Mikro-Gen
£9.95
Mikro-Gen's Sir Fred has nothing to do with running an airline but a lighthearted adventure set in medieval times. It should provide a surfeit of laughs for oven the most surly of Speccy users.
Your quest, as Sir Fred, is to rescue the damsel in distress. Although you'll get to see her you won't know in which of the seven rooms she's held - until you've completed the whole adventure. What's more, each time you start a quest, the computer will select any one of fifty-eight game patterns. This gives you plenty of game play option - and plenty of objects to seek and use in your mission. Some can be used once, some over and over again - do you really want to?
A sirtain sirprise is Sir Fred's amazing gymnastic abilities - despite - all his armour! He runs, jumps, swings on ropes and swims realistically. His in-built inertia means he gets puffed, falls over and drowns pretty realistically as well! He's a crack swordsman and brill bow man. Makes yer sick, don't it - no wonder he always gets the girl...
There's not a lot you won't have seen before, but it won't always have been so well packaged. The graphics aren't cosmic (nor medieval, mind) - like the game it's good and solid. You could well while away a few knights with Sir Fred.
Spectrum
Mikro-Gen
Arcade Adventure
With Rambos mowing down everything in sight and Supermen juggling skyscrapers, this offering represents a return to Elizabethan values. The gallant Sir Fred has to rescue a princess from a castle. Glossing over the sexism endemic in computer games - when has a princess ever done any rescuing? - this is another from the ever popular arcade adventure genre.
All the rooms you can eat, with nasty things trying to drain your strength, lots of objects to pick up, and then work out what to do with.
It's a tricky game to master, one for the real aficionados to drool over. If you thought Jet Set Willy was a piece of cake, then this could be right down your dungeon.
Despite only the usual controls of up, down, left right, select and use, a lot of extra moves have been crammed in by combinations of the keys. Climbing, running, swimming, there is apparently no end to his talents.
The graphics are up to Wally standards, despite the fact that it was written by a Spanish company, rather than the Wally programmers. Another of Sir Fred's many talents is swinging on ropes. However, this is where the game rather falls down - or at least I did.
You are meant to swing on the rope by pressing alternately left and right; I must have been defeated by keybounce or something, but all that kept happening is the intrepid knight would end up going spurs over helm.
Just to cater to the mobs of computer games players conditioned to handing out mindless violence to all who get in their way, you get scoundrels and footpads to put to the sword. This rather goes against the grain of normal arcade adventures where the philosophy is to avoid things rather than kill them.
Odious overtones apart, this game takes the arcade adventure to new heights.
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