OF CANISTERS, CLOWNS,
COLLISIONS
AND THE (SUB)CONSCIOUS
In Which Perez Has One Life To Live
And Knauss Has Three Games To Review
Medalist's Weird Dreams
Anarchy
BY GREG PEREZ
Put simply, Anarchy is Defender with an attitude. Anarchy is a fast-paced
shoot-em-up with dazzling graphics and intense gameplay. Geared mostly
to accomplished game players. Anarchy truly serves as one of the hottest
arcade challenges around.
Your mission as a futuristic fighter pilot is to destroy the Anarchists who have taken control of the planet and to protect the life-support canisters which hover above the planet's surface. You are armed with a single-shot laser, but as the game progresses, you may be equipped with a myriad of offensive weapons.
Defend The Canisters
The game field consists of a four-level, parallax-scrolling. horizontal
landscape which smoothly zips by at a breakneck pace. Along the bottom
of the screen reside the 10 canisters which you must defend. As the game
opens. several Anarchist ships beam into position and start their attack.
If you don't keep close watch over your canisters a Stealer will slowly descend to snatch one up and tow it to the top of the screen. Only by shooting the Stealer can your recover the canister, and if the canister falls from too high an altitude, it will explode on contact.
Survival Tips
Adding extra weaponry is essential to surviving in Anarchy. When you
destroy certain enemies they release tokens which fall to the surface.
By collecting these tokens, your ship can wield more firepower. Double-laser
fire and cannon outriders are some of the extra armaments, but one of the
more important firepower tokens is the boost token. Boost tokens add 100
boost points a pop, giving all on-board weapons repeat-fire capability.
The Nackem power gives your ship all weapons and a bonus 500 boost shots
to boot!
One Life To Live
In Anarchy you are given only one life, but a powerful force field
sucks up most of the damage sustained during your mission. After your force
shield is depleted, your ship is blown to kingdom come. If you are running
low on shields, a top-up token refills your force shield.
Undoubtedly, Anarchy is one of the most high-energy games I've played. It brings back the old challenge of the Defender days, while offering an array of enemies and weapons. The frantic action that ensues is superior to any shoot-em-up game out there.
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| Game:
Type: Company: Price: Requirements: Summary: |
Anarchy
Arcade action Psygnosis
$39.99 512K, color monitor Frantic action makes
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Digitek's Clown-0-Mania
Clown-O-Mania
BY GREG KNAUSS
In Clown-O-Mania, the player controls Beppo, a little clown, who has
set off into a huge multi-level maze to collect valuable crystals. Throughout
the maze, there are several different enemies that try to stop Beppo and
many things he can pick up to aid his quest.
If all this sounds slightly familiar, it's because Clown-O-Mania is essentially an enhanced Pac-Man. While the game is enjoyable enough, its lack of originality keeps it from being memorable, even with all the things added to disguise its relation to the original maze game.
Clown-O-Mania's greatest divergence from the Pac-Man standard is the fact that the maze is viewed at a three-fourths angle, and is more than one level vertically. While this effect makes Clown-O-Mania more interesting visually, it also gives the game its biggest negative: Beppo is hard to control. To move the clown northeast on the screen you push the joystick up, but to move him northwest you push the joystick left. The manual lamely offers "Only practice will make perfect..." as advice.
Clown-O-Mania's other main change is the addition of strategy to the collect-the-dots scheme. One-way tiles, moveable barriers, colored tiles and a limited number of "jumps" make each level a challenge for your planning skills as well as your hand-eye coordination. It's a small addition, and don't believe for a moment that this is a thinking game, yet it's the biggest tweak on the formula that the game has to offer, and a nice touch at that.
Again, Clown-O-Mania is nothing new. It offers a dash of strategy to the generic maze scenario and in doing so creates a fun but forgettable game. Clown-O-Mania is the computer equivalent of cotton candy - something to enjoy that quickly dissolves to nothing.
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Type: Company: Price: Requirements: Summary: |
Clown-O-Mania
Arcade action Digitek Software
$29.95 512K color monitor Strategy twist saves this
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Accolade's Harmony
The Game of Harmony
BY GREG KNAUSS
Some programs just don't have any luck. Take The Game of Harmony, for
instance. It's billed as a "New Age Challenge" in which you create "synergy"
by "harmonizing sphericules." The full explanation given by the manual
is, "Whenever you unify two like-colored spheres, they heave a grateful,
musical sigh ... then dissipate into a state of blissful synergy." I can't
think of a less appealing way to describe what turns out to be a pretty
fair little game.
The manual would better serve the game by stating, "Balls disappear when they collide." The player uses the joystick to gently steer globes around the screen, crashing like-colored spheres into each other, causing them both to disappear. lf two different-colored balls collide, a third one is created between them. Some globes are connected by rubberbands so that moving one drags another along with it, changing your strategy. If you strip away all of Harmony's fancy talk, you're left with more of an offbeat puzzle than a game.
Perhaps Harmony's biggest prob1cm is that it's incredibly frustrating . . . but in a good way. The game is like Tetris: interesting and addictive, but not as simple as it first looks. You'll either enjoy the preciseness of the program or be driven out of your mind. To collide spheres, it takes a steady hand and careful aiming, but if you take too much time setting up your moves, the time limit runs out and the game's over.
Harmony, if nothing else, is original. It's a fun little game; no masterpiece, but an interesting diversion. You might want to give it a try before buying, just to see if it's too aggravating for you.
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Type: Company: Price: Requirements: Summary: |
The Game of Harmony
Strategy Accolade Inc.
$44.95 512K. color monitor Tetris fun packaged
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Weird Dreams
BY GREG KNAUSS
In Weird Dreams you play a man fighting against strange objects in
his subconscious. You grab fish from the sky, you stab man-eating flowers,
you even battle a ferocious plucked chicken. Weird Dreams has to be one
of the most original and interesting games ever created, but, unfortunately,
its uniqueness is overshadowed by completely frustrating joystick control.
The graphics are detailed and perfectly strange. The programmers, however, seemed so concerned with making the game an intriguing visual experience that playability suffered badly. Because your on-screen surrogate is so well animated, he's slow to respond to joystick moves, If you want him to duck under the spinning bar in the Cotton Candy Machine, you need to push the stick down before the bar is even close to him, or he won't make it to his knees in time. Weird Dreams is a game that requires precise timing in almost all of its scenes and having such slow response is so frustrating that it makes this otherwise excellent game almost unplayable.
Interestingly enough, the package includes a well-written and entertaining 64-page novella instead of an instruction manual, and a clue book that explains some of the stranger aspects of the game if you have trouble.
Weird Dreams is, initially, hard to dislike. The novella is funny and worth reading on its own, the graphics are original and interesting, the game's premise is unique and clever. But after trying the same scenes over and over, you get frustrated battling the slow joystick response. Without that to hog down the gameplay, Weird Dreams would be a winner.
Greg Perez is fast becoming a specialist at Psygnosis games. Greg Knauss is the chuck Yeager of START game programmers.
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| Game:
Type: Company: Price: Requirements: Summary: |
Weird Dreams
Graphic adventure Medalist International
$39.95 512K, color monitor If the joystick didn move like molasses,
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