Previous Next

You can't have failed to notice that Britain has recently gone green - ozone-friendly hairsprays, lead-free petrol, more votes for the Green Party, even previously ecologically-unsound people joining Greenpeace...! Micro Style probably come under the latter category, because Rainbow Warrior ("the Greenpeace game") is definitely a departure from their range of American Commie-killing battle sims.

Micro Style hope that they can bring eco-awareness to the masses who would normally switch off at the sight of another Norwegian in an anorak spraying baby harp seals with green paint. The game is split into seven different sub-games, each of which deals with a real Greenpeace campaign. Six of the seven can be selected from the opening screen, but you have to finish all of these before you can play the culminating game.

In Ocean Dumping, you control a team of eco-commandoes who have to board a ship dumping waste into the sea. Starting in a dinghy, your team has to climb on deck, then each stop a crame which is dropping barrels into the ocean. The crew of the ship aren't willing to help out, though, so oyu have to avoid the hose trained on your dinghy, dodge barrels, and the crew members who throw you overboard if they catch you!

Save the Whales is a sort of Breakout game, which puts you in control of a killer whale swimming about under a screen full of bricks. The objective is to completely uncover a picture of whales by blowing bubbles at the bricks to destroy them. Different icons drift across the screen, and if you bubble a good one (such as a Greenpeace dinghy) that icon will clear all the blocks it passes over. Hitting, say, a whale steak will cause it to restore blocks until it goes off screen. It's so easy to inadvertently hit the wrong object and suddenly rebuild a load of blocks that this game becomes quite frustrating.

The Acid Rain Campaign puts your team of activists at the foot of four chimneys which are spewing sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere. Periodically, a dinghy sails past carrying a banner bearing one of the letters in the words "STOP ACID RAIN". You have to collect all the banners and drape them across the top of the chimneys, while dodging a patrolling policeman, a large truck and a spanner-throwing worker.

Ozone Depletion takes your campaigners to the Antarctic where aerosols are roaming the atmosphere, knocking holes in it. To get rid of them, you have to chuck snowballs at them, otherwise radiation leaks to ground level, mutating penguins into homicidal killers, and doing your campaigner no good at all. Quite comical, as you can imagine.

Saving the Seals puts you on the ice floes of Canada, where hunters are out to cull seal pups for their skins. The only way to stop them is to spray as many seals as possible with green dye, making their pelts worthless. Just leaping from floe to floe is dangerous enough, but running into hunters is fatal, and a missile-firing nuclear submarine also makes an appearance.

My favourite of the six games takes place in the Irish Sea, where low-level nuclear waste is being pumped out through pipe outlets. You control a dolphin, which leads a diver past radioactive seaweed, dangerous squids, jellyfish and sharks to the six outlets, where he can set to, hammering the pipe shut.

You're probably thinking that one of the above sound like earth-shattering computer entertainment, and taken individually they're not. However, as a whole, Rainbow Warrior is surprisingly enjoyable. None of the campaigns has any depth and they all seem terribly silly while you're playing them individually, but they're so lightweight that it's difficult to get really cheesed off with them.

The games alone aren't likely to turn you into Mr. Ecology, but they do lead you to the beautifully presented and thought-provoking instruction booklet. This contains relevant statistics and case histories which make very interesting reading, educating the reader as to exactly what's wrong with the environment and what's being done to save it.

Twenty-five quid is a lot to pay for a non-mainstream title like this one, but it manages to educate without indoctrinating in a topic everyone should be fully aware of. And remember that part of the profits do go to Greenpeace for the purpose of saving the planet, which can't be bad.

If you want further information about Greenpeace's work, and how to become a member, you can write, enclosing an SAE to Greenpeace UK, 30-31 Islington Green, London N1 8XE.

First impressions are deceptive. This is a thought-provoking and quite enjoyable piece of entertainment software deserving your attention.