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Celebrate your New Year with Five Games Five Minutes...
...from acornelectron.co.uk
WONGO is the Acorn Electron's twist on HUNCHBACK...
...replacing the eponymous hero with a man on a pogo stick.
You are apparently bouncing along the Great Wall of China...
...defusing bombs left along it.
You start with relatively simple screens to complete...
i.e. ones that, with a well-timed bounce, you can clear all the boulders...
...lobbed at you from off-screen.
Then, slowly but surely, more and more hazards start to be introduced.
By screen eight, the combination of boulders and arrows being flung...
...from each direction, will be enough to have most giving up in defeat.
One thing's for sure.
After those first few initial screens, WONGO is a very hard game to win.
It almost calls for a Masters' Degree in the study of its move-combinations!
On many levels, there's NO margin for error at all.
A fraction of a second out...
...and you'll be unceremoniously flung off the wall.
With only three lives to your name, and no way to practise individual screens, ...
...that's a lot of study needed.
VORTEX is a 3D space battle...
...which, in 1983, and pre-ELITE, was extremely impressive to behold.
The premise is a simple one.
You fly left and right, and shoot at the enemy ships.
When they get within range, they shoot back, smash into you, or ...
...if you're lucky, get blown up by your laser beams.
There seems to be very little skill involved at all.
Using a scattergun approach seems to be the only way to progress.
If you get lucky, you take the ships out.
If you don't, you get taken out yourself.
Introducing a bit of variety are the asteroid storms.
Here you don't need your laser - only your reactions...
...to dodge asteroids which come flying at you...
...faster than the speed of sound.
Again though, there's very little skill involved...
...because, by the time you see an asteroid heading your way, ...
...it's too late!
So you end up just frantically moving around hoping for the best.
Hence we have a sort of "so-called" game here.
If, like me, you like your games to give you...
...at least a sporting chance of winning, ...
...you'll likely want to give this one a miss.
ESCAPE FROM MOONBASE ALPHA is more than a game.
It's a work of art.
The game mixes elements of Doctor Who, The Incredible Hulk...
...and children's cartoon Willo The Wisp.
And it's one of the only 3D maze games for the Electron.
And do you know what?
It's still as engrossing, and downright odd, ...
...nearly thirty years after its initial release.
You wander around Moonbase Alpha...
...looking for gold, and trying to pick enough of it up...
...to be able to pay the mysterious Doctor...
...if you find him...
...to transport you out.
Unfortunately, each room is patrolled by a monster.
When you enter the room, you have a second or two to check...
...the monster's energy level.
If it's more than your own, retreat and find a way around it.
If not, head in and take it on.
If you press T, you'll become The Incredible Hulk...
...and triple your strength for a brief period.
Other characters flit in and out...
...with the same randomness that pervades the game.
Stealing your gold, boring you to death, ...
turning you into a frog, ... the ways for you to die are endless!
Despite this, some deft fingerwork and strategic exploration...
...will eventually bring you to the Doctor, and success.
Pure. Random. Brilliance.
CLIFFHANGER is a sort of sad-looking game.
The on-screen instructions are littered with spelling errors...
...and no care at all has been taken with the graphics...
...which are blocky and basic.
There's no plot.
You have to get the man to the top right hand corner...
...of the screen, before the river below him...
...catches up to his position.
You can run left, right, and jump across the rockface.
Movement is odd.
There seems to be a quarter-second delay...
...between actually pressing a key and seeing your man react.
Nevertheless, the first screen is reasonably easy to clear.
On further screens, you have exactly the same layout...
...but you have to deal with falling boulders, ...
...and evil snakes to jump.
After five screens, the game wraps around to screen one again...
...with no increase in difficulty.
You might not be surprised to find CLIFFHANGER...
...is a type-in game, from the pages of Input magazine.
It was actually serialised in 23 separate issues.
Personally, as someone who typed it in myself, ...
...I was expecting a lot more from it.
Some of the more hectic levels are kinda fun...
...but the presentation is so lack-lustre...
...that it makes for an uncomfortable gaming experience.
KANE is a cowboy game with two stages.
You play a suited and booted gent...
...who's taking on a whole town full of outlaws.
In the first stage you run, slowly, into view...
...to take aim at some birds flying across the screen.
The more of them you kill, the higher your score, ...
...and the better you'll fare in stage two.
Although it's quite a simple idea, it takes a great deal...
...of practice to target the birds correctly.
The fact they're so small doesn't help.
The second stage puts you into the town...
...and you must wipe out as many baddies as you can.
For some unfathomable reason, you can only carry six bullets...
...for your gun at a time so, when you run out, you have to...
...run off to the right of the screen, to reload it.
Baddies appear in the doorways of the town.
And, again, the fact that they're so small...
...means that it's difficult to target them correctly.
That's just some of the reasons to hate this game.
The two stages have nothing to do with each other.
Both of them are boredom personified.
But my favourite is that, if you remove the nice-looking backgrounds, ...
...you realise that KANE is just a few pixels on the screen changing colour!
Take it away, please!
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