Producer: Imagine
Retail Price: £7.95
Author: Dinamic Software
Repulsed by the growing greed and powerlust of Queen Gremla, the warrior lord Arkos resolves to overthrow his monarch.
Arkos begins his destructive quest in the dank arcades of the planet Hypsis, running and jumping through the flick-screen underworld, aided by lifts that take him to higher floors or provide moving stepping stones to the next screen. But if Arkos falls from one of these elevated platforms, he loses a life. (He starts with three.)
Guardian robots ride the air firing at our hero, and laser-shooters aim at his body. Arkos has only limited energy to survive these assaults.
For protection the warrior carries a blaster with unlimited fire power, and a stock of more powerful grenades. Whenever Arkos destroys robots or monsters he gains points.
Eventually Arkos encounters red and white barrels, which he can destroy with three blasts. These then endow special powers upon him - energy hearts restore his flagging reserves, 'pow up' increases his fire power, and a force field offers protection from shots and collision. But be warned: some of the barrels conceal mines which kill at the slightest touch.
Once through the prison chambers, Arkos must cross a swamp where he finds regenerating green monsters occupying a platform world, and deadly rocket ships which streak across the skies. If our blasting warrior successfully negotiates this monstrous flock he comes face to face with the towering bulk of the Giant Orko, who can with a JUMP and a THUMP squidge the very existence from Arkos's frame.
So this overdeveloped creation must be ruptured by 40 shots - a grenade counts as four shots - before it goes to meet its maker.
Then only the three giant robots remain, and they can be taken out with 20 well-placed shots each.
But Arkos's adventure is far from over. Here Game Over moves to a second world, as Antos travels to the planet Sckunn to test his fighting skills in a forest land. (This second world loads separately, and can only be accessed with a code from the first half.)
Now Arkos has a giant laser, with increasable fire power, instead of grenades, This he can use against the enemy Kaikas and secure his passage to his ultimate goal, the Palace Of Greco la herself. There he is confronted with further robots, fireball-shooting Leisers-Freisers, more lasershooters and finally the Giant Guardian. This personification of evil must be destroyed section by section with 60 carefully-aimed shots before it gives up its mechanical life. Only then has Arkos completed his quest.
COMMENTS
Joysticks: Cursor, Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: reasonable, though there's terrible colour clash
Sound: spot FX
Options: definable keys; two separately-loading sections
The only decent part of Game Over is the loading screen, showing a skimpily-dressed girl.... Elsewhere the graphics are badly-defined but the backgrounds are good. Colour is used too much, so the screens are always full of clash. And there's no tune, just firing FX. But the big, irritating letdown is that once you've been killed, even on Level Two or Three, you go back to Level One again! Dinamic seems to have concentrated on design more than the quality of gameplay here, and it wasn't a very successful move.
NICK [63%]
Pick up your laser rifle, find a hostile alien planet, land your ship where the natives can find you, and go and hack, pillage, maim and generally make life miserable for the poor little things. Graphically Game Over is pretty good: the sprites are clear and quite well defined, though the terrible colour clash is another matter. Sonically the game consists of a few unimaginative blasting lees. Overall, a barely average shoot-'em-up.
MARK [45%]
The look of Game Over is very much in the Dinamic (Army Moves) programming style, ie dodgy collision-detection, attribute problems, detailed graphics and double loading. All these things add up to a very poor imitation of Green Beret, also from Imagine.
PAUL [56%]
When a megalomaniac tyrant queen threatens the galaxy there's only one person who can help... Rachael Smith.
FAX BOX
Game: Game Over
Publisher: Ocean
Designed By: Dinamic
Price: £7.95
What? Game over! You cannot be serious. Okay, some games are so tough you never make it past the first level, but when even the loading screen carries that fateful message... Well, they reckoned without the might of Rachael, who has right on her side.
Actually, some of you may prefer not to get past the loading screen as it features the same Amazonian tottie in the skintight bikini who's had you slobbering all over the advertisements recently.
But don't get too enamoured with Queen Gremla, because she's the sort of gal who doesn't just give a guy a hard time... she's got it in for whole galaxies. So quit drooling and get your hands onto your joystick - it's time to save the world.
To be honest, the plot's unlikely to win any awards for originality. It's Green Bert in another galaxy as you run along, leaping levels and shooting anything and everything that approaches. But when it comes to play balance, Game Over wins hands down.
