Birds and Beans (Atari VCS)

by “bluswimmer”

I'm Literally gonna spill the beans here. You are what looks like a duck minding your own business when suddenly green beans start falling down from the sky. You can sling your whip at the beans to destroy them. Higher beans are worth more points. Armed with this whip you're able to save.... well... er... the ground, which is more important than it sounds. Indy would be proud.

If a bean lands on your head you're squished. If it lands on the ground it makes a hole which your duck shall not pass, even with his passable Balrog impersonation. Stupid Gandalf! Other coloured beans also start to fall from the sky. shooting a white bean fills a hole in and shooting a blue bean fills all the holes in. The difficulty level ranges from zero to four.

 
This is a wonderful puzzler/shooter hybrid that's a great time passer.

Beeware (Atari VCS)

by Fehér János Zoltán

You are a swarm of killer bees, and so you must kill. Luckily for you as soon as the game begins a bunch of panicky looking individuals flood onto the scene, from various doorways, who you only need to touch to send them to an early grave. Well to turn them in an actual grave stone actually.

There are other swarms of killer bees around too which harm you when touched. But you do have an inexplicable secret weapon in the form of red lightning which can fired to wipe them out. You just need to line them up with the arrows on either side of the screen. After so many levels there's a boss in the shape of a giant bee. A few bolts of red lightning kills him and that's the end of the game.

 

It's quite fun while it lasts but a bit on the short side.

Sword of Surtr (Atari VCS)

by Jeff Stermer

This reminds me of the classic Adventure with a viking theme and better graphics. Rather than a square block you play Haldor the viking. He can choose either a bow or a sword from his crib and then go explore the impressive thirty plus flick screen landscape looking for The Sword of Sutr to complete his adventure.

Objects can be found such as boots, a horn, a key, armour, gems and gold. Foes out for blood range from ravens and wolves to viking berserkers and spirits. There's a Dragon boat for sailing but beware of storms and sea serpents. Some friendly faces also populate the land namely a priest, a wanderer, a merchant and dwarves, along with harmless bunnies, this isn't a Monty Python movie, and sheep, sadly neither Shaun nor Timmy.

 

Each screen looks unique and there's enough in this game to keep any adventurer happy and then some.

Plague (Atari VCS)

by Fehér János Zoltán

You’re a guy wearing a cloak and top hat traversing a bleak and barren landscape of black blocks, bushes and pits everywhere. So many that you start to think you're playing an even duller version of E.T. But it's not all doom and gloom. Well it is but that's just the atmosphere of the game. It's a typical platformer with shiny stuff to collect and a surprising array of creepy black thingies, all out to get you.

Some areas are in the dark and only the torch light around you reveals what's there. You have an energy bar and only get one life, but you can continue from the screen you inevitably fell down a pit on. Messages like 'No Hope', 'No Cure', can be seen along the way, just to cheer you up.

Quite a stylish game that plays very well once you get the hang of it.

Balloon Trip (Atari VCS)

by “bluswimmer”

Because you wear a funny hat when you flap your arms you can fly. You love green balloons so you set out to collect a bunch. You must avoid what look like low flying satellites or high flying sea mines. Whatever they are, they kill. Fly guy might go high but he's no tough guy. A satellite, or nasty fish bite, and it's sweet dreams fella, and goodnight.

 

Tapping fire flaps your arms and you can also drift left and right. You gain points for flying and collecting balloons which fill a meter. But even after scoring over a thousand points I never filled it up to see what happens. At 200 points the game gets faster. You can also start at a later level, 0-easy to 4-hard (faster, more killing stuff).
 

This is a fabulous game that would be great for any high score competition.

Spies in the Night (Atari VCS)

by Jared Gray West

You play a spy who must sneak behind a dilapidated wall, across several screens, to a detonator which will blow up the lighthouse whose rotating lamp can reveal your position and get you machine gunned to pieces. You must time your runs and hide behind the wall sections when the light shines your way. Sometimes the wall fragments are so low that you need to duck down behind them to avoid the fatal light.

You make Chuck Norris look like the sugar plum fairy as you can somehow survive being machine gunned to pieces several times. However, your mission is time sensitive so if you dilly dally around time will run out and the mission will fail. Further missions add other hazards, like people trying to blow your head off, just to keep your job interesting.

