Producer: Artic, 48K
£6.95

Artic have produced five text only adventures to date, lettered A to E. This is 'D'. Despite or because of, the lack of pictures, all their adventures are dripping with verbal atmosphere. They contain endless locations, options, puzzles to solve and are never afraid of the most obscure or most obvious of solutions. Always excellent value. In this game you are one reconnaisssance flight to spy on an enemy island when you are hit by fire. The adventure begins in the plane as it plunges earthwards. There are many tangles with the parachute before you reach the ground - just grabbing it and opening the fuselage door results in a nasty red mess on the ground! From there on you must make your way to the heart of the enemy stronghold, secure information, and return to your aircraft carrier in disguise, avoiding being shot by your own side. Biggles lives again! Clear writing and fast responses combined with a variable element in replay, make this a very worthwhile buy. Save game feature.

Producer: Artic, 48K
£6.95

Artic have produced five text only adventures to date, lettered A to E. This is 'D'. Despite or because of, the lack of pictures, all their adventures are dripping with verbal atmosphere. They contain endless locations, options, puzzles to solve and are never afraid of the most obscure or most obvious of solutions. Always excellent value. In this game you are one reconnaisssance flight to spy on an enemy island when you are hit by fire. The adventure begins in the plane as it plunges earthwards. There are many tangles with the parachute before you reach the ground - just grabbing it and opening the fuselage door results in a nasty red mess on the ground! From there on you must make your way to the heart of the enemy stronghold, secure information, and return to your aircraft carrier in disguise, avoiding being shot by your own side. Biggles lives again! Clear writing and fast responses combined with a variable element in replay, make this a very worthwhile buy. Save game feature.

Producer: Artic, 48K
£6.95

Artic have produced five text only adventures to date, lettered A to E. This is 'D'. Despite or because of, the lack of pictures, all their adventures are dripping with verbal atmosphere. They contain endless locations, options, puzzles to solve and are never afraid of the most obscure or most obvious of solutions. Always excellent value. In this game you are one reconnaisssance flight to spy on an enemy island when you are hit by fire. The adventure begins in the plane as it plunges earthwards. There are many tangles with the parachute before you reach the ground - just grabbing it and opening the fuselage door results in a nasty red mess on the ground! From there on you must make your way to the heart of the enemy stronghold, secure information, and return to your aircraft carrier in disguise, avoiding being shot by your own side. Biggles lives again! Clear writing and fast responses combined with a variable element in replay, make this a very worthwhile buy. Save game feature.

SINCLAIR ACTS TO IMPROVE THE STANDARD OF ITS NAMED SOFTWARE

John Gilbert looks at the latest group of cassettes issued by Sinclair and finds that it is now setting the standards.

A new batch of Sinclair Research software for the ZX-81 and Spectrum shows a marked improvement in the quality of programs and a continuation of fine artwork on the cassette inserts.

The reason is that the company is selling programs from other independent companies, such as Melbourne House and Artic, instead of continuing to rely on Psion, Mikro-Gen and ICL.

The Hobbit which takes first place in the new releases for quality and value for money. This adventure game, which the makers claim uses artificial intelligence, is discussed in Mind Games on page 93.

VU-3D, for the 48K Spectrum, is another good offering from Psion. It allows the user to create a three-dimensional representation of an object on the television screen. The object can then be rotated and viewed from any angle. The objects can be displayed as wirework figures or can be shaded. They can also be magnified and reduced.

It is possible to store the figure on tape in a data file and re-load it to view again. The program costs £9.95 but even though it has some good features it still seems over-priced.

Games feature strongly in the new tapes. Sinclair is selling the Artic range of adventures, A, C and D. Adventure A works on the 16K or 48K Spectrum and 16K ZX-81 and is called Planet of Death.

You are stranded on a planet and must return to your spaceship. There is no guide to the keywords but with a little thought you can discover the help command. At times the suggestions can be very unhelpful and it is a good idea to construct a map, as some of the help suggestions may make you retrace your footsteps.

The next adventure so far released is C, called Ship of Doom. It can be run on the 48K Spectrum and 16K ZX-81.

Your ship is captured by aliens who are searching for humanoids to replace their brains with microchips. The object of the game is to escape from the alien craft by breaking the gravitational field. To do so you must find the control room of the alien ship.

The help command is a little more useful in this game and it is easier to get further when playing the game.

