Previous Next

But what of Who Dares Wins 1, I hear you cry? Well, if the truth be known, there wasn't one. The reason being that Alligata, the publishers of Who Dares 1 got into a spot of bother with the law on account of said game bearing a remarkable resemblance to someone else's. Enough said.

Who Dares Wins II is published by Tynesoft under licence from Alligata. As I can't say I've been overly impressed with the output of either company I was pretty amazed to discover that this is good stuff.

Don't get me wrong now. I'm not going so far as to give it an unreserved thumbs up, it even has the odd bug. But Tynesoft have all the same managed to come up with a pretty close approximation of the C64 original.

As if you needed to guess, you are a sort of Action Man character, complete with plastic hair, scar and eagle eyes. You have been assigned the task of rescuing your compatriots from deep within enemy territory where they are held captive by the armies of death.

This is a task which only the bravest will undertake, a job for a fearless hero, an assignment to which anyone with any sense would say "bog off". You get the picture.

In practice, what this boils down to is you standing at the bottom of screen one, gun in hand, while a bunch of crazy gooks come screaming at you from within the jungle (for which read odd tree-like objects here and there).

The Strategic Plan for Unobtrusive Combat, or spunc, as it's known in the forces, is to hide behind a tree until an unsuspecting gook comes within range, then let him have it with the old AK47. Firing is accompanied by a very satisfying dull boom which sounds more like distant artillery.

Alternatively, you could try what they do in real life. Keep your head down, run around like a complete nutter, and shoot at everything that moves - and some things that don't. I found this second approach less than efficient, but it was pretty good fun all the same.

As well as shooting people to death, you can blow their arms and legs off with hand grenades. You have five to start with, but can pick up more along the way. Even so, it's probably best to save the grenades for trucks, trains and the like, which are impervious to mere bullets.

That's basically it really. You kill them before they kill you. If you make it to the top of the screen, another one scrolls on with different terrain and more soldiers. The basic backdrop is sort of sandy stuff and there are all sorts of interesting things like trees, moulds (the military term escapes me at this moment), lakes, railways and outposts.

When you get to an outpost lots of soldiers run out and the bullets really fly. If you kill them all that's the outpost captured and it's on to the next one.

Overall, I was really impressed. What *didn't* impress me was the bug that enabled me to walk straight through the enemy when on a certain part of the screen. Equally unimpressive is the square block that appears around sprites on all C16 games apart from those by Gremlin Graphics.

The twelve hours (well, it seems like it) of Colonel Bogey I was forced to listen to between one game ending and another starting also impressed me little. And finally my game ended for no reason whatsoever when I was just about to capture an outpost [We believe you - Ed].

Finally, so as not to go out moaning, the bits I really liked; when the gooks die they throw their arms in the air and do a little dance, brilliant grenade explosions and twelve hours of wonderful Colonel Bogey music between each game.