Previous Next

Looking at the packaging and glossy, Utimate-style instruction booklet, I was expecting Nodes to be simply over-hyped and underwhelming, as so many 'mega-games' have proved to be.

However, I was pleasantly surprised by Nodes once I started playing, and spent the best part of an evening bouncing around the surface of the moon and trying to complete the game.

In many ways, Nodes is simply a platform-collect-the-object game, but it is nonetheless a very good one, and well enough designed to keep you interested in it for a very long time.

You play the part of the Rt Hon Charly Fotheringham-Grunes, 'apprentice saviour of the universe', and must guide him through caverns in the depths of the moon, in search of a monolith which is transmitting signals to another planet. To aid you in your search, you can recruit an extremely cute and nicely animated moon-mole, who can eat through moon rock and sometimes discover new passages and caverns.

The figure of Charly himself is also very well animated - a large sprite, that actually seems to have a real character, and which somersaults delightfully, rather than just hopping across the screen. His somersaults are some of the smoothest animation I have yet seen on the Spectrum, and I spent a long time just bouncing around in order to enjoy the quality of the animation. As usual, there are various monsters out to stop him from reaching his goal, but here again his friendly moon-mole can help, by running around and eliminating them.

Nodes isn't really state of the art, but it is a very well designed game and very enjoyable. My only criticism is that, at £9.95, it's rather expensive, though not outrageously so.