Producer: Alternative Software
Retail Price: £1.99
Author: C A Sharp

Star wrecking, across the universe... I never listened to that song and I don't know this verse... It's funny how THAT song rattled around my head like a tin can in a tumble dryer and yet when it came to writing a funny intro the words of the infamous ditty escaped me. It says something of the popularity of the Star Trek theme that the record, which doesn't even have a disco beat, can enter the Top Hundred at all, never mind reach Number One. And though the timing probably has more to do with the release of the latest Trekkie movie than the recent novelty single, here we have a budget Trek which takes a humorous look at the crew who 'boldly go where no man has BEEN before' (even the phrase must be copyright)!

Star Wreck fools around with the names of the famous starship crew and coalesces around a story from the log of the starship Paralysed. You, Captain T Cake, are on a mission to the planet Dandrox, with a cargo of one Trell and a Rigellian Slime Beast, needed for experimental purposes. To complete the complement of weirdos you also have on board the Thracian Ambassador going to Dandrox and a Kroll in transit to Alpha-Trica III.

You join the Captain in his cabin on the Crew Deck, one of four decks; they're all of slightly different shape and stacked one on top of another, but most lead east from a central elevator shaft. This shaft provides effortless transport around the ship much as in the TV series, but no doubt you'll soon find a power failure curtailing your movements.

And that can only mean Mr Clot who, despite his name, gets one of the few good write-ups ('a fine engineer and the only thing which holds this bucket together'). The others are slandered as follows: 'a bleary-eyed medic' (Dr Decoy), 'a strange Slavic individual' (Checkout), and 'looks like something out of Dante's Inferno' (guess)!

Observing these characters is one thing but actually talking to them or visiting their quarters brings about some strange behaviour, ranging from Checkout's incoherent speech through Lieutenant Yahoo's amorous advances and Dr Decoy's fixing - 'just a flu jab' he says - to Mr Zulu stripping off on the bridge.

But not everything is off the wall - there are occasions when lucidity returns. Firing the torpedo from the bridge on the highest level gives rise to the following comment: 'Great! You have just dispatched one of the deadliest weapons known to man into the depths of space. Let's hope it doesn't hit an inhabited world.'

And at other times the game can be downright civil servantish - EXAM WEAPONS CONTROL gives 'This is the control for all the weapons systems' - or even estate agentish: EXAM CONSOLE leads to 'It's very nice'. Still, a return to insanity is never far off, with the likes of EXAM HELM - 'You can't put it on your head' - lurking around every corner.

There are spots where the program is funny AND accurate. FI RE PHASER gives 'Your eyesight isn't what it was and you have blown a hole in the Starship', and examining the Thracian Ambassador you're told 'He is a surly old article with no sense of humour, somewhat like the average computer mag reviewer'.

Star Wreck isn't the best-constructed budget game I've seen, but it does deal with one of the most interesting TV programs ever - and some of the jokes are still funny, despite the mass of TV and radio humour directed at the series over the years.

DIFFICULTY: not easy to actually get anywhere
GRAPHICS: rudimentary and oft repeated
PRESENTATION: decidedly average
INPUT FACILITY: verb/noun
RESPONSE: Quill

FAX BOX
Title: Star-Wreck
Publisher: Alternative Software
Price: £1.99

For all you Trekkies out there, here's a mission you haven't undertaken before. You're Captain James T. Cake of the Starship Paralysed and you're on your way to the planet Dandrox to deliver your cargo. This comprises one Trell and one Rigellian Slime Beast, which are needed for experimental purposes, and the Thracian Ambassador, who isn't. He's just visiting. You also have on board a Krall, whatever that might be - it's in transit to Alpha-Tricia 111, whatever that is.

All you've got to do is get them all there. Easy? Not with a rust-bucket like the Paralysed, it isn't. Not to mention your crew. For a start there's Ensign Guzunder ("The average Star-Fleet Moron"), and then there's Ensign Weevil, whose gaze definitely says 'out to lunch'. The only fun person sounds like Lieu Yahoo - at least I thought it was fun what she did when I went into her cabin. Wha-hay? This is what we want!

Among the other characters are Dr Leonard Decoy, Zulu, and the ship's engineer, Mr Clot, the only person holding this heap of junk together. Not that he's doing a very good job as you're no sooner up in the air when there's a generator failure. As this operates the elevator which is the principal means of getting from one section of the ship to another, this is a distinct problem. But not to Captain Cake, of course! You have it fixed in a trice, or even sooner, but can you cope with the rest of the emergencies and collect your pay-off at the end?

I enjoyed this game much more than Alternative's other offering, Life-Term, but the main drawback was in trying to discover what you've got to do next. With virtually the whole of the Paralysed open to you from the start (at least until the generator blows), you can wander round and round with little idea of what's going on. Eventually things do start to happen, and my spies tell me that there are quite a few irrelevancies in the game, put in just to raise a chuckle, which is something I always like to see. Chatting to the characters also helps, not to mention trying to do other things to them, which I'll leave you to discover.

Not the lengthiest or hardest of games and the vocabulary could certainly have done with being a bit bigger and more helpful. But it's quite fun, slightly offbeat, and not bad value at £1.99.

Label: Alternative Software
Price: £1.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: nit applicable
Reviewer: Deniz Ahmet

Having produced some decent cheapo adventures in the past I was expecting something good from Alternative Software's Star Wreck. What a mistake!

For a start it's about as funny as a motorway pile-up. You play captain James T Cake, of the starship Paralysed, your mission to take a cargo of one Trell and a rigellian Slime Beast to the planet Dandrox.

The game itself is let down mainly by its graphics, which are very simple. Pictures made up from lines which don't look like anything in particular can hardly be called state-of-the-art.

Also Alternative Software doesn't seem to know that the Spectrum can produce sound as there is none, apart from the click of the keys.