Producer: Ariolasoft
Retail Price: £8.95
Author: Victor Ruiz and Florentino Pertejo

There you are, all tucked up snugly in your comfy bed dreaming wonderful dreams. Tonight you're back in the days of King Arthur. You're a brave, dashing knight: rescuing beautiful damsels from distress and generally buckling your swash. But in the morning your alarm clock never rings and when you open your eyes you are no longer in your semi-detatched in Surbiton, but, gadzooks in the very land of which ye were dreaming.

Gone are your street-cred clothes and your Diadora trainers and in their place is a splendid suit of armour. This might not look quite as cool as your previous attire but it will certainly equip you a lot better in this hostile world.

Armed with your trusty sword Excamembert, your task is to go forth and redress the balance of time. This is why, four twentieth century elements have followed you through the time warp. These elements must be found and given to a Guardian who will return them to their real time. These elements are the Fire Which Does Not Burn, the Mirror of Wisdom, the Elixir of Life and finally - The Voice From The Other World (sinister chuckle).

There are four environments which you must cross before you can even contemplate returning to your own time. There's the forest, the lake, the caves and eventually the castle where King Arthur is waiting to meet you. At the end of each of these sections is one of the vital elements which must be returned to 1986. Once each object has been collected it must be delivered to the Guardian and his magic cauldron.

Each section has different nasties, for instance the lake is full of killer eels and nasty fish, and that Guardian can do some very antisocial things to you, like turn you into a frog. This might seem a might unreasonable to begin with, but having this amphibious form will allow you to get through the lake section a lot easier than if you had a human body.

Did all the great and fearless men die out in the Middle Ages and are we all a bunch of wimps in the twentieth century. Only if you finish the game will you ever know!

COMMENTS

Control keys: Q up, O left, P right, M fire
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard play: sensitive
Use of colour: pools of limpid colour in the evening light... alright!
Graphics: large sprites, well animated
Sound: a bit of Scarborough Fair to begin with and some spot effects throughout
Skill levels: one
Screens: about 70

If you fancy a bit of a change then this could well be what you're looking for. There is an immense sense of playability from the word go. As I hacked away at the first couple of winged beasts and then started off on the quest toward Camelot Castle, I became totally engrossed. Each of the characters is excellently drawn and the backgrounds are colourful and well detailed. The sound is also quite good. I enjoyed playing Camelot Warriors, it was tremendously compelling.

Camelot Warriors is a pretty arcade adventure. I found the game relatively easy to get into, despite the blocky error detection and slow responses to joystick movement. Animation of all the characters is very well done; especially the owl which flies over the cauldron. The game contains very little colour clashes, but uses colour lavishly. The only annoying part of Camelot Warriors was that you can go so tar in the game and then no further I found the game a joy to play, although at nine pounds I feel most people won't get far enough for their money.

Camelot Warriors is a very appealing game. I enjoyed playing it a lot. While some of ARIOLASOFT's more recent products haven't been of the highest quality, I think that Camelot Warriors is the sort of game that they should be producing as standard. Colour has been used to excellent effect, and the graphics in most cases, are beautifully animated, Addictive and playable, this game is one that is well worth a quick play or two, but I doubt whether it fully justifies its price.

Ariolasoft
£8.95

Lawks a mussy! Stap me vitals! Great thundering egads and plenty of thees and thous... 'tis but a little slip in time twixt the place of thy birth in the 20th Century and where thou findeth yourself enow! Gad me zooks! Alone and friendless in a medieval setting... yipes. Ten out of ten for picturesque woodland, minus several million for the evil druid and all the eye clawing owls and flesh eating spiders.

Good job you found a sword though, 'cos that's the only way you'll get anywhere, by thrashing everything you meet into bite-size pieces. (Swish, squelch!) in order to escape this flashback into forsoothery, you've got to collect four elements from your own century and present them to the guardian of each world you enter. The different worlds (the Forest, Lake, Cave and finally Castle Camelot) each have a different magical guardian which you must best before progressing onto the next. Each world is linked to the next by a magic portal, which you must also find.

This is a jaunty little platform jape in knight's clothing, with a few nicely animated monsters to get your blood up, but not enough action to really get you excited. The control you have on your character seems a little stiff, which is a shame as you have to perform a lot of very closely bunched jumps, turns and strikes in order to get through the first screens. But not bad at all if you're a platform freak looking for a new Left/Right/Jump-arama to best. The graphics aren't bad, with few attribute problems, and all that with multicoloured sprites too! it certainly made me Laughalot.

