Producer: Alligata
Memory Required: 48K
Retail Price: £7.95
Author: M.D. Russell and C.M. Wright

A massive space station is on collision course with the sun and it's your unenviable task to prevent a solar explosion turning the universe into a black pudding (all right, it didn't actually say that but you know how it gets after reading so many cassette covers).

Playing Here Comes The Sun you get the impression of an adequate but unpolished piece of software. I'll show you what I mean.

The program spends one minute loading a screen which is left there for only 12 seconds before being deleted. This is replaced by a list of the vocabulary - useful, but should it be placed on a loading screen which is lost when the game starts? On the loading screen vocabulary is mis-spelt and this is a foretaste of things to come. If you're struggling with the word LASER that's because the computer has been programmed to expect LAZER.

Although the space station appears large there are no location descriptions, more location statements really. Many locations are repeated and so some loss of atmosphere is inevitable. The half dozen or so graphic descriptions add little to the adventure. You can be randomly killed for no apparent reason in locations where you have previously been safe. I'm no great fan of the random element - at best it's irritating, at worst it can dissuade you from playing again.

Once you've settled into the run of things you come to the exertion area to be confronted with a primitive arcade ski slope game no better than the type found in program listings of what seems like eons ago. However, not all is gloom. The adventure is interspersed with a thousand funny ways of dying. Oh, well...

SUN BURN CAN BE TERMINAL

Memory: 48K
Price: £5.95

If you do not take adventure games too seriously, you might enjoy Here Comes the Sun from Alligata Software. In this somewhat tongue-in-cheek tale, you play the part of the last great hero who must try to prevent his space station colliding with the sun, failure resulting in a solar explosion which will wipe out the universe.

That is the theory, but in practice playing the game more often seems to result in the hero suffering some ignominious disaster, such as turning purple from lack of air and being pronounced "seriously dead".

The game starts in the airlock of the spaceship, whence you must trace your way to the retro-rockets which will enable you to pilot the ship to safety. Unfortunately, giving perfectly sensible commands does not often elicit a sensible response.

Simple graphics do not add a great deal to the game and in time the humour may pall, but the adventure provides a reasonable amount of entertainment.

Here Comes the Sun is produced by Alligata Software, 178 West Street, Sheffield S1 4ET.

MACHINE: Spectrum 48K
JOYSTICK: No
CATEGORY: Adventure
SUPPLIER: Alligata
PRICE: £7.95

Here Comes The Sun is a text adventure with a few graphic screens and minimal sound in which your task is to take control of a space station and prevent it from colliding with the sun.

It's good to see someone taking enough care over a program to create their own character set, and the text is clearly presented.

There's a fairly large vocabulary, with most of the standard commands as well as some more unusual ones, The vocabulary is listed on the screen during loading.

I have a number of quibbles with this game. The first is that a good deal of unnecessary effort has been put into providing witty diversions while playing. At various points during the game an aardvark eating an orchid crosses your path, and at other times the program resorts to Shakespearian English and Hobbit references.

Touches like these may amuse some people, but surely the effort would have been put to better use in adding relevant detail to the locations, most of which have very little to offer.

A number of drones and members of the ship's crew come and go, but none of them have much to do, and even less to say. From time to time one of the drones will cotton on to the fact that you are a stranger, at which point the game ends and you have to start again.

I can't help thinking that a little less quirky humour and a little more substance would have made this a better adventure.