Previous Next

This program, written entirely in Basic, gets high marks for originality. I like what the author is trying to do, even though the end result leaves something to be desired. It is a graphic strategy game, but unusually only for two players to play against each other, and not a copy of an existing board game. It is very much a product of the author's somewhat fevered and certainly complicated imagination.

It came as no surprise to read in the Virgin blurb that he is a mathematics student. What he is doing, in effect, is to create an environment for a two player game which would not be possible without the aid of a computer.

The blurb also describes it as a unique game... of the brain versus brain type - in more ways than one. Each player has to try and *kill* his opponent's brain. Is vicarious violence so endemic to the world of computer games that a strategy game needs to be presented thus? I hate to think how a modern software house would market chess if they had just invented the game. Anyway, the object is to fire 'lasers' across a grid which has prisms at various locations, some provided initially by the program and some placed by the players. If the laser enters the opponent's "brain" - drawn with happily vague graphics - the game is over.

The complication is that each prism has a deflection factor. The prisms drawn at the start have random deflection factors which you can only discover by hitting one with a laser beam. The ones you place yourself have a deflection factor defined by the player. Each direction has a number. If the ray enters from the east (1) and the deflection factor is 4 then it will exist to the west (5) and so on. If you want to convert a direction 60 to a 3 you have to enter factor of 5 because totals over 8 reduce by 8. Confused? You will be. I had to reload the instruction program three times when I first tried to play this one. Mind you, when you master it you need never feat BBC Basic's MOD function again!

Modular arithmetic aside, it is fairly complicated and the documentation was not thorough enough to avoid the time-consuming bore or reloading a separate instruction program. One also has a number of options to choose, on the difficulty of the starting position and the length of time the laser beam remains visible - the longer it stays, the easier it is to figure out what is going on. Unfortunately, as a strategy game it is marred by far too great an influence of chance. It is quite easy to hit the opponent's brain - or your own - by shots which deflect from the wholly unpredictable behaviour of the program-supplied prisms.

Personally, as a chess player, I dislike games with strong chance elements, especially when (unlike the better card games) they can't really be incorporated as calculated risks in one's strategy. However, this game is certainly different and those wishing to cool their joysticks and engage their brains may get quite a lot of fun out of this one.