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ROBOTS ON THE RAMPAGE

THE ROBOTS have gone loopy in the mechanised factory far out in space. Your job as the metagalactic repair man in Strangeloop from Virgin Games, is to get through the rooms filled with dangerous swan, reach the control room and shut down the crazed computer. On the way you will meet superswarf and an anti-hero who will try to disrupt everything you do, as well as robots which will help you to patch up your space suit when it has been attacked by swarf. Virgin is giving a £2,000 robot to the first player to complete the game.

You are guided by a map on which you can see some of the 240 rooms around you and which will help you find a jet-bike.

You can pick up fuel and patches for your suit and retrieve items such as rings and spanners, which are given out by robots or left strewn around the floor. The objects can be used to perform various tasks which must be done before you stop the factory computer. For those reasons the game can be called an arcade adventure, on a par with Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner.

If you run into trouble you can save the state of play onto cassette and resume the game later. You can also halt all the on-screen action to take a quick break. A real-time clock tells you how many months you have spent on the game.

If you are killed off you are reincarnated, as long as you have one of your eight lives left, and may position yourself anywhere within the present room. Thus you can sacrifice a life to escape from a particularly lethal situation.

Strangeloop is more than likely to be one of the biggest selling games at Christmas and may make as large an impact on the market as any game from Software Projects or Ultimate. For the first time in its short life Virgin Games has a winner on its hands.

John Gilbert

Memory: 48K Price: £5.95 Joystick: Kempston, Interface 1, Sinclair, Cursor