| ★ AMSTRAD CPC ★ GAMESLIST ★ MACROCOSMICA (c) AMSOFT/DATACOM ★ |
Amstrad Action | PopularComputingWeekly | Aktueller Software Markt |
Much as I love playing Elite, the arcade sequences always frustrate my tired old fingers. To the rescue comes author David Reading with his Macrocosmica. It's Elite without the zapping: ten galaxies, each consisting of 600 cells, plus an eleventh which is inidaily hidden from the player, await exploration. The strategy required is to keep your fuel levels topped up to ensure a safe passage from planet to planet while avoiding irate attacks and meteor storms, and earning enough money to equip your ship with the right equipment to get from galaxy to galaxy. Buying cheap and selling dear (Civil War breaks out quite often, when a killing can be made in small arms and medical supplies) is the way to make money, though you can make shady deals with pirates, gamble at the local Hi-Lo casino, or even, indulge in a bit of drug-smuggling (beware the Customs officers). Good sound and pretty graphics make this an attractive and addictive game to play, but a major letdown is the lack of a Save feature, necessary, surely, in a game of this sort. A Pause facility would have been a poor sec-ond-best, but even this is missing.
An enjoyable albeit flawed game - but the price of nearly ten quid is surely well over the odds? SPACE DOTS Macrocosmica is the latest release under the umbrella of Amstrad's own Amsoft Gold label, the idea being that Gold games are a few cuts above the usual run of the mill and thus justify a marginally higher price. Macrocosmica is, son of, Elite without the hi res animated vector graphics or. if you like, a souped-up version of Star Trek. In short it is a trading game with a space plot with a few nominal space graphics as you travel from planet to planet. Central to the program is buying and selling of goods through the universe. Like Elite it has a scanner to tell you what's in the vicinity and give you details like how tough the customs are and what sort of economy each has. There are pirates who will steal your cargo and who also give rise to one of the few animated sections of the game a very simple left, right, up, down, blast away as you hurtle through a mass of dots that represents space. It's nicely presented, but there really isn't enough to retain the interest. As a trading game it lacks humour and the graphics are not enough to justify the price tag. PopularComputingWeekly860130 |
|  |
Page créée en 093 millisecondes et consultée 6905 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. |
