If you have sixteen Atari STs, or sixteen friends with an ST each, then MidiMaze is for you. Let us explain...

MidiMaze us the first game from US software company Hybrid Arts, best known for professional-standard MIDI music packages. Written by Xanth FX, the team responsible for the famous Shiny Bubbles graphics demo, MidiMaze is technically sophisticated, despite being based on a very old chase-around-a-three-dimensional-maze idea.

The difference in this case is that you control a homicidal Smiley Face, and your task is to hunt down and exterminate fifteen other Smileys. You can chase them through the mazes blasting away, or play a waiting game, jumping out from behind walls to ambush them or sneaking up from behind. The amount of strategy involved in the game depends largely on the skill levels set for the fifteen enemy Smileys, which can be controlled either by the computer or by another player seeing the maze from his own viewpoint on his own Atari ST.

Up to sixteen STs can be networked toegher using the MIDI ports, which are usually used to control synthesisers and other electronic instruments.

There's even a facility called MidiCam by which one ST can be used as a game monitor by non-players. The MidiCam machine will display a map of the maze showing the position of all the players, and switch to the viewpoint of any Smiley.

Although you can play MidiMaze on a single machine, the real fun starts when you get several players together. You can even play a team game by defining groups of Smileys which cannot shoot each other.