This is my favourite Atari VCS homebrew game I've played in 2018.

The Darkness of Raven Wood (BBC Micro)
by John Blythe

The Darkness of Raven Wood is a horror themed graphical text adventure (Aka. Interactive Fiction) with an impressive number of illustrated locations.

Set in 1862. You receive a letter from your childhood friend Raynard who now lives in Raven Wood a neighboring village to the one you both grew up in. The new head of Raven Wood manor, Lord Elgan Wood, has recently arrived to carry on his dead father's legacy. Since his arrival strange things have been happening.

Several children and a priest have gone missing. Strange creatures and a snow storm have beset the village. Raynard’s last message pleaded with you to return and help him. When you arrive snow is falling in July, the villagers are staying indoors and Raynard is nowhere to be seen.

 

As with most text adventures to play it you need to know various commands to travel around, manipulate objects and interact with people in the game world. This game uses the compass directions, UP, DOWN, IN and OUT for movement. You can USE, EXAMINE, GET, TAKE and DROP items. INV brings up your inventory. SAVE unsurprisingly saves your game, but there's only one save file you can use. You can also TALK to people. The parsers vocabulary is much larger than this but finding the commands you need to use is part of the fun.

The Initial title screen has two options (1) Instructions and (2) Play the game. On pressing (2) a secondary title screen appears with two more options to either (1) Play a new game or (2) Load a saved game. I'm not sure why there wasn't just a single title screen with the three options together. Anyway, on pressing (1) the game does actually begin.

You start off outside The Bleeding Wolf Tavern, Not quite The Slaughtered Lamb but it might as well be. It's snowing and your carriage is there but the driver's done a runner. Cheers pal.

You can go in the tavern where there's a barman, villagers and beer. On attempting to chat with people it seems you're better off interacting with your beer rather than anything human.

 

I left the tavern and ventured east where there was a village square containing a fountain and an equally talkative stranger. The square was a crossroads. After examining a few things I decided to go South

Another crossroads on a trail. A graveyard west, the trail continuing south and a forest east. I had to check out the graveyard. Turned out it was an abandoned church with a creepy guest lumbering around outside. I decided not to hang around for dinner and went back east.

I went further south along the trail and eventually somehow ended up in a dark forest where some wolves were sniffing the air. I waited for them to go away. Turns out I'm not exactly Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer, and ultimately paid the price. So this game plays just like all those fabulous text adventures I played aeons ago. A fantastic nostalgia fix.

There is a slight pause when you move from one location to the next but it's not surprising when you learn that the game has 50+ locations all with illustrations and the code fits into just one SSD file. This is thanks to some incredible compression and decompression of the illustrations by Lurkio and Tricky.

 

The illustrations themselves are absolutely gorgeous. Photoshop with a tablet was used to create them. They were then converted to BBC format with Image2BBC. In some places the same illustrations were used. Not something I'm a big fan of even if it is supposed to be a maze that's easy to get lost in.

Location descriptions are excellent giving the adventure a solid, creepy, hammer horror style atmosphere. There is no music or sound effects which is not exactly shocking for this genre. The silence actually lends itself to the this type of game. Things are even more spooky when all you can hear is the sound of the computer loading in data.

The atmosphere generated by the location descriptions and back story is excellent. The quality of the illustrations is top class and it’s great that every location in the game has one. The characters in the game are not quite as alive and interactive as say ‘The Hobbit’ and those duplicate location illustrations are a personal bugbear that I just can’t shake.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable old style text adventure with remarkable illustrations, to accompany the text, both in quality and quantity. Recommended, especially for lovers of interactive fiction.

Dungeon Raiders (ZX Spectrum)

by Andy McDermott (Payndz)

Dungeons Raiders is a treasure collect 'em up maze game with a unique concept, written in AGD by the creator of CyberMania, Sorceress and Sorceress 2: The Mystic Forest. In fact this is the third game in the saga of the witches and the Dark Lord after the Sorceress games.

For years the necromancer Skulvort has commanded his minions to loot the land surrounding his dungeon fortress. Four adventurers plan to infiltrate the fortress, claim the loot back and destroy Skulvort once and for all.

