Previous Next

There is a nightmare, popular among a certain class of animated cartoonists in the sixties, where the dreamer walks along an endless passageway. The only features are the doors (entrances, not the pop group), evenly spaced (oh, I dunno though), and the chequered floor.

Light comes from an evenly illuminated ceiling. As the dreamer walks down this interminable corridor, all he hears is the tap-tap-tap of his feet on the hard surface beneath him. He speeds up, and the doors and the squares merge into a flickering blurt. It only finishes when he breaks down or wakes up. It depended on the cartoonist.

Metrocross is disturbingly like that nightmare. There are differences of course, which serve to spice up the game in the same way that extreme pain spices up the Japanese TV game of Endurance. In that game, competitors are exhausted, maimed, starved, dehydrated, mutilated, and humiliated. In Metrocross the sprite is squashed by giant Coca-Cola cans, bitten by rats, electrocuted (I think...) by underfloor kilovolts and run into the ground. All while trying to run down an almost featureless corridor..

That's not. to say that there aren't kicks. For a start, a well aimed kick to a stationary tin can that lies ahead gains bonus points. In fact, any sort of kick will do, from a Lineker 30 yard tap to a Nureyev pas de deux. And then there are skateboards.

Skateboards are good news. A well-timed leap on to one results not only in improved mobility and freedom from a couple of the corridor carnivores, but should our sprite (no name, unfortunately) manage to soar nimbly from one board to another he will generate a mean 2000 points.

Unfortunately, contact with the aforementioned cans and rats, or the un-aforementioned hurdles results in suspension of his skateboard license until he acquires another further down the line. And there are no bonus points in the offing if he does that.

Hurdles can be leaped over (as can the rolling cans), but hitting one results in lost time. So does going around the outside, so hurdling is definitely in for Metrocrossers.

There are slight variations to the floor patterning as well. To relieve the monotony somewhat, there are areas of distinct greenery. These, if trodden in, reduce the forward velocity of the intrepid icon by a mammoth 75%. You try running with 75% of a mammoth stuck to your shoe and see where it gets you, On Endurance, probably...

But to help in the great race to the end arch before the time runs out (the aim of this little caper) there are ramps, from which a leaper can whistle through the air for a great distance, proof against all comers. On some levels these ramps are the only features.

And (gasp) there's more, as Albert Broccoli once said to an ageing Scotsman, How would you cope with potholes? Or rotating red cubes? Or funny squares on the ground that blow chromatic streamers up your leg? If you don't know now, you'll know shortly after you play Metrocross.

Metrocross? Metrocross? Isn't that where you try and get from the north side of Oxford Circus to the south side without being splatted by one of London's cheery cab drivers? No. Metrocross is where you pound down this corridor until you get to an end marker. And it's as much fun as it sounds. I managed to get to level 4 on my first ever go. I don't think I'll be playing it again.

Ignore what the others say. Metrocross is great, it's got the kind of music you turn up rather than switch off. You feel breathless for your mode 0 sprite after the first level, then there is more. The little man pants with gusto at the end.

It is worth kicking the little cans as you "go for speed up". The scroll is pretty fair, the animation as you leap from ramp to ramp a little flickery, but then there is a lot of screen for the poor little Z80 to move. This has been a good month for games.

More arcade conversionery, and this time the graphics on the Arnold are as good as the screen shots ("from the original arcade game") on the back. In this "increasingly impossible" race against English grammar, didacts will note that once you've jammed your joystick to the left and learned how to steer extremely slowly there isn't a lot remaining.

As the blurb says: "Are you the one in a million who can think in microseconds rather than minutes?", 'cos that's the average time from loading the game and recording Tom Jones over the cassette...