That's not to say that it's easy. The aliens, pretty as they are, come thick and fast, and whenever you think you've mastered them there's something nasty lurking on the next screen, such as a great green giant who bounces around like a manic spacehopper!
As well as the flying meanies there are floating platforms to help you cross chasms, unless you want to kiss the canyon floor. And there are red drums for when you feel like a bang but are running low on ammo. Beware though - those arsenals may contain other, less useful supplies!
Finally, when you've run the gauntlet of the 20 screens which make up Hypsis, taking you from the depths of the dungeons to a waiting spaceship, you have to load more data and set off on a further chase and shoot session in the forests and palace of Sckunn.
Gremla has done all she can to make life difficult for you - not to say short. She's even carpeted her palace with a mine field. Luckily your hero, Arkos, is a sprightly little sprite. Perfect in every tiny detail, as far I can tell, (the Spectrum's resolution wouldn't let me get really intimate) he can run, jump and crouch, and the animation has to be seen to be believed.
He's provided with a choice of weapons, and you'll need to suss out the best way to use them against the enemy if you're even going to reach the half-way point. In part one Arkos has a rifle with unlimited firepower, plus a supply of grenades which come in useful for dealing with mobs or some of the bigger monsters.
Part two sees him supplied with a giant laser which wastes everything that gets in its way but only has twenty-five shots. Again its useful to hold it in reserve for special circumstances, such as the final mega-challenge which involves the almost invulnerable Laser-Shooter.
After all that you may feel you deserve a rest. Tough! Because if I kill Gremla first I know what I'm going to do. I'm stepping into her shoes even before the 'Tyrant wanted' card appears in the Job Centre!
BARGAIN BASEMENT
A bumper New Year collection of cheapie rubbish (whoops!) from that king of the skin-flints, Marcus Berkmann, and his preppy pauper (ha ha) Jonathan Davies.
Summit
£2.99
Reviewer: Jonathan Davies
Slipping into the role of Arkos, a small flickery sprite with an incurable attribute problem, your task is to destroy the evil Gremla, a power-crazed empress. Not surprisingly, this involves battling from left to right through several action-packed screens. There's plenty of stuff to shoot, all the usual add-on weapons, but the execution is very poor. The colour-clash makes it very tricky to see what's going on at times, and Arkos seems to float around the screen in a manner which defies all the laws of physics. Difficulty is achieved simply by having loads of baddies attacking you at once. You don't stand a chance, and kicking the bucket means starting again from scratch.
Not even worth buying for the cover piccie - it's been tragically modified.
Label: Imagine
Price: £7.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tamara Howard
I did so want to like Game Over from Imagine. I hated the packaging so much that I really wanted to enthuse rapturously over the game. But I couldn't. I even found it hard to laugh at Game Over, and boy, is that serious.
We begin with a left-to-right flipping affair, a space-age prison chock-a-block with robotic guards, apparently flying on legs of lamb. Or perhaps they're cylindrical vacuum cleaners. Anyway, the graphics being somewhat on the small side, it's not at all easy to tell, but they're v. peculiar all the same.
Off you go, the hardy, fully equipped, but not overly bright Arkos, across twenty screens of flippin' good fun (eh, eh) across the hostile planet Hypsis, in order to gain the access code to the even more unpleasant planet of Sckunn in order to fight the evil queen. She of the infamous advert.
The first two screens are dead easy. Just run along and shoot at the meaty guards. Should you see a barrel, shoot it. It could contain something nice, like extra weaponry, a new lease of life in the shape of a heart, or it could be a bomb, in which case, jump like crazy, you're going to die. It should be said now that you can't die merely through being shot. This is one of those games which provides you with an energy allowance at the beginning of the game, which is drained whenever you're shot, and which goes away completely if you touch a bomb or fall off the edge of a cliff.
The third screen is far more difficult. A case of leaping across a void on to two platforms, which bob up and down, whilst being attacked by a throng of robots. It's even trickier than it sounds, and unbearingly frustrating because you keep falling off and dropping dead. Then it's Game Over for you sonny.