Three of the adventurers, one of which looks very familiar, set off for the dungeons whilst a fourth, a powerful wizard named Zpectru, uses his magic from afar to guide the adventurers in their quest for treasure and protect them from the underground minions within the fortress.

You play the part of Zpectru the wizard and control the Eye of Force, which is a fancy, fantasy name for a crosshair. If you move it to a point in the maze and press fire your fellow trio of adventurers will head towards that spot. Any minions that you pass the crosshair over will either be destroyed or temporarily frozen. Even the destroyed minions waste little time in regenerating so chaos ensues on every level of the game.

From the title screen you just press enter to start. Controls for the Eye of Force are up (Q), down (A), left (O), right (O) and fire (Space). There are twenty levels to pillage and 60 items of treasure over all the levels in total. Grabbing all three treasures on a single level will lead you to the next. Once all 60 are collected the Necromancer will be defeated.

Your fellow adventurer good guys are always yellow in colour. But even so, keeping track of the number of different characters on screen may be a little overwhelming for some. This may even be the Lunar Jetman of homebrew games. For me it was a wonderful challenge to keep my eyes on the good guys, the bad guys, the traps and the treasure. There's a lot going on but if there wasn't the game would be far too easy.

Your colleagues are sometimes a bit dumb in not using the quickest or even the correct path to a treasure you may have highlighted. For me this added to the games charm and character. I was constantly shouting and cursing at the idiots as they bungled around each level. Failure was always their stupid fault. However, I was genuinely gutted every time one of them kicked the bucket leading to the appearance of a little tombstone and me getting more than a little game rage. What calmed me down a bit and makes no sense at all is that any adventurer missing from the trio is resurrected at the beginning of each level. Happy days!!

The graphics are similar to the developers previous efforts. I particularly like the characters for both the adventurers and the minions in this one. The audio is noisy as hell, especially on the title screen, and more than a little grating, but it does add to the whole hectic atmosphere of the game.

The Eye of Force mechanic is a brave departure from the common place mechanics of the developers previous efforts and I'm very happy to report that it works extremely well. The gameplay is intense and has a proper 1980’s arcade game feel to it, which I love. The only down side is that "music" is actually enough to drive anyone insane in the membrane, insane in the brain.

This is one of my favourite ZX Spectrum homebrew games to appear in 2018. It really harks back to the old days of the pure arcade adrenaline rush I used to experience back in the early 80’s, only this time at home on my living room sofa.

Tank 1990 (ZX Spectrum)
by "Dwa83"

Tank 1990 is based on a number of games released mainly by Namco between 1980 and 1991, namely Tank Battalion (1980), Battle City (1985) and Tank Force (1991), amongst others. The aim of the game is always the same for all versions of which there are many for the arcade and nearly every make and model of home computer and home console imaginable, including a previous ZX Spectrum version. The previous version of the same name, Tank 1990, was published in 1990 by Chinese company Yanshan Software.

You control a tank on a map of varying terrain. Enemy tanks appear on the map and must be destroyed before they destroy you or your Imperial Eagle which is bricked in at the bottom centre of the map. If this is lost it's game over. After clearing twenty tanks you move onto the next map until you reach map 36 where victory means you win the game.

 

The title screen is a bit mysterious, it just says Tank 1990 in bricks and little else. There is no indication of what to press to start the game or what the control keys are. You press enter to start and this is also fire. Directional controls are Up (W), Down (S), Left (A), Right (D), and these cannot be changed.

 

Each map contains brick walls that can be destroyed by having either the player's tank or an enemy tank shoot at them, steel walls that cannot be destroyed or passed, bushes that provide camouflage, ice which gives your tank a sudden bout on unwanted inertia and water which cannot be crossed.

Flashing tanks drop power ups at a random place on the map once they are destroyed. A grenade acts like a smart bomb and destroys all enemy tanks. A helmet makes the tank invulnerable for a short time. A tank gives you an extra tank. A clock freezes the enemy tanks for a short time. The tanks move around fairly smoothly and the gameplay is pretty much fine. But many things are lacking. There are only ever three active enemy tanks. They are all white. They only ever require one hit to destroy. There's no points scoring at all, no multiplayer and no terrain editor. There are no game modes. The level number is not shown and the star and shovel power ups are missing. Sometimes power ups land on terrain which cannot be accessed or destroyed so you cannot collect it.

