Personal Compuer Games
1st July 1984
Gravitor
Cross Asteroids with Lunar Lander and the hybrid offspring will probably be something like this game.
Your mission is to destroy alien satellites and so prevent that alien takeover we've all been so worried about. To carry out your task you will have to complete three screens of difficult, but not very thrilling, action.
Your triangular ship begins in a narrow tunnel at the bottom of the screen. Using the rotate left and right and the thrust controls you must manoeuvre your way out and get to the four 'fuel-rich satellites' at the top of the screen.
This could take you some considerable time as the controls are tricky and none too responsive. Thrusting is always rather awkward in games like this. Sometimes you don't press hard enough and just drop like a stone; at other times you get your finger down and speed off to a fragmented death.After much crashing into walls you will eventually reach the wide open spaces where those satellites are hanging. You avoid the UFO zooming across and touch a satellite.
Upon contact you are transported to the second screen, one of four jagged planetary landscapes. On the surface are four red fuel cells. You must position the ship above them and, using the tractor beam, collect them. This is none too easy since the screen is swarming with various hostile projectiles and that pesky UFO is still around.
Should you ever complete this stage you will then have to negotiate 'the spiral negative universe tunnel' before reaching another satellite system.
This game has some good ideas, but the quality of graphics and sound does not compensate for the difficulty of play. Growing frustration is all too likely to terminate your interest in the future of the universe.
