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Reviewed by David Bradforth
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It’s always nice to see another games collection released for the Acorn platform, and especially so when it’s released by APDL. The format is simple: a collection of public domain (shareware or freeware) games which will appeal to most of the family. There truly is something for everybody, and as it’s a collection devoted to the player, there is none of that silly utility stuff which you may or may not want.
The full collection includes Kryten, Digger, TaiPei, Bomba Man, Blitzer, Kick Off, Patience, PollTax, Sim, Hatris, Miner, Bunny Race, BotKiller 1, Gyrinus 2, HangMan, RailPro, Fall, DStar and Grey Thunder. Whilst it’s highly probable that you’re not familiar with all of these titles, I’m only going to comment, in what follows, on just a few of these games − we could fill a whole issue of Archive writing comments about each game in the selection! We may do a roundup of PD games in a future issue and that would be more appropriate there.
Bunny Race
Bunny Race is a superb little game where you’re driving a bunny with attitude in a race against a rather nasty geezer in a plane. I love the little game-related stories, so here’s the plot taken directly from the help text given inside the game:
Poor old Elvis the bunny really was having a bad hare day. If it wasn’t bad enough for some unsavoury character to have spray-painted his lovely car in such an unappetising pink colour, they had also stolen all of his cabbages too! Well, Elvis was not best pleased, and set off to find the culprit.
Following the track of paw prints nearby, he soon reached the burrow of his arch rival, the evil Alfonso! All the evidence was there − the chewed cabbage leaves, the pots of pink paint in the corner... Elvis had caught Alfonso red pawed! However, Alfonso wasn’t going to give up that easily! He grabbed the remaining cabbages and jumped into his handily placed get-away plane, and flew away...
Elvis knew his mission − to catch up with Alfonso, and rescue the stolen cabbages!
It’s just brilliant: the game is optimised for an ARM 3 Archimedes, but even on a StrongARM RiscPC the whole feeling is of pure professionalism. Recommended.
Kryten
Quite obviously inspired by Red Dwarf, yet incredibly strange. I just couldn’t get the hang of it; which is a shame really as I’ve just seen a comedy show by one of the Red Dwarf stars. Dunno what to say ...
Kick Off
Good thing this is a PD game because, if it weren’t, it could be interfering quite majorly with a game called ... erm ... Kick Off which has been on the computer market for years and years! This is a version exclusive to this CD-ROM, but I’m not a particularly big football fan, so we’ll leave comment on this for a future magazine.
Gyrinus 2
This is, quite possibly, one of the best pieces of public domain software ever to come across my Acorn desktop. It is written by Tom Cooper, who is now working at Psygnosis (there are still some people working there, you know) and it’s a really good platform game. I love it, and I’ve not told you anything about it. Do I need to tell you anything about it? Well let’s just say that Tom Cooper had a reputation for his sense of humour − if you’ve played Hamsters or 2067BC you’ll understand why. [Clue: the sole aim of Hamsters was to beat the living daylights out of .. erm .. Hamsters.]
So to conclude ...
... what can we say? For £7.90, you’re getting 20 superb games which have been modified to run directly from the CD-ROM. I’ve noticed a minor problem with the Frogger game which I shall now inform APDL of, but aside from that it’s superb value for money, and brilliant fun to play as well. Recommended! This is only available directly from APDL.
David Bradforth, darcworld@argonet.co.uk
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