Electron User


Bumper Bundle

Author: John Woollard
Publisher: Alligata
Machine: Acorn Electron

 
Published in Electron User 2.12

Bumper Bundle is a tape collection of four programs: Bug Blaster, Lunar Rescue, Hell Hole and Crown Jewels.

Bug Blaster is an action-packed arcade game with the sole object of blasting everything that moves - and those things that sit still! You control the left and right motion of the zapper which fires vertically. You can push it up and down, but the window of movement is limited to the bottom five lines of the screen.

At the start, the display contains randomly placed mushrooms. Immediately, a centipede begins crawling left then right across the screen and slowly descending. As you fire and hit the bug, it breaks into separate sections, each with a life of its own.

Falling vertically down the screen and moving from left to right are various other creatures - spiders, scorpions, dragonflies and snails. Each of these scores points if zapped. If you come into contact with any of the bugs there's an explosion and one of your three lives is lost.

Your Lunar Rescue mission is to descend from an orbiting station, carefully avoid the asteroids, and land. After a man has boarded your craft, it ascends. On the way up you have to avoid or destroy the aliens.

Eventually, you dock the rescue vehicle on the mother ship. You have three attempts in each game. Scoring is based upon the number of aliens zapped and the difficulty of the landing site chosen.

Hell Hole is definitely a more intellectual arcade game. I've spent many hours working at it, but I still haven't sussed out how to trap or capture the fiend. Please let me know if you have the answer. Like the two other arcade games, the graphics and sound are very good. All three are quality software.

The fourth program of the suite is an adventure game based upon the unlikely event that a joker has stolen the Crown Jewels and then hidden them at various locations in London. The graphics are not outstanding but, as far as I could tell not having finished it, the adventure is well worth pursuing.

I was really impressed with this collection of programs. All four proved to be of a high standard in presentation and content. This is truly a Bumper Bundle.

John Woollard

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