Producer: Code Masters
Retail Price: £1.99
Author: Philip and Andrew Oliver

Professor Twilight, the proud owner of Nightmare Mansion, has offered a reward for the eradication of the stately home's ghosts and ghoulies. Chuck Studbuckle took up the challenge, but after five days inside the horrid house he still has not returned. As his brother, it's your duty to go and rescue him.

In order to make a room to room search, you can jump up and down, move to the left and right and climb walls. The Mansion's lifts move between floors and are activated by touching flashing objects; including a crystal ball, goblet, necklace and document. This action also increases your score, as displayed at the bottom right of the screen, but beware - the objects are not necessarily close to the lifts which they control. A map of Nightmare Mansion is called up to verify your present position.

Vampires, hands, skulls, and slime materialise to thwart you as you progress. When close, these cause the Terrometer reading to increase and your Macho Energy level to fall. These creatures can be avoided, but only with difficulty and a great drain on energy. Your remaining reserves are shown on the left hand side of the screen, and are replenished by drinking the frothing beakers of magic potion which are found about the house.

Your only weapon is a sub-compact anti-matter Phantom splatterer, one shot from which temporarily returns demons to their astral plane. Some creatures are indestructible, but those which are destroyed earn more valuable points.

The program features an unusual two player mode. Unlike other two player games, Ghost Hunters does not place the participants in competition or allow them to control two separate characters. Instead, One player controls the character's movement while the other operates the weapon.

COMMENTS

Control keys: definable; Up, Down, Left, Right, Fire
Joystick: Kempston, Cursor, Interface 2
Use of colour: you can choose one of two colours and black
Graphics: atmospheric, well detailed and realistically animated
Sound: excellent title music and reasonable FX
Skill levels: one

Now this is interesting - all the fun of a platform/exploration game combined with the joy of killing for a second player. Played alone, Ghost Hunters can get rather monotonous, especially as there isn't that much to look at. However, if you tackle the game with two players it can really be most enjoyable. Solving the tasks isn't too difficult, but it should keep you playing for long enough to get your money's worth.
RICKY

The loading screen and title music set the scene perfectly for what is a very atmospheric game. The graphics are superb, with the screen containing a lot of characters and furniture - all of them detailed and recognisable. Ghost Hunters is fiendishly addictive, so make sure you have a good few hours to spare before loading it up. The Terrometer and Macho meter work well together and are very useful. I loved every minute of this, it's a giveaway at £1.99.
PAUL

I have a lot of respect for Code Masters, they have avoided releasing the sort of rubbish that emanates from other Budget Houses. The atmospheric graphics hold together well despite lacking colour, and the characters move realistically. Roaming the haunted house becomes absorbing once the control system has been mastered, and the two player mode makes it slightly easier as you don't have to concentrate both on running around and shooting up the ghoulies. The appeal may be short-lived however, as Ghost Hunters isn't that big a game and completion should be easy.
BEN

Code Masters
£1.99

Who ya gonna call? Ghost Hunters! Doesn't have quite the same ring, does it? Never mind, 'cos this rather weird game from Code Masers doesn't resemble that celebrated original at all. What seems at first sight to be a dull platform game turns out to be an unusual and tricky test of skill best played by two - and that's a shock in itself.

You're Hunk Studbuckle, which sounds more like a medical condition than a name, but so it goes. Your brother is trapped in Nightmare Mansion, in a maze of passages and rooms surrounded by hordes of undead ghouls and zombies. Unless you save him, he won't have a ghost of a chance. Serves him right, if you ask me, but you're a hero, so off you go to do your stuff and almost certainty get killed yourself. What a mollusc.

As you walk around the 21 screens. you aim to pick up various flashing goodies which activate hits in other parts of the maze. As the undead rise from the ground, your Terrometer goes haywire, and this depletes your Macho Energy (don't push me!) until you pop your clogs. This is where the two-player option comes in useful. Playing by yourself, you control Hunk with your joystick as normal. Keeping fire pressed down activates your gun sights and you can then zap all the ghouls, vampires and what not with your thermonuclear phantom blaster. It's all a bit of a rush, though, as you can't move Hunk and fire your blaster at the same time. But with two players you can! It's not often that you get a Speccy game for two with both people on the same side, so it makes a change.

Even with two of you blasting the ghosts in the ghoulies you'll need the beakers of energy that lie about here and there. And watch out for those spidery lifts that often seem like the only way to get up to a particularly inaccessible ledge - Hunk (being a bit wet) is awesomely afraid of em! EEK!

Graphics are only single-coloured (though you can change the colour from red to blue - gasp), but quite effective in a fussy sort of way. My fave nasties are definitely the skulls, which look remarkably like Neil Kinnock, even down to the way they never stop talking. There's even digitised speech to keep you occupied. Ghost Hunters is hardly a huge step forward in Speccy programming, but it's a reasonable cheapie and worth its modest price.

