| Software |
IN Great Britain Limited, a game for the 48K Spectrum, the player inherits the problems of the British economy. You have a choice of becoming Conservative, Labour, Liberal or SDP Prime Minister, with a five-year term of office which would give ulcers to any hardened Minister.
The purpose is to manipulate the yearly budget to keep inflation and unemployment at the lowest possible level. That may be difficult one way or another because you may have to raise company taxes to bring down inflation. If you do so, however, people will be made redundant, because bosses cannot afford to retain them. As a result of the tax increases, the dole queues will grow longer.
On top of the mass unemployment, soaring inflation rate, increases in prices and taxes, you may have to deal with riots and general public disquiet.
Every five years you will have to face a General Election and perhaps suffer a humiliating defeat. It is easier to lose in this game than to win. Inflation and unemployment seem to escalate for no reason at all. The game may enlighten a few to the problems of Government but it is a game, not a simulation. It costs £4.95.
Great Britain Limited is available from S W Hessel, Berkshire.
ONE OF the first companies to produce a chess program for the ZX-81 was Artic Computing. Now Artic has beaten even Sinclair and Psion to writing a chess game for the Spectrum. It can be used only with the 48K Spectrum but it gives options which were not possible on the ZX-81. On first loading, the program asks whether the player wants to play, analyse, or load.
Taking the play option first, there are seven levels of play with response times ranging from two seconds to five minutes. The board is represented in high resolution at the right-hand side of the screen and the moves made by player and computer are printed on the left.
The players are represented using user-defined graphics but are a little too small for our liking. It would have been better to have a larger board with bigger characters on it.
Using the analyse option, it is possible to set up the board to allow the computer to analyse a position with which the player may have had difficulty or has found in one of the many chess magazines and books under the heading of chess problems. The instructions for the game also say that this option is ideal for end-game analysis.
The main difference between ZX-81 and Spectrum chess is the ability to save games you have not completed. You can then load the unfinished game into the machine and resume where you finished. It is irritating on the ZX-81 when it is necessary to complete a whole game which could take as long as an hour, or not finish the game. Now that problem has been overcome and it takes only seconds to re-load a game.
Spectrum Chess is from Artic Computing, Hull and costs £9.95.
THE SPECTRUM Monitor is a new machine code entry and debugging program for the Spectrum 16K and 48K. The program is written in machine code and allows free interchange between it and Basic. The monitor occupies slightly more than 4K of user memory, leaving plenty of space for machine code programming and debugging.
Access to any part of memory is allowed and the monitor contains a disassembler which uses the standard Z-80 mnemonics. It is possible to change memory locations and move around blocks of memory.
One major advantage of the Spectrum Monitor is that it will display the contents of the CPU registers. That will help users to identify bugs in machine code programs.
Another useful addition is a hex/decimal converter.
It is possible to put a disassembled listing of memory on to the printer as well as on to the screen. That is a very useful facility, as it will allow the user to scan programs in a leisurely fashion.
The Spectrum Monitor is an attractively-presented program and easy to use. It costs £7.50 and is available from Picturesque, Kent.
YOU ARE trapped in a maze which looks slightly like Hampton Court maze. There are several hungry monsters on the prowl waiting for you to give them a quick snack to satisfy their meaner instincts. If you bump into one of the creatures from the prehistoric age while running around the maze your life will not be worth two flint axeheads. That is how a new game for the 16K Spectrum, Escape, begins.
The most amazing thing about the game is the graphics. The screen shows a three-dimensional overview of a maze. You must control the little man at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen with the cursor control keys. The purpose is to wander around the maze to find and pick up an axe. Once you have found the axe you can break down the door of the maze and escape. To do that you must also keep out of the jaws of the monsters.
The maze is generated randomly at the beginning of each game.
The game was written by the author of the J K Greye 3D Monster Maze and is one of the best and most original games we have seen for the Spectrum so far.
Escape is available from New Generation Software, Bristol.