Captain Planet
by David Perry, Nick Bruty
Mindscape International Inc
1991

All you lentil-eating, CFC-free hairspray-using freaks are in luck this month because good ol' Captain Planet and his green gang have bought their super-righteous brand of eco-friendliness to save our world. Alan green fills up with lead-free petrol and tracks down the Planeteers…

Mindscap
£10.99 cass, £15.99 disk

For those totally un-'right on' drongos who haven't been following the cartoon capers of David Ike and His Fabulously Turquoise Flying Suits... sorry, I mean Captain Planet and the Planeteers, it features a team of environmentally sound, super-hard superheroes.

Set in a future age, the Earth's in serious danger of being destroyed by the activities of Hoggish Greedly, mad scientist Dr Blight and aptly named Verminous Skumm (now there's a bunch of dodgy-sounding dudes). These wicked types are foolishly ignoring the cries of a dying planet in their relentless pursuit of wealth.

As we all know, the Cap'n and his band of environmental warriors are constantly fighting mans' destruction of the natural world. All those money-grabbing industrialists have got a new force to consider as this right-on bunch of heroes smash their schemes. As if global warming, the depletion of the ozone layer, pollution and so forth aren't enough!

THE HUNKY CAP

In this shoot-'em-up you control the hunky Captain Planet himself (unlike other versions of the game, in which you control all the characters in a platform romp). He controls all the forces of nature in his battle: Earth. Fire, Air, Water and Heart. Er, well actually he shoots twinkly stuff at the baddies. He brings relief to the rain forests, aid to the animals, sanctuary to the seas and peace to the planet (hoorah!).

He begins the game flying through space (as these superheroes invariably end up doing). As he tears forward to infinity, he has to dodge oncoming stars (which splat him into oblivion on impact - no surprise there) and grab clocks which give him extra time to rescue the world. This is just an introduction to the real assault on the villains. Once splattered on an approaching star, he takes his time bonus and returns to Earth.

PRINCE

First off there's evil profiteer Sly Sludge to deal with. Known as the prince of pollution, he plans to destroy the protective atmosphere surrounding the Earth with his CFC-loaded missiles and ozone-unfriendly balloons. Why? So he can turn the whole planet into a holiday resort ('cause it'll be so hot)! Cor blimey, the lengths some people go!

Capn Planet's got to fly along collecting the balloons, being careful not to shoot them (else the harmful gas will escape) and dodging rockets and other flashes that scream past. With dramatic explosions on screen (producing great showers of love hearts all over the place), stem parallax-scrolling by and all the other action, it's a scene of true psychedelic splendour (wow maaan!), enough to touch even the most environmentally unsound among us.

After a few hundred games (yep, it's not easy), you'll manage to defeat Sludge himself and deactivate the gigantic CFC warhead, but it's a painfully frustrating process getting this far. The amount of baddies is quite overwhelming - you've never seen so many little sprites out for your blood - and they move fast, too. Exhausting stuff... but it'll keep you trying until the wicked Sly Sludge has been defeated and the atmosphere saved.

PLUNDER, SLUDGE AND BLIGHT

Once Cap's sorted this little problem out, he finds himself floating around in space again. Then there's other battles of conscience to fight. Looten Plunder (great name!) is planning to capture dolphins. Why? To use them in his deniable experimentation, that's why. He's going to poison them with vast amounts of oil waste!

The task's much the same sort of thing as dealing with Mr Sludge, but underwater. The barrage of enemy assault is just as fierce, but this time it's sea urchins and such like all over the screen, and the backgrounds made up of little upward-scrolling bubbles (cute, eh?).

The Captain's next goodly mission is to put a spanner in the works of dastardly Dr Blight. He's planning to burn down a massive area of rain forest. Why? (You knew he was going to say that, didn't you? - Prod Ed). To go and build a dirty greet Plutonium mine there. And you know what they make with Plutonium. Yes, those nasty nuclear bomb things.

To carry out this operation, Dr Blight's using aeroplanes to drop great fire bombs on the forest in question. If the destruction of trees isn't enough, think of all the animals in the area getting burned to death! You've really got you're work cut out in this game, haven 't you?!

I'm not sure Captain Planet is going to convert us all into green-minded warriors of mother nature, but it's a damn good genre.

Uncompromisingly pretty and dangerously fast, it'll have you at it for ages (oo-er). It's similar to some of Mindscape's previous offerings (is this an echo-logical trend? haw haw), but I doubt fans of fast and forms action will be disappointed.