Label: Code Masters
Author: Philip and Andrew Oliver
Price: £2.99
Joystick: various
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: John Gilbert

This is Ghost Hunters, where Rambo meets Dracula in a gruesome follow-up to Vampire, Code Masters' early, and actually pretty successful game.

Three days ago Professor Twilight, who owns Nightmare Mansion, offered your twin brother Chuck Studbuckle a substantial reward to rid his house of ghosts, ghouls and been heard of since and it's your duty, as big brother Hunk, to go look for him.

At the start of the game, after a voice-synthesised 'Ghost Busters' - sorry 'Hunters' - you've got a choice of setting all characters and backgrounds in red or blue, depending on how good your telly's definition is, and whether you prefer blood or light. Authors Philip and Andrew Oliver have taken no chances with colour clash.

Hunk may be a muscle man, armed with a machine gun, but the terror meter at the bottom of the screen fills with blood as he bumps into monster upon monster until, when he's petrified, he dies. His strength is shown on the macho meter which decreases as he fires his gun and fights monsters. Strength can be replenished by drinking from bubbling cauldrons, yak.

There are several gothic stereotyped monsters which inhabit the 13 - at least I counted 13 - floors in the house. The plan of rooms etc is a sort of flattened version of the castle in Cauldron. There are bats which change into cloak- spreading vampires, zombies with arms outstretched, spiders which bounce down from their webs on the ceiling and crawly sneekers which slime over the floor.

All of them can be killed by pressing Fire and moving your gun's cross-hair over them.

You'll find your baby brother somewhere near the top of the mansion, but to get there you must use the lifts which are activated by picking up objects such as goblets of blood and scripts.

It's an intriguing dodge, collect, and climb game, a low-rent, very viable alternative to Cauldron.

I could even just about put up with those dread-awful horror cliches.

BUDGET GAMES ARE ACCOUNTING FOR MORE SALES THAN EVER. ZX LOOKS AT THE LATEST RELEASES.

If the computer press is anything to go by, budget software is taking over the world. Nobody is buying full-priced games apparently (unless they're conversions of coin-op titles), and certainly Mastertronic, if they're not taking over the world, are taking over Melbourne House.

There are a number of software houses competing for the budget market but for the most part it's a three way fight these days. Mastertronic were the first in the field, closely followed by Firebird's Silver range, and these two have been slogging it out enthusiastically for a while now. Recently though, Code Masters, the label founded by a couple of ex-Mastertronic programmers, has made quite an impact with games such as BMX Simulator and Terra Incognita.

This month we've received some new releases from all three of these companies, giving us a good chance to compare a Super Robin Hood variety of products and take a look at the state of the (budget) art.

CODE MASTERS

It's been a good month for Code Masters, with five of their games arriving for review, and, apart from the unfortunate Brainache (reviewed elsewhere this issue, along with Transmuter) they're all faring quite well. Transmuter is a good version of the old Scramble format, and Ghost Hunters ("featuring voice synthesis") is one of the better platform games to come our way recently. Set in a haunted house, the game sets you the task of rescuing someone who has been trapped within the house. There are all sorts of ghoulish sprites out to do away with you, but fortunately you're armed with a ghost busting rifle which evens the odds somewhat. There's nothing at all original about platform games, but this one seems to have been thought out quite well. You use your rifle by moving a hairpin sight around the screen, but while you're doing this your character is immobilised and this adds an extra little edge to the game since you have to be quick when it comes the choice of whether to use the rifle or just run away.

Super Robin Hood is along similar lines, except that it's Robin Hood helping out Maid Marian in a medieval setting.

Star Runner is from programmer Christian Urquhart (who's just released a full price game on Hewson's label). It's a simple game involving guiding a running figure along a route dotted with fire pits, stumbling blocks, robot guards and the like. The graphics are quite nice, but the game does seem to be a bit too simple to offer a lasting challenge.

Generally speaking, Code Masters' games seem to be a little less formularised than those of Firebird or Mastertronic who at times seem to be a bit over fond of the dated maze game format. This seems to be paying off for the newer Code Masters and they've done well to establish themselves so quickly whilst other budget labels (even from such big names as Elite and U.S. Gold) have failed to make a dent in the apparent Mastertronic/Firebird monopoly. If I had to pick a couple of games from this month's budget releases I'd go for Transmuters and Ghost Hunters. That puts Code Masters ahead this month, with Mastertronic in second place and Firebird in third.

Still, a month is a long time in budget software so perhaps next month things will change (perhaps with the release of Thrust 3 from Firebird...).