Your Computer often had more than one program buried in its pages and its Volume 4 No. 10 issue brought us both Loona Rescue and Stop Thief.
Loona Rescue is a fast-executing machine code game in which you have to negotiate your way through a meteor storm to rescue some dudes at the base of the screen. You pick them up one at a time and then have to repeat the dodge-'em process all over again to reach the mothership.
The level of difficulty in this implementation of the old favourite is ratcheted up. Everything moves at a a fair old pace - from the smoothly scrolling action to the waving and crying rescuers on the planet surface. You have no gun (unlike in some versions) so you cannot clear a way through the meteorites - deft fingerplay is the only skill you have to take you as far as possible.
Something I really like is the particularly gratitious death sequence - smash into the mothership, or indeed miss it altogether, and, as you might expect, your little ship explodes in a blast of colour. Rather less usual though, is that the man you were carrying is catapulted out and goes flying back through the meteor-storm, inevitably puree-ing himself on a passing meteorite or splattering back from whence he came. Well, gee, that must be an encouraging sight for his still-stranded comrades!
Another nice touch is that, in addition to increasing the speed of the swinging meteorites as levels increase, red stars also appear peppered throughout the playing area. The higher the level, the more of these obstacles appear. They don't move but contact with them is fatal. I think Loona Rescue is the only Space Rescue clone of this type on the BBC that has this feature.
Stop Thief is a platform game in which your aim is to wander around a little playing area - there are a number of rooms which you can traverse Jet Set Willy-style, wandering from one room to another and finding methods to avoid the marauding baddies and collecting the booty items (£ signs).
The game is BASIC, and is jerky. You can move left or right, jump from one platform to another, etc. When you reach a staircase, moving left (or right) onto it lets you climb it and when you reach a gap in the platform which has a rope leading down from it, you walk onto the top of the rope to shimmy down it.
The collision detection is frankly pitiful - you sometimes have to practically dance the fandango on top of a £ sign to pick it up. The aimlessness of the nasties is also a bit frustrating - sometimes they get lucky and hit you, other times they fly around in one corner like moths around a light source.
Perhaps the most annoying habit this game has is not having a physical border around the playing area. It's a room game, right? So if you walk left off one screen you end up on the right of the next one. Yes, that's correct. However, many times what you think is the edge of the room is in fact not the edge of the room at all. I've walked right, a number of times - thinking I would go on to the next room, only to see the hero plummet straight off the end of the platform to death. This is a hard sort of feature to describe in text but try and exit the first screen by walking to the right and you'll soon see the problem.
Clearly, Loona Rescue is a much more polished number than Stop Thief. In fact, Loona Rescue would have carried any disc and could have more than held its own as a full-blown release - it really is an extremely engaging little game. In this context, Stop Thief is a welcome bonus, worth a bash for a few moments but unlikely to knock Jet Set Willy off the proverbial perch.
Loona Rescue was written by David Griffin and is available on the Your Computer 4.10 companion disc. It runs on a BBC (Model B only) with PAGE at &1900. Stop Thief, on the same disc, was written by Paul Sweeting and runs on all BBC computers, and the Acorn Electron.
30th October 2010