If you do manage to leap across the void and take out a few more aliens, you come to a charming woodland scene. In screen shots these look pretty good. Nice mountains combined tastefully with big slob monsters. (You'll see what I mean.) But wait until they move. Ugh! Because alas Game Over is truly the home of Mr Attribute Clash. Monsters merge with Arkos, who, in an extremely slovenly way merges into anything that comes within his flight path. Not a pretty sight. So this is perhaps the only time that we can be grateful for the fact that the figures are so small.
Game play is a redeeming feature, it's fast and frantic, multiple monsters swoop from all over the place firing wildly and zinging into Arkos, draining his energy, and sending him back to the beginning. However, death is a rather attractive event. Arkos disintegrates into little itsy-bitsy twinkling stars which waft away off the top of the screen. An appallingly whimsical display totally out of place within the context of the game.
The nicest thing that can be said about Game Over is that it's a run-of-the-mill screen flipping sort of game that gives you a lot to shoot at and not a great deal else. It's simple to play - usual joystick or keyboard controls, but it's not overly enthralling, and the attribute problem is awful. Mostly a disappointment.
MACHINES: Amstrad/CBM/Spectrum
SUPPLIER: Imagine
PRICE: £7.95 Spectrum, £8.95 Amstrad CPC/CBM, £12.95 Amstrad CPC/CBM Disk
VERSION TESTED: Amstrad CPC
A principal female character at last, but one, I suspect, launched as a cassette wrapper to appeal to the male eye. But what's this? This woman, named Gremla, is a cruel and powerful galactic ruler, a mega-villain to out-shine Darth Vader.
The hero, yes you've guessed it, is a man called Arkos. He was Gremla's faithful Lieutenant but a sudden twinge of conscience has turned him into a super-goodie, determined to defeat the megalomanic obsession of his ex-boss. The final battle is played out on two levels and ladders worlds, the first called Planet Hypsis, the second Schkunn. You must dash across each, destroying Gremla's guardians on the way, and, on the final screen, defeat the Giant Guardian.
Hypsis is a horizontally scrolling world of 20 screens, peopled with five types of alien robots and another five types of objects. On the first screen you meet the small, floating laser shooters, robots that'll shoot straight for your head and drain your ever decreasing power unless you put four laser bolts into them. To offset their deadly effects, shoot at the Energy Heart cylinder, grab the heart which floats away from its remains and take on the energy it contains.
You'll need all that energy if you're to beat the second level which, when you first see it, you will think is unplayable. There are two level pads which move up and down in the middle of the screen. Jump to the first and then the second, but you must not hit the ground or you're turned into a mass of glittering vapour that floats away -and that's a life lost.
If you pass this screen you'll have seen and solved the play format for the rest of the game.
The levels change colour - blue to white - later in the game, and take on ladders in the middle of the map, but the method of moving from one end of the screen to the other is always the same. Only the guardian robots change. You soon encounter a massive guardian robot, a Dalek without an eyestick, which lobs huge energy bolts at you. Don't bother to stay around and destroy it. Just run across the screen in the vain hope that you'll retain all of your energy.
Next up are the green monsters which you find on the metal platform and stone bridge screens. They represent no threat that I could see, and don't even look pretty.
To combat all these forces you can pick up grenades on the ground and a nifty time you'll have to avoid the mines if you're ever to get to the second world.
The Planet Sckunn scrolls vertically and horizontally, so the game play's more difficult. That said, your weapon, puny though it is on the first level, is upgraded so that it produces a never-ending stream of laser power and will destroy everything in its path.
There are two stages to get through: The Forest and The Palaces. In The Forest there are lakes in which you'll drown as well a less-than-abundance of aliens. Admittedly you do get a creature called a Kaitas which takes two energy points from you when it hits you, but it can be downed with just one laser shot and doesn't represent much of a threat.
The Palace screen is an improvement over The Forest, but only marginally. It's crowded with elevators which take you from one floor to the other. Once you're in one you mustn't move or you could die. There are also mines scattered on the floor, and four more types of aliens with which you'll have to deal.
The aliens on this level shoot fireballs and you need to hit them four or five times before they're destroyed - not a difficult task with your super laser. The Giant Guardian at the end of the game, however, is another matter. Hit it 30 times and its wings disappear, 15 times and its body disappears, another 30 and its head vanishes. It's a devil to destroy and makes up for all the puny aliens in the other parts of the game.
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