Adventure D, called Espionage island, can be used on the 48K Spectrum or 16K ZX-81. You must escape from an aircraft which is about to crash into the Atlantic. You must the reach the island safely, avoid capture, and try to discover the secret of the island. The game is more difficult than the others and many people have not managed to get out of the aircraft, even though there is a parachute. All the adventures cost £6.95.

Leaving adventure games, Reversi, or Othello as it is sometimes called, can be played on the 16K Spectrum or 16K ZX-81. The game has nine levels, from novice to expert, and the computer is difficult to beat. The makers claim that Reversi reflects the strict contemporary morality of Victorian society but we believe that it can traced to Arabic origins. Reversi costs £7.95.

An interesting addition to the range of software is the Artic 1K Chess. It takes some technical wizardry to squeeze this kind of game into the unexpanded ZX-81.

The game can be played using one of two opening moves. Because of the lack of memory, castling, pawn promotion and capturing en passant are not allowed. The game loads in approximately 40 seconds and that is ideal for someone who wants a quick game of chess without having to load from a tape which takes several minutes.

The computer also makes its moves very fast for the amount of memory available to it. 1K Chess costs £4.95.

Super Glooper is an amusing game of Pac-man on the 16K ZX-81. Glooper must paint the maze before the aliens kill him. Unfortunately it is difficult to evade those aliens using the standard ZX-81 keyboard but it is not impossible. Glooper can also pick up one of the shields at the corners of the maze to protect himself and chase the aliens.

On the other side of the tape is Frogs, a game of Frogger. You must get the frogs over the river via the moving boats to the jetties on the other bank. If froggie falls into the river, it drowns.

You score points for each frog you get across the river and you can have eight frogs to send to their deaths. Super Glooper and Frogs cost £4.95.

Another game with a familiar-sounding theme is Through the Wall. It is based on Breakout and is available for the 16K ZX-81. On the other side of the cassette is Scramble, also a familiar theme. Both games on one cassette represent good value at £4.95.

A package for the 1K ZX-81, called 1K Games, has also been released. The games include Jackpot, in which you must try to win the 25 pence jackpot from a one-armed bandit; Etch and Sketch, where you can draw pictures on the screen; and Maze Game, where you must find your way out of the conventional maze.

The release of this cassette, costing £4.95, is a good idea at a time when so many people are buying ZX-81s.

A basic Toolkit is available for the 16K ZX-81. It provides a series of machine code routines to make the job of programming easier. It includes a re-number routine, a search and replace routine, a merge routine to put together two separate Basic programs, and a routine to put a Basic program above RAMTOP and out of the way of the NEW command. The Toolkit costs £5.95.

Two database programs are available in the range for the 48K Spectrum. They are called Collector's Pack and Club Record Controller.

Collector's Pack can be used to store information about coins, stamps or even records. The Club Record Controller will store information about people such as addresses and telephone numbers. It would be useful to schools or even someone who runs a private club. Both packages are easy to use and cost £9.95.

Adventure B, Inca Curse, for the 48K Spectrum is an upgrade of an adventure which Artic wrote for the 16K ZX-81. The adventurer is exploring in the jungle when he finds an Incan Temple. The aim is to go in and drag out all the treasure, or as much a you can carry. It all seems so easy until you enter the game and step into the temple.

The authors have managed to cram a good deal into this adventure and the Artic top score of 3,200 points will take some beating. We must admit that it is not one of the adventures in which we have made much progress. Adventure B costs £6.95.

The latest release of tapes is certainly better than the previous one. The games, utility, and business areas have been covered well but there is still a lack of good educational software. The only tapes available tend to be multi-choice and question-and-answer sessions.

The Psion tapes seem to be the best for quality at the moment and the ones with the most interesting concepts. None of the cassettes reviewed was bad but The Hobbit, Vu-3D, 1K Chess, and Super Glooper seem best.

Espionage Island is a large adventure game with over 50 locations to be discovered, and 12 or so objects to collect on the way, to be used for various purposes. It features a SAVE routine so that you can stop the game where and when you like, come back to it another time and carry on where you left off.

The basic plot is to leave your stricken aircraft (safely, and in one piece of course) explore an island, get into a military installation, collect its secret, escape, and return to your aircraft carrier. As there are a large number of locations, it really is essential that you draw a map as you go along. To move from one location to another you must type the direction required into the computer: it is not necessary to type out 'north', 'south', 'up' etc in as complete words - 'n', 's', 'u' will do just as well.

