Producer: Terminal
Memory Required: 48K
Retail Price: £6.95
Language: Machine code

This is a game about deranged carpet fitters. The screen depicts the plan of a very large room with several exits. The object is to cover the room with white carpet, of which you have an unlimited stock. The main problems come in the form of your apprentice - who's absolutely nuts and should be locked up - and rival firms of fitters who have also been asked to do the job.

Lying about the room are various useful implements like tacks and cutters and a hammer, as well as the essential key (without which you cannot leave a room). There is also food around, which must be eaten if you aren't to starve to death.

Your apprentice goes about eating all the food and picking up all the useful objects as well as removing your carpet as fast as you lay it. As a target is set and must be reached before you can leave the room, if you've got the key, and score points for squares of carpet laid, you must keep well ahead of the apprentice's depredations. Another problem is that you cannot walk over cleanly laid carpet, so it's easy to get trapped. One way out is to drop two objects if you have them and spoil the square, which lets you out. Alternatively you will have to wait until the idiot catches up and removes a square to let you out.

You will be stopped from laying carpet if you run out of tacks or use up hammers and cutters. Escaping from a room through the correct exit leads you into another room. There are nine in all, each with their own spatial problems and rival carpet fitters.

COMMENTS

Control keys: very badly placed in a straight line - O/P left/right, Q/A down/up, SPACE for drop
Joystick: joystick option mentioned but not stated which
Keyboard play: uncontrollable and terrible keyboard layout
Use of colour: average
Graphics: primitive
Sound: fair, repetitive and unimaginative
Skill levels: 1
Lives: you only die once
Originality: a possibly good idea obscured by a bad game

First glance at the cover and I thought this was going to be a great game - and I was wrong for the second time in one day! it just goes to show how a great looking cover an fool you into buying a game that turns out to be rubbish. This is the sort of game that you might have bought when the Spectrum was first introduced. I hated it.

The idea is certainly an interesting one, and Carpet Capers could have been a winner - except for a number of problems. The graphics are very primitive; you, your apprentice and the rival fitters are tiny squares with an outline of a man in them. They all jigger about the place in an uncontrolled manner, and it takes a long while to figure out what the hell is going on. When you do, you realise it really isn't worth it. I'm astonished that a game that looks like this one should have been released as new these days.

About the only thing written on the cassette inlay that turns out to be true is the warning about TVs interfering and stopping proper loading of the program. It claims (elsewhere) that the graphics are, "Hi-res flicker free graphics" and that the screens are, "FAST machine code action." Well, compiled machine code action maybe - they're certainly not what I would call fast, and no one could claim they were flicker free unless they were blind. The idea behind the game sounds quite good, a sort of updated "Painter" type, but it's hard to enjoy a game that has such poor playability and uncontrollable, poorly designed graphics.

RUGGED GRAPHICS

Memory: 48K
Price; £5.95
Joystick: Programmable

You must be mad to carpet the floors of a local lord's manor, in Carpet Capers for the 48K Spectrum. The lord has also invited your rivals into the house to do as much of your work as possible and so take away money from you.

You score pounds for the amount of carpet you lay, and the number of rivals you carpet. You must also remember not to put carpet up to the doors for as any good fitter knows, you must not tread on newly-laid carpet.

There are nine rooms and it is best to use a joystick, as the action can be hair-raising. Unfortunately the same cannot be said of the graphics, which are amateurishly stiff in movement and are a character square wide.

Full marks, however, can be given for the concept which makes the game addictive, perhaps even playable for more than half-an-hour.

MACHINE: Spectrum 48K
SUPPLIER: Terminal Software
PRICE: £5.95

Carpet Capers is a game about deranged carpet fitters. Or so says the inlay card.

Whether this means that the carpets are deranged or the fitters themselves, I'm not entirely sure. And from the game itself, it's quite hard to tell.

After the weird message at the start of the program, the loading screen appears.

This contains the main title and also a picture of a carpet. I assume it's meant to be a carpet only from the name of the game. In fact, it looks more like a cross between a map of the River Thames and the top of an electric shaver.

