Personal Computer News


Sinbad

Author: Bryan Skinner
Publisher: Virgin Games
Machine: BBC Model B

 
Published in Personal Computer News #081

SINBAD

Sinbad is a mixture of game types. In the first screen you have to leap on to a green rope ladder hanging below a flying carpet. You're shown as a rather chunky figure in green hose, blue top, red hair and a distinctly square nose.

The carpet meanders across the screen, dangling that ladder tantalisingly just out of reach. With a carefully timed leap, and by judicious ascent and descent you can touch one of the half-dozen or so things that wave from left to right across the screen. Contact changes the colour of a thing, but makes it malevolent - you'll fall to the ground on contact with one of these changelings.

The accompanying sound is very good - far better than the game itself. Sounding for all the world like an electronic organ, the music comes across as slightly Oriental.

Sinbad

Once you've changed the colour of all the things, you're taken to the next level, where you actually get to fly the magic carpet while massive pulsating blobs of colour come at you out of a multicoloured, star-lit sky. Your aim here is simply to avoid them - not too difficult, though far easier with a joystick.

The carpet has an unnerving tendency to accelerate viciously, scudding off the side of the screen, only to reappear on the other on an unavoidable collision course with one of the brightly coloured meteors. Success at this level takes you to the next where the carpet and things are slightly different and the tasks harder: spiders fall from the sky and have to be jumped over while you struggle to gain the ladder again. Higher levels involve essentially the same screens, but with more hazards.

Sinbad is far from brilliant - not easy, good sound, poor graphics. The idea's quite novel - but the game doesn't go far enough. The game quickly becomes boring.

Bryan Skinner

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