Anything that you come across on the way, collect. The computer understands simple commands, usually a verb and noun, like 'get torch', the reply being 'OK'. If the object is something to wear, then you must first 'get whatever' and then 'wear whatever'. To get you started, this is what you must do with a parachute in the plane at the beginning. If you do not then the reply will be '... pulling you out with a rush of air. You land, making a large red mess. You are dead. Do you wish to try again?', and back to the beginning you go. As you get further into the game, this can be extremely annoying, so it is a good idea to SAVE the game every so often, so you only have to go back so far. This is done by typing 'quit', and when asked if you wish to SAVE the game, say 'y' (it is not necessary to say 'yes') and use a blank cassette. However, if you say 'n' to the request, then the computer is wiped clear, and you have to reload the entire game. A request for 'help' (and you do have to spell this word out) more often than not tells you to 'try drawing a map', but occasionally will give you something useful - for instance 'help' will tell you 'no smoking'. One thing that is not clearly explained is that if you type in 'r' it will give a recap of your location description, which can be very useful if you have typed in all sorts, got nowhere and the original description has scrolled off the screen.

One location that had me confused was 'you are in a STICHED swamp, tell me what to do'. 'STICHED' is a misspelling of 'STITCHED' and if you think of a synonym for that, it will tell you which direction to go through the 'sinking swamp' to get out on the other side. If you do not get out you will eventually 'sink up to your neck and drown. Do you wish to try! again?'. Without giving anything away, there is a point where you have to join a rope to two objects. If you type 'tie rope' it will reply 'what to?'. If you retype it as 'to A and B', or even 'to A and to B' then the computer will accept this but only understand the first part of it (i.e. 'to A'). The correct way appears to be 'tie rope', 'what to?', 'to A', 'OK'; 'tie rope', 'what to?', 'to B'. This will give the right answer 'I can see a rope tied to A and to B'.

If you really get stuck with this game, then a request to Artic Computing will bring a Tip sheet to help. I expect they would appreciate an SAE.

Espionage Island kept me occupied for several evenings and Artic are to be congratulated on producing such an interesting game. I can't wait to get into the other three adventure games they produce. Espionage Island requires a 48K Spectrum and costs £6.95.

This series of adventures displayed as plain scrolling black text on a pale yellow background, the conversation scrolling continuously up the screen.

In itself this is acceptable. But is spoiled by the fact that when a lot of conversation has been held at one place and the location details have long since disappeared, there seems to be no way of recalling them. The lack of a cursor can also be confusing.

Planet of Death, for the l6K Spectrum, sets you down on an alien planet where your space ship has been captured and disabled. You must find it and escape.

The environment here seemed just like earth to me - very mundane. Most things I tried to do proved impossible or went unrecognised. A weak theme and frustrating game.

Inca Curse, for the 48K Spectrum, places you in a South American jungle outside an Inca temple. This you must explore and return with as much treasure as possible.

Quite a good game with plenty of exploring to do, and points to score, but a disaster from an educational point of view.

Spelling is obviously not the author's strong point! I came across "vandels", an "armory", and "hyroglithics"!

The publishers claim 3200 to be the maximum number of points to have been scored to date. Could this be the total number of spelling errors in the game?

In Ship of Doom which runs on the 48K Spectrum you are in a space ship which has been drawn into an alien cruiser by a Gravitron beam. The aliens are rounding-up humans to turn them into androids.

Your mission - to press the main computer control button to free your ship. There are endless corridors and rooms to roam about. with some strange devices whose purposes are not obvious.

The control button is easily found, but covered by seemingly unbreakable glass! Quite an interesting adventure, if SF is for you!

Espionage Island, again for the 48K Spectrum, puts you under pressure from the start. You are in an aircraft which has been shot at, and you can see a parachute and lever. Your mission is to find the secret of the island on which you were spying from above, but first you must get there.

The island is populated by natives - and hides a guarded camp.

Are the things you find in the wreckage of your aircraft a clue? Can you penetrate the camp? And will you be able to return to your aircraft carrier base? Quite an exciting Adventure.

This series of adventures from Artic Computing of Hull, seems to improve alphabetically! I can hardly wait for Adventure 'E'. The Adventures cost £6.95 each.