Personal Compuer Games


Gatecrasher
By Quicksilva
BBC Model B

 
Published in Personal Computer Games #12

Gatecrasher

Rolling out the barrel is much more fun in a pub than in this strategy game of putting barrels in boxes, but both may drive you to drink...!

You're presented with a maze containing gates which lead to nine boxes at the bottom. You have to drop barrels from the top level so that they bounce down through the maze into separate bins.

Your character is completely unanimated and jerks across the screen to the one of sound of sandpaper on skin. Once you have selected your hole and dropped the barrel, it runs down the maze being deflected by gates which swing either left or right. The trouble is that if you hit a bin a second time, it cancels the first one.

Gatecrasher

The gates form predictable routes which means you may get stuck without a way to hit the correct bin and you'll run out of barrels.

You can avoid this by two great little routines which allow you to scroll the display up and down, and you can send your cathode-ray tube haywire by having an earthquake which rattles the maze and switches gates randomly.

The first four screens are just a matter of filling the nine gaps but the fifth and sixth involve rearranging a set of numbers into ascending order. Completing the seventh stage gives you a code which you must break to win a prize.

The game is quite clever and stretches the brain to think logically but does not have enough action or variety to be really addictive.

Bob Wade

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