Voidrunner deals in ultra-death and hyper-violence - nothing more and nothing less!

All you do is command your crack corps of ships (you start with four, flying in Red Arrows formation) against the remorseless onslaught of wave after wave of aliens. There is no firepower, time or energy limit, and the whole screen is free for gameplay. You start with five lives, but for every wave you vanquish, you gain another life, up to a total of nine.

There's nothing very sophisticated about the enemy either. They have eight basic forms, few can actually attack you, and those that can are easily avoided. Most are just cattle to the slaughter!

So, okay, where's all the fun in this? Well, Voidrunner has none of this messing about with poncy graphics and whizzy sound. What it does have is more aliens moving faster in more directions in true pyrotechnicolour than any other game of the type. And what's more, on each level you get onto, you get more ships which can fire independently at all angles until the whole screen's just one boiling mass of total death and destruction. It's one magic game.

Label: Mastertronic
Author: Icon
Price: £2.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tony Dillon

Look into my eyes. You are getting sleepy, ever so sleepy. You are going baaack... baacckk... back to the time of mutant camels and strange colours. When I count three, you will awake and Jeff Minter will arise to rehaunt you down to your local software dealer. One, two, three.

It's true! Jeff's back with a vengeance. Icon design has lovingly converted his old C64 hit Voidrunner to Spectrum, and I think its got a hit on its hands.

So what kind of game is it? After wading through all the blurb, you eventually realise it's a basic shoot-em-up. Pure and simple. Just weaving around the screen making "neeow doo-doo boom" noises, destroying droids and camels alike and saving the Earth. No big deal for hardened tough guys (or tough persons, if you want to be technical).

The game has you flying vertically, blasting away at all sorts of 'orrible meanies which react in different ways - some explode while some leave pods behind which have to be shot again.

Your ship, or rather, group of ships change formation as you zoom from level to level, each with an animally sort of name such as Llama, Goat, or Sheep. This insures that the amazingly cool tactics that you used to get off the last level are not necessarily going to get you through the next.

Voidrunner is fast, colourful, highly playable, extremely addictive and a snip at the price. In the immortal words of Douglas Adams: "Boffo. A good one".