Instead of looping after completing level 36 this game has a victory screen. Having an actual end game is probably a good thing. The graphics whilst nothing special do the job. Audio is surprisingly lacking for a 128K game. There is an older and better version of this game called Battle City 128K. It was first created by Epsilon in 1996 but not released until it was recovered and improved in 2016. It has multiplayer, a map editor and all the power ups from the original. I'm surprised and disappointed that this newer version is not an improvement over Battle City 128K but actually inferior to it.

The game is as simple and playable as the original Namco tank games. It has decent enemy tank AI and movement, no colour clash on any terrain and an end game after the last map rather than a loop back to the beginning again. But it has a number of issues. There's a lack of info on the title screen, only one set of keyboard controls and power ups which are impossible to collect due to the type of terrain they appear on top of. There are features in the original game and also a previous Spectrum version which are sadly lacking in this Tank 1990.

Unfortunately this is a below average game that with a bit more polish, in areas where it is found to be lacking, could have been great or at least better than the previous incarnation for the Spectrum.

Parachute (ZX Spectrum)
by Miguel Ángel Tejedor (aka Miguetelo)

Parachute is a conversion of the game of the same name released by Homevision for the Atari 2600 video games console back in 1983. It was Miguetelo's entry into the ZX-DEV’17 Conversions competition.

You are a paratrooper and your mission is to descend from the sky, evading numerous patrols of enemy helicopters, aeroplanes, birds, balloons and other obstacles, to reach your base on the ground. Sometimes you must pass through several screens in the air in order to reach the ground level base screen. If you bump into an obstacle your parachute splits and you plummet to your death. Fortunately you are somehow related to felines and therefore get nine lives to play with. The title screen gives the usual options of keyboard (QAOP), Kempston joystick or Sinclair joystick, but there is no redefine keys option.

Once the game starts a small aeroplane flies along the top of the screen and your paratrooper leaps out of it. He floats down the screen and will do so at a greater speed should you press the descend button. This action uses up some of your precious limited fuel supply so you must use it sparingly, at the right moments. Fortunately You can collect extra fuel canisters on the way down. This fuel mechanic is not in the original game.

The developer has added platforms, which you can land and rest on, as well as mazes to the screens in this conversion which really add to the game’s depth. It feels like a completely different game to the original at this point and is a lot more complex with more varied screens, which gives them more of an identity. There’s great variety with enemies consisting of floating bubbles, guided missiles, balloons, patrolling soldiers and even spikes to contend with.

There are thirty-five screens in all. The initial screen has a base at the bottom of it but later it's two, three or four screens in the air before you reach a screen with the base on. Sometimes a soldier at the base level needs to be avoided. Landing on him highlights another, slightly annoying, difference between this and the original in that when you die, rather than just flashing and carrying on down you are taken back to the top of the first screen and have to perform the jump all over again.

The original game reminded me a little of crossing the road in Frogger, only backwards. More often than not the hazards you needed to avoid were almost changed together, rather like Frogger traffic, with one convenient gap in the chain that you could take advantage of and squeeze through. This conversion is similar but on later levels it reminds me more of Lunar Lander with it's maze like caverns that you need to negotiate. It's quite a difficult game, not because it speeds up and adds more enemies like the original, but because more complex screens are thrown at the player. I'm not sure this conversion does even speed up. The fuel mechanic balances out the difficulty level very well.

The graphics are quite pretty and colourful and everything is recognisable as to what it is supposed to be. The original was famous for being one of the few Atari 2600 games to contain in game music and this conversion doesn't disappoint. There are four excellent AY tunes for the in game music which alternate for each level. The title screen music has a fifth excellent tune.

There is a slight flaw in the scoring system as you score points just for flying. There is no time limit and fuel is not used when pressing the ascend key so you could just clock up your score indefinitely. However, the challenge of the game is to see the next screen until eventually you get to the 35th, and this need is so strong that I figure there won't be anyone playing this game solely to achieve a high score.

