Aimiable arcade adventure

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Stormcycle is an arcade adventure based around your attempts to find five light-refracting diodes which are urgently needed to complete a super laser to protect the Earth from a meteor storm unleashed by alien warmongers.

You wander around the garden outside ahouse where he diodes must be gathered together You quickly « are not alone. Strange beings drive vehicles along the round and overhead and contact with t em, red ces you energy. Flying devils drop bombs which have the same effect. You are armed with a trusty sword which will need to keep lunging all the time or your strength will soon waste away.

The worst hazards are the pits. Fall into one and a whole life is lost - it's just as well you've got three. Assuming you avoid these pitfalls you'll be able to use the energy bottles which are scattered about to recharge yourself. You may also he able to use a smart bomb to destroy all aliens on your current screen, but they seem to have remarkable powers of regeneration.

Movement between the various sections of this game - garden, forest, moon, cellar and castle - is by means of transporters which look like fat little pharoahs, each of which will take you to another area. Many lead to dead ends where your only option is to use the suicide key.

The diodes can be spotted without difficulty, but this to become proficient at collecting some of them and one even requires a jump into nothing where you vanish behind the title bar at the top of the screen. There's a little bug here - if you jump you can reappear temporarily at the bottom of the game screen.

One other possible bug - or is it feature? - is that on one screen you can become walled up in the castle. If this happens it is 100 per cent fatal, but you can avoid this fate as there is no need to visit that location.

Stormcycle is a good game, though not in the same league as Citadel, so ordinary mortals like me can complete it and read the boring congratulations screen. The graphics are suitable for a budget game, the animation is fast and it has sensible features like sound on/off and pause. In fact, Stormcycle makes an ideal starter for arcade adventuring.

Rog Frost