And now we get to the bit which I've been putting off for so long - the game itself. Frankly it's not up to much. The idea is that you're supposed to be laying carpets in the Manor. But it appears that the Lord has a bad memory, for there are two other teams there, all willing to do the work. And they don't particularly want you around.

You have to enter nine rooms in turn. These seem to have names very reminiscent of games like Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy. In each, you must collect a box of tacks, a hammer and a pair of cutters to help you do your job. Then, you travel around the screen laying your white carpet. You are competing against the layers of blue and red carpets.

You get paid for each square of carpet laid and each room has a target. When you reach the target for a room, you can then progress to the next. To do this, you must also pick up a key. Then it's just a matter of finding the right door. There are three, usually, so a little experimenting soon pays off.

The graphics here aren't really up to much. The men are all made from only a single character and the carpet is simply blocks of colour.

Control is via a joystick or the keyboard. This is not a game which, if I had bought, I would play very often. If at all.

MAKER: Terminal Software
FORMAT: cassette
PRICE: £5.95

Take a collection of clearly quite deranged carpet layers leaving multi-coloured trails behind them, add a selection of objects to be picked up as you move from room to room and the overall effect of carpet capers is a bit like Painter meets Jet Set Will. Sounds good? It is - eventually.

Initially, though, it's just bloody irritating. The carpet later figures are horrible, flickering stick men, which take a bit of getting used to. And then there's your apprentice, who buzzes around you like a blue-arsed fly, nabbing objects that you're after and often making it impossible to tell exactly where you are. Result: until you get the hang of it, utter confusion.

Once you get going, however, it's completely absorbing. I looked at my watch after a couple of games and was astonished to find that I'd been at it for an hour and a half. The trick is to get the objects you need to keep you going, get a key to let you into the next room, nobble as many other carpet-fitters as possible and lay a quota of carpet without blocking yourself in a corner. All in all, over nine screens just enough tricks to get the old adrenal gland buzzing nicely.

It really makes nifty patterns, too.

MACHINE: Spectrum 48K
CONTROL: Keys, Joystick
FROM: Terminal, £5.95

If you haven't quite got the artistic touch with a brush' to play a Crazy Painter game you could do worse than try your hand at this more robust variation.

Instead of painting you have to lay carpets. This is difficult enough at the best of times, but in Carpet Capers you ace a host of problems besides banging your thumb with a hammer.

The game has nine screens, each one representing a different room to be carpeted and each one presenting particular problems. In the conservatory there are numerous bushes to be avoided. In the billiard room an enormous table blocks your path.

In each room you have a target - in pounds - for the amount of carpet you must lay. You get only £1 for every square foot and penalties are incurred for being too slow.

Scattered around the screen are the various tools you need to do the job: hammers, tacks and cutters. These must be collected before you can start scoring. You must also regularly stop to eat the food and drink the tea which are in the rooms.

The main trouble, though, is that the house is full of rival fitters, all beavering away to cover the same rooms.

To move from room to room you collect the key and find the right exit - but only after reaching your target.

If you carpet yourself into a corner you have to wait for your apprentice to come and rescue you - there's no walking over new carpet.

Carper Capers is frenetic fun but its graphics are disappointing - the figures are small and there are so many rivals about that the screen display is sometimes very confusing.

Particularly annoying, though, is the layout of the keys. What excuse is there for having up and down next to each other? Get a joystick if you want to play this game.

In the sophisticated Spectrum software market it is not often a game populated by unanimated user-defined graphics retains the user's attention for more than a few minutes.

Carpet Capers, billed as a game 'about deranged carpet fitters', does just that. The player rushes round the screen - a joystick is almost essential - lays as much carpet as possible, picks up the key and any tools lying around, and finds the door to the next room which the key unlocks.

To make matters more difficult , your apprentice undoes all the good work, if you let him; other carpet fitters are laying carpet over yours and you cannot tread on your own carpet. There are nine rooms to complete and each one is a challenge.

Produced by Terminal Software, 28 Church Lane, Prestwich, Manchester. Price: £5.95.