I liked the additional maze like screens which did not feature in the original, the in game music which is nothing short of fantastic and a fuel mechanic which works well in balancing out the games difficulty level. I wasn't so keen on having to start again from the top screen when you die and also scoring points just for being in mid air was a bit weird.

All in all it's a highly enjoyable conversion which is a massive improvement over the Atari version, whilst retaining the simple playability of its inspiration, and giving us some awesome AY chiptune music to listen to as we hurtle towards the planets surface.

Quahappy (ZX Spectrum)
by Jamie Grilo

In a departure from his previous outings the latest game from prolithic developer Jaime Grilo is a creepy, top down, exploration style affair, created using AGD. If the audio and visuals in this one don't give you the jitters then I'm not sure what will. You have been warned.

After a splendidly spooky looking loading screen by Andy Green you are presented with the title screen and some control options. You can use the keyboard, a Kempston joystick or a Sinclair joystick and if you're not happy with the default keyboard controls, up (Q), down (A), left (O), right (P) and pause game (M), you can always redefine them by pressing 'R'.

You control a disembodied head called Dauntless Andy. I would have preferred Intrepid Andy myself, rolls off the tongue much better, but it is what it is. He's been given this name because his friends have dared him to enter Quahappy Manor and grab all the coins in there and of course he's took the dare on.

This story is passed on to the player in simple terms on the very first screen, which is an area just outside the manor. But once Andy steps foot, or head, in the place, the entrance door slams shut behind him. So he must find a way to unlock it and escape.

Inside the manor you'll find over 50 rooms full of enemies, traps and other objects. In fact almost all the enemies in the game are also disembodied heads too which lends a weird kind of creepiness to the game. Enemy heads patrol up and down, left and right and also bounce diagonally around the each room

There are thirty coins of various currencies hidden around the manor which can be collected, although some, not included in the thirty, are phantom coins which cannot be picked up. Coloured keys (red, magenta, cyan, yellow and green) can be found in difficult to reach places which, when collected, will let you pass through matching coloured doors. To unlock the entrance door and escape Andy must collect the letters of the words 'MAIN DOOR KEY' scattered around the manor.

The status area at the bottom of the screen shows lives remaining, messages, number of coins collected (out of 30), letters of 'MAIN DOOR KEY' collected, score and coloured keys obtained.

Push buttons can also be discovered which trigger certain mechanisms. Other hazards include spikes, presses and laser beams. There's a lot of rooms in the manor which tease the player by showing parts of the current room which they cannot reach unless they travel via a number of other rooms. Most of the rooms appear to be very maze like in construction. It goes without saying that mapping this game out is essential unless you have some sort of mega memory and the fact that you start off with a generous nine lives gives an indication of the games difficulty level. It's not gonna be easy.

The game play is nice and simple and almost always about timing and memory of enemy movement patterns. It reminds me of an old, slightly less creepy Spectrum game called Mutant Monty only with interconnected screens, like Jet Set Willy. All enemies must be avoided as there is no way to destroy them. Maybe they're all ghosts - Yikes!! Graphics are suitably unsettling and effective at making your skin crawl and the in game music is excellent, very eerie.

I like The games simplicity. It's an explorative avoid 'em up and nothing more. The disembodied heads create a creepy atmosphere and the design of the rooms in the manor and how they connect together is excellent. The sound effects are a bit weak compared to everything else in the game. 'Come here, dear!', that just freaks me out each time I see it in a room.

An enjoyable game that's fun to explore and has a fantastically creepy atmosphere. It's a nice change from all the platform games created with AGD. Jaime Grilo has found a winning formula once again. 

Elon M with a Jetpack (ZX Spectrum)
by Rafa Vico

Elon M. with a Jetpack is a new version of the classic ZX Spectrum game which wowed everyone back in 1983, Ultimate Play The Game's Jetpac. It was developed using AGDx.

The idea in this game is the same as the original. Your spaceman, Elon M is stuck on a planet. To escape he must collect and connect together the three sections of his rocket and then fuel it with half a dozen crates of rocket fuel whilst avoiding or blasting the aliens on the planet. Once fully refuelled the spaceman can take off and fly to the next planet where he must blast a new type of alien and refuel to take off again. Alien artifacts and treasures can also be found on each planet.

