Triple Decker 7

Triple Decker volume seven opens with Atom Smash - a game which shuns conventional theories on sub-atomic physics in favour of the Alternative approach.

The nucleus of every element up to number 17 in the periodic table has become unstable. In an effort to rectify this situation, you and your ship have been miniaturised and armed with a supply of gluons - sub-atomic particles of the boson variety that bind quarks in hadrons. They are represented as red blobs.

Starting with hydrogen, you must collect a gluon from the warehouse and fly it to the docking point on the nucleus. This process has to be repeated five times while avoiding the single electron that bounces around the screen. Logically enough, the number of electrons increases as you progress through the periodic table. This is a simple game that is well programmed and fun to play.

Knockout is a version of Breakout that has been turned on its head - presumably because it makes the programming easier. At the top of the screen a cannon ball floats horizontally right and left - below this a brick wall advances skywards. The aim is to smash every brick before the wall reaches the cannon ball.

Having eliminated the traditional bat from the game you are restricted to pressing the spacebar whenever you want to drop the ball vertically from its current position.

Even before the demolition of the first wall is complete, a second wall has appeared and is heading your way... will this torment everend?

If you have failed miserably at either of the first two games it could just be that your faculties are waning and the old Mr. Freeze in the ice reflexes just aren't what they used to be. Program number three - Reaction Tester - will let you know, to one hundredth of a second, just how fast you really are.

Using a traffic light system, the program flashes a red, yellow then green bar on the screen. As soon as the green bar appears you must press the spacebar. This action stops the clock and displays your time along with a rating from excellent to poor.

Triple Decker 8

The first game of Triple Decker eight is Grebit, an excellent version of the arcade classic Frogger. Your task is to guide the ambling amphibian from his starting point on one side of the M25 to his lily pond on the far side of a raging torrent.

With a total of nine lives to play with, you may think that it's all going to be apiece of cake, but don't believe it.

My only grumbles are the lack of sound when the frog jumps and the poor choice of colours - the frog is practically invisible when sitting on one of the swimming turtles.

In Mr. Freeze you are the proprietor of asuccessful frozen food company, so successful in fact that an unscrupulous rival has sabotaged your warehouse - represented by a screenful of ice blocks, between which have been placed a number of electric fires. As each fire is switched on its countdown timer begins to tick - if this reaches zero before you reach itthen you lose a life.

You can only run on the ice blocks - which promptly melt as you leave them. Movement is allowed in both the vertical and horizontal planes, and you may also slide a row of ice blocks left or right. Unfortunately only half of the last sentence is true - my Mr. Freeze was limited to vertical movement only and the ice blocks refused to travel in any direction but left.

The final game, Fruit Worm, follows the adventures of a small worm with a voracious appetite for fruit. Moving at a steady pace, you must guide the worm between rocks in its search for nourishment. However, the more it eats, the longer it becomes, until finally it bites its own tail and the game ends.

Fruit Worm looked quite good, but was completely unplayable due to a nasty bug - as soon as I pressed any key to begin the game the worm shot off to the right and promptly died on the garden fence!

Verdict

Triple Decker volume eight would have easily out-classed volume seven were it not for the bugs. My copy may have been unrepresentative, but hang on to your receipt just in case.

Steve Brook