{fh200AA00Quickie PD Game Reviews
{fb1000000
by Mike Williams


{fb1FF5555             ZAP

{fb10000FFAuthor{fb1000000 Jonathon Whelan

{fb10000FFPlot{fb1000000 Zap the aliens

{fb10000FFPlayability{fb1000000 The aliens move a lot faster than you do, so you end up not lasting very long. When you do die, it's not always obvious why.

{fb10000FFGraphics{fb1000000 Fast and smooth.

{fb10000FFFeatures{fb1000000 None

{fb10000FFTypical Duration{fb1000000 2 minutes.


{fb1FF5555             3DTANKS
{sg3t
{fb10000FFAuthor{fb1000000 Stuart Cupit & Simon Cruse

{fb10000FFPlot{fb1000000 A three dimensional tank battle, using wire frame 3D shapes. Shoot the tanks before they shoot you.

{fb10000FFPlayability{fb1000000 It plays pretty well. The enemy tanks are pretty mean, so you have to be on your toes defensively.

{fb10000FFGraphics{fb1000000 Smooth fast wire frame graphics

{fb10000FFFeatures{fb1000000 None

{fb10000FFTypical Duration{fb1000000 3 minutes.

{fb1FF5555             3DTETRIS

{fb10000FFAuthor{fb1000000 Dominic Beesley

{fb10000FFPlot{fb1000000 A Tetris variant in three dimensions.

{fb10000FFPlayability{fb1000000 The keys take quite a bit of getting used to. There are keys for rotating the pieces on all three axes, and moving them forwards, backwards left and right.

Once you've mastered the keys. It turns out to be a pretty good game.

{fb10000FFGraphics{fb1000000 Excellent. 

{fb10000FFFeatures{fb1000000 High score table (saved to disk).

{fb10000FFTypical Duration{fb1000000 12 minutes.

{sdiv

{fh2000000Adept's 'Adept'
{fb1000000
The first thing you notice about this demo is that the screen area is way off to the left, partly off screen. This is even more apparent on non-multisync monitors which I assume the author has not tested the demo on. Of course you can just adjust the horizontal image further right on a monitor but before I got my monitor I was using a TV which you couldn't adjust. I assume this "effect" is caused by a non-Acorn screen mode which the author is using because it isn't a normal TV resolution mode like 12 or 15 (they display quite small on my monitor). I doubt it's a "true" multi-scan mode because the demo works on normal monitors.

Right, I'll now tell you about the content of the demo. The demo starts off with one of the best trackers I've ever heard on the Arc which is staying on my hard disc. All effects are really good but some are a bit jerky on my A3010. A two-sided spinning rotating Cebit logo spins round the screen. While the logo is spinning, the screen flashes and the logo jerks sometimes; is this a bug or a feature? One side of the logo changes to say Adept and spins to the top of the screen followed by some very nice parallax scrolling behind this. Next, surprise surprise, comes a scroll-text which is in very bad English; this isn't surprising considering the programmer is German! The parallax scrolling then makes way for rippling coloured squares which come in from bottom right and engulf the screen.

After a short while the screen fades into what looks like a big sprite of a garbage pail kid which rotates round the screen, zooming in and out. At the same time text is written on top of this with the usual greets and hellos. The usual names like BIA, Arc Angels etc are there, but what has happened to these, by the way?

After the greets are over the screen fades and the "Adept" logo appears again, along with a landscape made up of dots which flies past as another scroll-text scrolls along the screen.

The last part of this demo is a three dimensional picture of the author which you can move left and right with the cursor keys. Rather impressive.

Rating : 8/10 (Would have been higher if the effects weren't jerky at times)

{ss_i
