Acorn User


A Maze In Space
By Opus
BBC Model B

 
Published in Acorn User #027

A Maze In Space

Here's yet another version of Scramble, though with a few changes and extra facilities. You must first fly up to the planet, avoiding its moons, meteors and defences. You then go down to the planet and seek and destroy your target, the alien command space station, shooting daleks, fuel dumps, rockets and planet defence. A Maze In Space goes a step further with vertical scrolling, so you can go up and down into caverns.

You are told which state your target is in, but that can be quite a large area. You have only one life, as the game uses shields, which decrease if you bump into an object, and once they are at zero you're finished. Sometimes you get caught in a space warp, which returns you to your starting point.

Before loading the game itself, the game objects and full instructions are presented.

The graphics are fair, the objects being quite detailed and good use made of colour, though the planet's moons are only in block graphics and the maze drawing is flickery, especially going upwards. At the top of the display is your score, present stage, and state of shields, and during play the computer warns of failures to your guns, low shields and lack of fuel.

A nice tune plays while the instructions are displayed and other effects during the game are similar to those of Rocket Raid. You can select sound on or off, joysticks, fast or slow game, fixed or random start position, and there's a freeze-game option.

A Maze In Space is a good attempt to improve on Scramble and if the flicker from the scrolling could be reduced it would much improve the quality of the program.

Ian Brettell

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