ALAN [88%]

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Wow man! My Speccy'e exploded and the colours have gone mad. No, hold on. Am I playing the Amiga version? Nope, It's definitely the Spectrum and it's terrific! Anyone who's played games like Extreme and Dan Dare 3 will know what to expect from Captain Planet as it's been programmed by the same team. The trouble with Extreme was that the graphics were amazing but the game was only a couple of levels long! Every Captain Planet sprite and background is packed to bursting point with colours and there's no clash to make things look untidy. Unfortunately the amount of things going on make it very difficult to keep up with the action, especially when there are rockets firing all over the shop. It's a bit like Bonfire tight around Ludlow! This is one game that even the slickest of gamesplayers won't complete in a hurry. Having a storyline covering green issues is a great idea and coupled with the slick presentation and graphics is a thoroughly enjoyable blast.
NICK [87%]

REVIEW BY: Alan Green, Nick Roberts

Blurb: TEN 'RIGHT ON' THINGS TO DO 1. If you've mistakenly bought other Speccy 'mags', don't trash 'em. Cut them into little squares, put them on a nail in the wall of 'the smallest room' and use them when nature calls! 2. Paint everything in your bedroom green - even yourself. You won't be able to find a ****ing thing but you'll feel very green. 3. If you use tea bags, cut the top off old ones and empty out the soggy tea leaves. Then fill them with fallen flower petals, staple the top together and put them in your underwear drawer to keep everything smelling of roses - literally! 4. Don't use mild green F***y L*q**d or P**m***v* to blow soap bubbles, use plain water instead. You won't get many bubbles but you'll have a damn good blow (missus)! 5. Buy the Captain Planet videos and comics to swot up on the latest eco news. They're a jolly wheeze and when you're bored of them you can make a small portable WC with them. 6. Don't tie parcels with lots of string. Just use one short piece of elastic: It'll help develop your muscles and the parcel can be opened with remarkable speed and ease. 7. Instead of pampering to the whims of fashion, learn a little origami and use an old newspaper to make a distinctive titfer (hat)! 8. Preserve the peat bogs in East Anglia. Rather than Growbags and such like, put horse manure in plastic bags and spread dung over you flowerbeds. Then hope your neighbours don't complain about the smell of sh-(snip!-Ed). 9. Instead of putting your rubbish out for the binmen to collect or dropping it in the local tip, gather it into a large skip, take a trip to the Beeb studio and dump it over the Blue Peter team. This won't make any difference to the environment but it'll give a lot of people a good laff. 10. If you see any litter in the street, pick it up. You never know, that small piece of paper might be a fiver.

Mindscape
£10.99 cassette/£15.99 disk
0444 831545
Reviewer: Jon Pillar

The power is yours! Mindscape claim that by buying Captain Planet, "you too can help save our planet." Don't be fooled Spec-chums - it's the biggest con since Tall-Boy Binks got three years for cat- burglary.

Yup, it's time for another good old rant. The Captain Planet TV cartoon-with-a-conscience reaped no end of awards for bringing green issues to the fore. Each week the Cap, aided by his pre-teen Planeteers and a whole fleet of registered trademarks, would defeat a nasty eco-villain while giving a handy environmental tip. Everything from home recycling to the depletion of the rain forests was covered in an entertaining and jolly informative manner. It was all very neat and very clever. Tragically, the game is a very different bunch of coconuts. True enough, it makes a big show of being environmentally concerned, with green slogans splashed over the box and throughout the manual. Indeed, one of tie main selling points is that it contains special environmental hints. But it's all codswallop - the game is about as much use to the environment as a polysterene cup bonfire. Its "special environmental hints" (including such classics as "use both sides of scrap paper," "take time to put rubbish lying on the ground into rubbish bins," and "use daylight wherever possible - it's free and does not pollute") are blindingly obvious and barely worth the paper they're printed on. Which is another thing - the game comes in a shiny cardboard box with a twenty-two page manual, and none of is recycled. Blimey. (It's no good Spec-chums - I'm going to have to go for a walk and calm down before I tell you about the game itself. See you in a bit).

A BIT LATER...

(Deep breath). Right That's better. Onto Captain Planet the game. First impressions are promising - the graphics are large, swift and colourful without being confused. There's a good spread of enemies, some nice scenery, and the whole thing runs virtually without colour clash. Gameplay is a cross between Dan Dare 3 and a low-grade Turrican, with Cap whizzing through space collecting time bonuses before landing on a horizantally-scrolling shoot-'em-up sort of planet. The tie-in to the cartoon characters is about average (Cap clears a way through each level for the various Planeteers to follow) and, unsurprisingly, it's the villains who get the best coverage. For example, in Level One you face Sly Sludge, who is attempting to destroy the ozone layer in order to boost the profits from his seaside hotel chain (the chump). Your mission is to penetrate his ground defences and wreck the factory that's producing these diabolical CFC rockets. Al good dirty fun and at first sight another hit from the programmers of SmashTV. It's when you actually start playing that the faults emerge.

