| ★ AMSTRAD CPC ★ GAMESLIST ★ LAZER TAG (c) GO! ★ |
Computer and Video Games |
Lazer Tag was hyped hugely at the PCW show last Autumn as the 'latest craze from America' that we all ought to be interested in.
A bit like primary school playground war where you surprise your enemy with an imaginary gun, shout 'bang' and he is dead except that now the game takes place in a futuristic set, and your guns use micro-beams to register direct hits on recorder devices worn on each player's chest. It's a bit like one of those war games, Combat Zone for instance, only with a sci-fi theme. The real Lazer Tag is operated by a company called Worlds of Wonder at dozens of centres all over America. So how does it work as a computer game? Not very well has to be the first and most glaringly obvious observation about this game. It was programmed for Go! by the development house Probe -who were also incidentally responsible for a number of the Out Run conversions. In fairness to Probe they did start the design with a fairly serious handicap - the insistence of the Lazer Tag owners that the computer interpretation be completely non-violent. Pretty tall for any computer game designer. What's non-violent about that you may wonder. Well - the men don't actually explode the targets on their chests simply glow and you 'hit' meter counts down. Certain items are scattered around the floor like a gun and length of chain - though picking them up serves no purpose that I could work out. As you scroll up-screen there are fences at the end of each section. Your man occasionally sticks to these again for no discernable reason.
A tank-like vehicle may rumble across the screen or a copter appears and start straffing you but there appears to be nothing you can do about it. The lazer gun fire itself has a neat idea in that the bullets can bounce off angle to hit their targets. Quite complex patterns of lines can streak around the screen. This could have been the basis of challenging game, especially if two players could have played simultaneously. Unfortunately you have such little control over the laser and your player that it fails totally. It is entirely down to chance whether you hit the targets or not. To add to the frustration, Lazer Tag is also an 'against the clock' so that just as you are trying to work out what the blazes is going on you have to start all over again. The play area is dotted with spinning satellite dishes which -according to the instructions -increase your fire power when you shoot them. Not so in my version. I blasted away for ages - all to no avail. It would be possible to go on listing the faults of this game but it wouldn't serve much purpose. What we have here is game design that was only half thought-out and an implementation only partially carried through. This would have received a luke warm reception as a budget title - but at ten quid our advice is avoid it like the plague. This is an unfortunate release for Go! - as they do have some excellent other titles about to be launched such as Bionic Commandos and Wizard Wars. Lazer Tag is the dog in the pack. Computer and Video Games |
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Page créée en 958 millisecondes et consultée 2193 fois L'Amstrad CPC est une machine 8 bits à base d'un Z80 à 4MHz. Le premier de la gamme fut le CPC 464 en 1984, équipé d'un lecteur de cassettes intégré il se plaçait en concurrent du Commodore C64 beaucoup plus compliqué à utiliser et plus cher. Ce fut un réel succès et sorti cette même années le CPC 664 équipé d'un lecteur de disquettes trois pouces intégré. Sa vie fut de courte durée puisqu'en 1985 il fut remplacé par le CPC 6128 qui était plus compact, plus soigné et surtout qui avait 128Ko de RAM au lieu de 64Ko. |
