Previous Next

With no hype but just the simple expedient of putting out two excellent games, Ultimate has gone to the top of many people's Spectrum software league table. Admirers will be pleased to hear that its third release, Cookie, follows the tradition of Jet-Pac and Pssst. The bad news is that it is a very similar idea to Pssst, but the good news is that it's an even better game.

The aim is to bake a cake by adding all the right ingredients and keeping out the wrong ones - unless you want a cake full of fish bones, of course. You can move Charlie the Chef around the screen by using the keyboard or with Kempston or Protek joysticks.

The mixing bowl is at the bottom of the screen, with dustbins on either side. To the right are five drawers containing the cake's ingredients, though I don't think I'd care to eat the result of mixing together cheese, sugar, chocolate, mixed peel and custard. There are also give nasties lurking around the kitchen: tin cans, fish bones, washers, bolts and tacks.

Charlie can move around and throw flour bombs in eight directions, and with these he must stun the flying ingredients so that they fall in the mixing bowls. First to come, out of the top drawer, is Colonel Custard, and a number displayed on the bowl shows that you need ten of these in there to start the cake on its way.

The problem is that if one of the nasties falls into the bowl by mistake, felled by a badly-aimed flour bomb, the amount of custard required goes up.

The game is quite hard, as everything on the screen is against you and mustn't be touched at all. If this happens, you lose one of your five lives, though this in itself is a pleasure just to see the chef's hat go sailing up off the top of the screen while he turns upside down and plunges into his own mixing bowl.

Cookie has the fast-moving action, the colour and the superb graphics that set Ultimate's previous two games in a class apart. Very tasty.