 

Once the game has loaded you are given Keyboard, Kempston and Sinclair joystick options to choose from. Keyboard controls are fly (Q), left (O), right (P) and fire (Space). On starting the game players of the original will be familiar with the look of it but also notice it's little differences too. The platform graphics look more appealing and the background is no longer just pitch black. It has mountains and clouds which add a sense of depth to proceedings.

 

The three rocket parts are there sitting on the platforms and are dropped in place exactly the same way, but on refuelling, rather than your rocket filling with magenta as you drop fuel loads into it there's a status bar at the top right of the screen which shows how many fuel loads have been added and how many remain. Enemy aliens look and act almost the same as their original counterparts, they even appear in the same levels, meteorites, bouncing fuzzies, wobbling bubbles, guided missiles, etc. Similar looking alien artifacts can be collected as in the original too.

 

Elon's laser is not quite as satisfying and attractive as the originals Defender like laser streams but it has an additional overheating mechanic which adds a strategic element to all the blasting. A coloured laser indicator icon in the top left shows the lasers heat status. When players complete the first level they're in for quite a nice surprise because each level in this version has different looking platforms in a different layout. So a new strategy to navigate around the platforms is required for every level. Also the area where your rocket is located is not always the same. The graphics do their job and the similarities and differences from the original make them interesting. Audio wise there's no music, just a bunch of spot effects for when you collect things or blast enemies, but they're effective enough.

 

Unfortunately the game has a few mildly annoying quirks. Sometimes fuel drops directly into the rocket which I'm sure never happened in the original. Sometimes fuel drops through platforms and there are no pauses between fuel drops so that little bit of suspense, where you have to fight off hordes of aliens whilst waiting, is lost. Laser fire sometimes freezes matrix-style in mid air, like the game code can only cope with a limited number of bullets. Part of me thinks this might be why the laser overheating mechanic was introduced, the other part of me thinks Mr. Anderson is up to his old tricks once again. Also odd graphic fragments get left behind in various areas of the screen. More Matrix shenanigans? But these quirks don't spoil the fun in this enjoyable half nostalgic trip down memory lane.

I enjoyed the varying looks and layouts of the platforms on each level and the enhanced background details. Also the laser overheating mechanic and the fact that the aliens in the game look and act like those in the original but not exactly the same was quite refreshing. However, the laser fire is not as astounding as the original and the mildly annoying bugs are mostly annoying because with a bit more time and care you know they could have been ironed out.

This is a fine version of the original 1983 game. All of the extra features work very well and add to the game. I would have recommended it more highly if it weren't for those meddling kids,..... I mean, mildly annoying kids,..... I mean bugs. But it's still worth a play.

Night Stalker ZX (ZX Spectrum)

by Aleisha Cuff

Night Stalker ZX is a port of Night Stalker, a single-screen maze shooter released in 1982 for the Intellivision video games system, created with AGDx. The original Night Stalker, developed by Steve Montero, was a successful attempt to bring an original arcade style title to the Intellivision system.

In Night Stalker ZX you play as a marooned space soldier trapped inside a hedge maze with a bunch of relentless killer robots, spiders and bats for company. Luckily a gun appears at one of five random locations in the maze and can be used to blast the evil inhabitants, but each gun only has six bullets which once used cause another gun to appear. The only safe place for your space soldier to hang out is a bunker in the middle of the maze. As you progress through the game smarter killer robots start to spawn.

Controls are up (Q), down (A), left (O), right (P) and fire (M or Space). There is also the option to use a Kempston or Sinclair joystick. Lives remaining and score are shown in the top right of the screen. You begin each game with six lives. Each level of the game introduces new, more difficult to despatch killer robots. Levels increase based on your score.

The first level has a grey robot, a spider and a couple of bats. Spiders and bats don't kill you, they just paralyse you temporarily, but this can become a problem if a killer robot is in the vicinity because they too have guns but with unlimited ammo.

Level two is reached at 1000 points and introduces the smarter blue robot. On reaching the next level, at 5000 points, there's an even deadlier red robot, whose bullets can block yours, and any bats shot on this level respawn as grey robots.

Level four arrives on 10,000 points. This number of points also grants you an extra life. The bats are replaced by grey robots from the beginning and a fearsome genius magenta robot comes into play

 

The fifth and final level appears at 50,000 points when the ultimate in robot tech is introduced, an invisible robot which can only be detected by it's gun fire. Definitely not the droid you're looking for.

