★ GAMES ★ EDITEURS ★ DURELL DURELL ★ |
| Durell Durell | Games Editeurs |
Three stunning new games for the new year from the west country's premier software house. Pete Connor goes all the way to Taunton to preview them for you. In the county town of Ian Botham country - and Amstrad Action country - is one of Britain's classiest software houses, Durell. You'll know them from Harrier Attack and Combat Lynx. Now they've got three stunning new games poised to make a big impact on Arnold owners early in the new year. We've made the long and arduous journey to Taunton to bring you the good news of Critical Mass, Saboteur and Turbo Esprit. CRITICAL MASS This sizzling game takes place on an asteroid, which seems only fair since it will remind many old hands of that arcade classic Asteroids. Old hands, though, may have to just sit back and admire - this is a game that requires the quickest of reactions and toughest of nerves. It all happens on a remote asteroid in an outlying system of the Terra Foundation where nasty aliens have primed the anti-matter conversion plant to go bananas. You have to get through and deactivate the thing before it reaches critical mass and makes a critical mess of everything for a few thousand parsecs around. You get around on the asteroid's surface in what the Durell mob like to call a 'skidoo'. a neat and nippy little craft controlled by accelerating or by rotating left and right - just as in Asteroids. This 'vectored flight' will pose beginners some tricky problems. If you want to turn round the oniy way to do it is to rotate 180 degrees and thrust. Not easy when you've got a vicious alien on your tail. There's just about everything you could ask of a shoot-em-up in Critical Mass- speed, mayhem, fear and monsters from outer space, all executed in graphics of the highest quality. Experience the thrills and the chills soon on the Amstrad.
SABOTEUR Do you sincerely want to be a hero? Do you really want to penetrate a top secret, high-security base, do battle with dozens of guards, wrestle with man-eating dogs, find and capture a staggeringly important disc, plant a bomb and then fight your way out to a helicopter on the roof to make good your escape? Well, you don't need to join the CIA or the KGB just have a go at Saboteur, An evil fascist dictatorship has taken over the country don't ask me which country - and your task as a mercenary is to capture the disc containing the rebel leaders'names and then escape before your bomb does for the baddies. You won't find it easy this game has 118 rooms. And they're not laid out in a simple way. You have to go through sewers, take underground trains in the right order, find your way through a maze of tunnels and a tangle of girders. So you'll need some nifty mapping skills. Not to mention some hardened combat skills. From the moment you leap out of your dinghy at the start of the game it's action-packed stuff You somersault and jump around, engage in karate chop-ups with guards, find and use a variety of weapons, all the while keeping an eye out for those snapping doggies. The animation is superb and these action scenes are really tough. TURBO ESPRIT Fasten your safety belts it's going to be a bumpy ride. This is a driving game par excellence, from the man who brought you the outstanding Combat Lynx Mike Richardson. In his new program he doesn't just give you the chance to drive around like crazy and shoo: people. No, he also gives you the chance to do some good by ridding the world of some very evil people - international drug traffickers. Seated in your Lotus Turbo Esprit you drive through a city in pursuit of the smugglers. Buildings loom up on every side. Traffic lights halt your progress - unless you want to flatten a few of those pedestrians crossing the road. Watch out for them again at the zebra crossings, or you'll lose even more points. Roads change from two lanes to six in the twinkling of an eye. The individual delivery cars are backed up by hit squads posing an additional threat. Your ultimate aim is to get the armoured van the cars are delivering to. But there's a lot of driving. shooting and mapping to do before you'll get that far.
The Inside Story Now get this right: it's pronounced Dew-Rell, with the accent on the second syllable You'd better get it right because, because mis pronunciation of the name, says Robert White, is 'the one thing that makes me hysterically traumatised.' Durell is the name of the company because it is Robert White's middle name and because it seemed more suitable than the only other alternative he had Wobblesoft. After spending a few hours in the Taunton off ices of the company you might wonder whether Wobblesoft wouldn t more accurately describe the slighty manic atmos phere that prevails. It's the sort of place where the bank manager rings up as he did during my visit to ask if they've got any good games for his new Arnstrad 6128. It's the sort of place where it hardly seems unusual :hat Robert While began as an art student, trained as a teacher, changed to Quantity Surveying and ended up designing hospitals on computer before starting his own software house with an Oric and a few programs he d now rather forget. it was in 1983 that Robe: t's ad in the Somerset County Gazette attracted the attention of Mike Richardson. who promptly wrote Jungle Troubles and Harrier Attack - the programs that started Durell on the road to success Now there are 9 full-time programmers employed a: Durell. plus another three freelances who can be called on when the need arises. The launch of the three games previewed . here should make them one of the most important software houses around in 1986.
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a Welshman now resident In Taunton. It Is, In fact, his first commercially released program - an earlier effort for Durell was deemed unfit for human consumption. Saboteur is all Clive's own work, from original Idea through to programming of both Amstrad and Spectrum versions.
Scuba Diver; a strange and compelling underwater game on the Spectrum way back in the summer of 1984. Arnoldians, though, will probably know him best as the author of Harrier Attack, one of the games provided in the Amstrad introductory pack - a cool 100,000 must have been given away already, and as many more been sold over the computer counters of the country.