BARGAIN BASEMENT

Another trip to Lowprice Lane with the king of the skinflints, Marcus Berkmann!

Mastertronic
£1.99
Reviewer: Marcus Berkmann

Shows how the memory can delude and confuse even as razor-sharp and well trained a mind as mine (hem hem). This little game, which first appeared through the now defunct Ariolasoft label just over two years ago, was in fact, history fans, one of Dinamic's very first games. Hasta manana, my old paella! Wossmore, I remember it as rather good fun, a platformy romp through the middle ages with bumper graphics and spanky monsters. But once again, the brain has played its devilish tricks. In reality Camelot Warriors is a snorefest of the first order, slow, nothing much to look at, unreasonably hard and full of irritating little game features that went out with Manic Miner. What's happened is that since its first release we've seen positively squillions of games that are much faster, much slicker and all in all much more fun. So when you throw out this load of old bathwater, make sure you bung the baby with it. (Eh? Ed)

Label: Ariolasoft
Author: Dinamic
Price: £8.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: John Gilbert

Grab thy sword and get into 'eth' mode - jumpeth, kicketh, etc - and you can leapeth into the land of Camelot Warriors.

You're whisked away from the 20th Century and dumped back in the mythical past where Arfur reigned over his clapped out kingdom. A trek to the castle, armed with your trusty blade. Excamembert (sic) is the only way in which you'll find the solution to your timeslip trauma and get back to the future.

First, however you must plough through three worlds of eye-clawing owls, flesh-eating spiders, killer fish and deadly plants to find four elements of the 20th Century which dropped through time with you. They are upsetting the balance of nature and, to keep Camelot tidy, you must find them and return them to their correct place.

The game's four worlds include Forest, Lake, Caves and Castle. Each land is inter-linked with others. For instance, you can jump from a grassy glade in the forest into the almost total darkness of the caves - no attribute clash there. The forest harbours an evil druid who'll turn you into a toad, and a race of giant owls who's wings batter you to death at the moment you enter the game.

Be ready with your sword and you can slice them in two.

So far so good, unfortunately, the game makes use of a weird joystick and keyboard control system. You'd think that to swing the sword you would press the fire button and to jump you'd move the joystick up against the wings of death or some such your instinct to hit that fire button will prove fatal.

Did I mention jumping? You'll have to do a lot of that. The caves contain purple piggies which bare no resemblance to the menacing boars they're supposed to be and two-legged go stoppers that creep up behind you and hack away at your calves. As they approach you jump or you'll lose yet another of your five lives.

Once you've despatched the monsters you can get on with finding the four elements which are hardly recognisable from the descriptive runes printed on the cassette inlay. I can report, however, that one of them is a light bulb and another a radio perhaps.

Each element has its guardian, taken from the world of mythology. When you've found an element hand it over to him - he knows what to do with it.

The Forest is ruled by Aznaht, a master druid who has command of all animals and who can turn humans into beasts. Azornic is a powerful dragon lord who's fiery breath feeds the cavern's central heating system. The lake's ruler, on the other hand, relies on Greek mythology for his existence. He's Kindo, brother of Neptune, and his domain extends over all things watery.

Camelot Warriors isn't a complex game but its mixed bag of mythology and science, mawkish monsters and neatly animated graphics appealed to the puzzler in me.

Ariolasoft has tried to mix arcade animation with strategy. If it's not completely successful it's because of its lack of complexity.

Camelot Warriors is for the arcader who's not afraid of gentle riddles. But it probably isn't one for die-hard strategists.

C64, Amstrad, Spectrum: £1.99

Resplendent in a suit of shining armour, a solitary knight heads off in search of the fabled castle Camelot. His route across mediaeval England takes him through woods, across a lake, through caverns and finally on to the home of Arthur Pendragon.

In each segment of land, the knight has to avoid the touch of various creatures indigenous to the segment; contact with any proves fatal, and the knight is only blessed with four incarnations. Later scenes are entered by reaching the exit of the previous one.

Once the castle is safely gained, four elements from the regions are to be found and presented to the corresponding guardians so they can be destroyed. The final challenge is an enigmatic quest "to find the key that will unlock the secret magic mystery". Hmmm.

This difficult scrolling and flick-screen arcade adventure goes a bit limp after a while. Although brandishing a large sword, the knight has precious little chance to use it and must instead rely on his abilities to leap large buildings in a single bound. Annoyingly tricky control and lack of immediate action conspire towards its premature and unfortunate downfall.