The trouble is, the game is practically unplayable. It's not the amount of mutant minions that cause the problem, but the end-of-level villains themselves - they're invincible. I played the game fifteen times on the trot, got to the big villain and each time lost all my lives immediately. Even loaded up with all the smart bombs I could find, I just couldn't beat him. Convinced it was something more than my natural gamesplaying talents at fault (cough), I invited the rest of the YS crew to give it a try. Sure enough, nobody else could finish the first level either.

To put it bluntly, Captain Planet is a bit of a disaster. It looks great, but it's stoopidly difficult. Based on what happened here in the office, I'd say that the average gamesplayer wouldn't even get to see two-thirds of the game, which hardly makes it value for money. Simply put, it's not one to snap up from the shelves.

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REVIEW BY: Jon Pillar

Blurb: BLIM! Captain Planet's motto is "Green Is Good". If you take the initials of the phrase you get the word "gig".

Blurb: FIVE PLANET FACTS The Earth is not a sphere, but a geoid. This is a word used solely by geography teachers in order to catch people out. As seen from space, two-thirds of the Earth's surface is water. However, no-one has been able to satisfactorily explain why it doesn't spill. The Earth was created on February 5th 1874 by a highly-paid gang of Scottish construction workers. History was later invented to avoid embarrassment. The term "to be green" was first coined to describe something that was bluish-yellow. It was not applied to environmental matters until someone noticed a plant. A top NASA scientist once calculated there were twenty-seven planets in our solar system. Fortunately for everybody concerned she then had a cup of strong black coffee and tried again.

Label: Mindscape
Memory: 48K/128K
Price: £11.99 Tape
Reviewer: Garth Sumpter

He's here and he's the saviour of the world. He's Captain Planet and he won't stand for any rubbish! And neither will any of the Crew here. We're all further out of this world than ol' Captain Chairleg will ever be.

Yes, it's Captain Planet's lot in life to try to defeat those dirty dastards of the environment. Sly Sludge, Looten Plunder and the notorious Dr Blight (who used to kick footballs into my mum roses and then let ME take all the blame) At his disposal (arf!) are the powers of earth, fire, wind, water and heart.

Play begins with the Captain flying through a starfield where by avoiding the stars and flying into the clocks he picks up a time bonus which is added to the time he begins with at the beginning of the game proper. This ticks down as he battles his way through the level and once his meter runs out, he's recycled back to the start.

Flying and running (using no high octane petrols), from left to right, Captain Planet has his own method of making the environment clean and involves scooting along and Mr Sheening everything in sight. In level one, Sly Sludge is found using CFC balloons and rockets to destroy the earth's protective ozone layer. He plans to turn the whole planet into a huge sun resort so that he can build lots of hotels and beaches. This sounds very much like the Spanish Tourist Board to me and as such, the Captain has my complete approval.

To get to the end of the level in order to confront the first of the three enemies of the environment, Captain Planet must cleanse everything that attacks him, collecting bonus points for collecting CFC balloons and destroying missile bases. Further levels have Looten Plunder stealing all the world dolphins for his evil experiment (booo!), and Dr Bight setting fire to the rain forests in order to take up plutonium mining.

The game is far too simplistic. Unfortunately, earth, wind, fire and water power are all combined into a shower of stars that are shot towards the enemy. Lightning icons that are picked up work like a smart bomb and cleanse everything on screen.

The effect of this? What you're left with once you've taken the licence away is a remarkably average shoot 'em up, that carries little excitement and dulls very quickly. Although quite fast and with reasonable graphics, Captain Planet, the game that was expected as being clean, green and mean has turned out to be not much better than the rubbish that Captain Planet has to handle every day.

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ALAN:
Haa! We're all environmentally sound here. I actually quite liked the game and have to disagree with the old task master. It's an average game but quite a pleasant blast.

REVIEW BY: Garth Sumpter

Blurb: HOW TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT Even around the house you can help to protect your environment with a little though: 1) Use cloth towels instead of paper ones - using paper ones looses trees! 2) Don't waste energy! Keep doors and windows closed when it's cold. 3) Ask your teacher to set up a recycling centre at school. 4) Make you mum and dad convert the car to unleaded. Even better, when they're not in, swap the family car for a set of bicycles. They'll thank you (er, eventually). 5) Don't buy anything made from ivory, tortoise shell, coral, reptile skin or animal fur (except domestic animals that give wool and leather of course). 6) Don't throw old paper and bottles away. 7) Build your own wildlife sanctuary. This isn't too difficult. You could convert your sister's bedroom into a frog reserve.