Sinclair User


Big Trouble In Little China
By Electric Dreams
Spectrum 48K

 
Published in Sinclair User #63

Big Trouble In Little China

One of the first thoughts that struck me after I had seen the film Big Trouble in Little China was what a good computer game it would make. All that martial arts and non-stop action, someone was bound to do a tie-in.

And someone did and I can honestly say that Electric Dreams needn't have bothered if this is the best it could come up with.

What it amounts to is just a boring Kung Fu/Bruce Lee meets Rambo and takes on the baddies scenario, with absolutely no atmosphere, no sound effects to speak of, and no game to play as far as I can see.

Big Trouble In Little China

The three main characters are pretty poorly depicted, and fight as though they are either dancing the hokey-cokey or doing an impression of Russian folk dancers. As for their dreaded opponents, they seem to be having a bad case of wind following a hefty beans dinner. All they do is either bounce up and down or hit you with a series of blurping noises which are supposed to sound like the meeting of limbs in battle, but don't.

The story line revolves around a villainous Mandarin who has a hankering for green eyed girls. He must marry one and then sacrifice her in order to appease a demon. He picks on two ladies who are the girl friends of Jack Burton and Wang Chi our fearless heroes, who are joined in their mission to free the girls by Egg Shen (who apart from being a dish in a Chinese take-away is also a magic user).

You can choose to become any one of these three in order to deal with the opponents' varying skills and the idea of the game is you battle through four stages to reach Lo Pan (the Manadrin), kill him by using all three characters' skills and free the girls.

Big Trouble In Little China

Apart from some pleasant oriental music I could not find anything else to make me want to go out and buy this game.

I suggest you spend your money elsewhere.

Overall Summary

Billed as a shoot em, zap em, hack'em game, it is an extremely lame example of the genre. A definite miss.

Andy Moss

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