Amstrad Computer User
1st April 1986Cluedo
OK, so it plays Cluedo now. Hands up all you people who have played computerised board games before? Right, now how many played the next round on good, old-fashioned printed cardboard? I think I have just proved a point. These Waddington games are wonderful - in their original form. The Amstrad versions are a pale shadow of the real thing, probably not helped by them being really awful Spectrum conversions. This game asks you if you are using a colour television? Methinks they missed that one.
So let's see what you get for your er... how much does it cost, Ed? [£19.95 - Ed]. Thank you. Right, a genuine green cardboard box, a lot of plastic moulding that holds the cassette and fills up most of the box, a distruction leaflet (mostly a mass of (c)s, (r)s, and TMs), a sticker advertising the film of the game, and a little booklet of detective note sheets that everyone will shove through a photocopier.
You get to roll a computer generated dice down the left-hand side of the screen, though it looks more like it is having a fit than rolling. You then move your character the requisite number of places. Be warned! If you cheat by moving it too far too, often it seems to forfeit you your move. This may be a feature or a bug, I'm not sure.
Anyhow, accusations fly back and forth like Sikorsky vs. the European consortium as per your usual Cluedo, except you can't see your clue cards. These are stored in the computer until you want to look at them. Then you tell everybody else to look at the ceiling while you put your mit over the corner of the screen and see what you got.
This is indeed a computerised version of' Cluedo and is a direct take-off of the original, but with less cheating. I prefer the original board games on boards, though the computer version does have one advantage - little brother doesn't nick the gun for his Action Man!