 

The single maze in the game has quite a few strategic locations where you can ambush your enemies. It's also worth noting that a single bullet can pass through multiple enemies standing in a line.

 

The graphics are Intellivision in style and look great. I Especially like the animation of the players character. The audio pleasingly retains the pulse sound of the original along with various spot effects when you collect the gun, fire it, blow up enemies, etc. There's no in game music but there wasn't in the original and I think it would detract from the whole feel of the game in any case. The free game download comes with a wonderful deluxe PDF manual which gives the low down on the game and also covers the details regarding the original games place in Intellivision history.

Just like the original the gameplay is simple but enthralling. It's addictive, I really wanted to see the invisible robot....eerr.... if you see what I mean. I love this style of graphics and the audio does it's job, not intrusive at all. I think music may have crushed the atmosphere of the game so I'm glad there isn't any. I would have liked a few more different mazes though instead of just the sole original.

This is a perfect rendition of an Intellivision classic for the Spectrum. This is the second Intellivision ZX game by the developer and I really hope she decides to do more. Tron: Deadly Discs next please.

Astrosmash ZX (ZX Spectrum)
by Aleisha Cuff

AstroSmash! ZX is a port of the classic shoot 'em up released in 1981 for the Intellivision video games system, created with AGDx. The Intellivision version was originally intended to be another game mode for Meteor!, an Asteroids clone. Meteor! got cancelled but the game mode, called Avalanche!, survived and gained its own release as AstroSmash!

The Intellivision system was better known for its sports games so this arcade style shooter was a breath of fresh air. It became so popular that in late 1982 it became the cartridge shipped with Intellivision systems.

Your planet is in peril! From above reigns down a nightmare of molten meteors and alien bombardment. Armed only with a fleet of remote controlled laser cannons, you must hold off the attack for as long as you can. In other words you ain't gonna survive this buddy.

AstroSmash ZX is a bit of classic video game mashup of Space Invaders, Asteroids and, to a lesser extent, Missile Command. You have a bunch of laser cannons and you must blast everything that falls out of the sky.

Your cannon can move left (O), right (P), fire (M) and enter hyperspace (Q) landing at a random, hopefully safe, location on the surface. A status bar at the bottom of the screen shows, from left to right, shields remaining, score, cannons remaining and current level. As the game levels increase the enemies get faster and deadlier.

 

Meteorites, which come in a range of shapes, sizes and colours, must be blasted before they reach the surface and, in the ZX version, damage your shield. In the original version there were no shields and upon reaching the surface meteorites would just decrease the players score. This enhanced ZX mechanic gives the game a bit more urgency.

Spinning bombs, which come in two sizes, must also be blasted or they'll destroy the players laser cannon if they reach the surface. Then there's homing missiles which track your movement and, you guessed it, must be blasted, or avoided. Although blasting a homing missile is the better option as it handily restores your shields too.

Beyond level three alien spaceships fly across the screen and start blasting you. Blasting them will give you an extra laser cannon and a whopping 100 points. The graphical style is very close to the original game. There's no music but the spot effects in the AY audio version are very Intellivision in flavour.

 

A mechanic in the original game, which was an original concept in itself at the time, was to have the game not only become more difficult as the levels increased but also to become easier again when laser cannons were lost. I'm not sure this concept has made it into the ZX version or it might just be my almost half century old reflexes playing tricks on me again.

From what I can tell it plays very much like the original. It certainly looks and sounds like an Intellivision game. It has a few improvements over the original and It's quite addictive. I always wanted another try to reach a higher level and beat my high score.

Sometimes blasting is not as responsive as it could be and on a few occasions it didn't respond at all. Yep, sure ain't gonna survive this buddy. I never pressed the Hyperspace button once as it was located well away from all the other controls so I'd have to look away from the screen to find it. When the levels increase the background colours are only either black or blue. The original game had more colours.

The developer has taken a classic Intellivision game, ported it to the Spectrum and improved upon it whilst retaining all the ingredients which made it such a fun game in the first place. Even though it has the odd bug I'd still highly recommend it.