Company Feature
Manta-Soft

This is yet another new section of the mag where we'll be looking at various Amiga Commercial or Amateur companies, reviewing all products which they've made that we can get our hands on, giving you a history of the company, various company profiles, information and previews if possible.

This issue we're starting with Mantasoft. A free/share ware company who have produced quite a few games and applications. Possibly the most bizzare of which is an ASCII art editor which is one of the many reviews in this section.







Manta Soft History

Well, I started it in about 95/6 when I started learning AMOS.

The first few games I made were just simple multiplayer games, written on an A500 with a copy of AmosPro. I then upgraded to an A1200 and then I made first real, spod land. Thats when I thought of the manta soft name and logo

.

After that I carried on programming, learning different techneques. You can see if you look at my games in cronological order how they get more and more advanced :-)

Then, at the end of 98, I went to 6th form College. yay!. The only problem is that now I can't seem to find that much time to do programming anymore. Don't worry, I'm still making stuff, just not as fast or as frequently as I used to.

And thats just about it. (wow, what an interesting story).







Battle Othello

We've all played it surely. The game where you put down coloured 'things' in an attempt to dominate a board. I'm not really familiar with the way it works, I've never studied it at great length, but basically, you place one of your coloured blobs one square away from another of your colour, and this will do something which means that you get a lot of your coloured blobs overwriting some of the opposing colours.

As with all the Mantasoft games, this has exceptionally nice graphics and is easy to play if you know what you're doing. As I don't really know how the game works, I wouldn't have thought you'd want me to go into it. So I won't :-)

9/10






SpodRacers

This is a pretty cool game, which doesn't really have anything to do with racing. It's based, quite obviously, on Knockout 2, as you'll see when you download it. However, unlike Knockout, this has some nice additions.

The basic game, first. It's very much like Knockout except that you're not racing on a circle, but you're racing on courses instead (of which you can design your own).

Basically, drive around the track banging into the other cars and making that blow up. The last one standing wins. Easy. There are some nice little extras which have been added to the game which make it better than the competition

.

There's the Spod files feature. This shows you a profile of each of the Spods with a nice routine at the bottom of the screen showing the Spod's car driving around.

There's the Tutorial mode which shows you how to play the game by dumping you on a course, telling you to drive and then placing another car on for you to kill.

And there's the game. And it's all nicely presented, nicely put together and it's very easy to play. Great!

9/10






Ascii Art Studio

Well, here's an interesting program. It's a paint package with a difference. A big difference. That difference is that you create Ascii (that is, text) pictures with it. It's got nearly all the features of a paint program, but instead of working with individual pixels, you work with characters.

It's even got features to cut out blocks of text which you can then move around as a brush and place anywhere you want, as many times as you want.

It's got a useful feature which allows you to load in an IFF picture which it then converts to Ascii. It does it quite well, to say it's pretty hard to write these conversion routines (I know from experience).

Overall, it's a pretty good program. nice interface, even though it does use Interlaced mode. And if you want to create ASCII logo's, this is the program for you

9/10