Search and Destroy

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Your mission, if you accept the challenge in Eagles Wing (Software Invasion) is to fly your aircraft along the river until you reach and. hopefully, destroy the enemies' missile silos and their command centres.

There are plenty of defences along the river, and you need to destroy at least some of these to bring on your in-flight refuelling tanker.

The further upstream you get. the more aggressive the enemy and the more interceptor aircraft there are trying to crash into you.

Press the spacebar and away we go, flying upstream, shooting up the various enemy installations whilst clocking up score and damage to ourselves and using fuel.

Provided we don't crash into the canyon walls, run out of fuel, or get destroyed, when we've scored 10,000 our in-flight service station appears. Throttle right back, avoid shooting it down, and we dock with it, where-upon not only does it refuel and rearm us. but by some miracle also repairs all our damage. Then on with the mission...

There is only one major criticism - the quality of the sideways scrolling. There is a continuous flicker on the left of the screen as the next line to appear on the right (yes. I do mean right!) is put into screen memory.

The scrolling itself is so poor that to anyone stood watching it appears that the screen is out of focus. Compared with other sideways (and, nowadays, even diagonal) scrolling, this is very primitive.

Fortunately, this isn't too noticeable to the person actually playing who is watching only a small portion of the screen. Probably the only other feature worthy of mention is the "brown" used for the canyon walls, and even this has been seen in other programs from this publisher.

At least in this game I stand a fair chance of keeping my name in the "top 10" table - my reflexes are so much slower than my son's that in most "reaction" games the lowest score he has in the table is usually well above anything I can achieve.

Despite its shortcomings. I think I will see my son on "Operation Eagle's Wing" at regular intervals in the future. Now. which key was it for shooting up ground installations? Right, away we go again...

Michael Gilbert