![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
It must be awfully hard
finding politically correct
villains for Speccy gmes.
The plot to Moving Target
runs as follows. 'The evil
drugs dukee of Colombia must die.'
There you are. A healthily dastardly
villain everybody can hiss without fear
of offending anyone but Colombian
drugs barons, who aren't the sort of
readers we're aiming for anyway,
thankyouverymuch.
Moving Target is surprisingly good. It's a zap game in the drand old tradition of running around a flip-screen maze, finding keys to open doors, shooting guards and planting bombs. (Very Dan Dare-ish, actually.) It overcomes some pretty tough handicaps to emerge smiling and worthy of a good couple of hours' play now and then. The first of these handicap sare the graphics. They are, to use that splendid YS-ism, crap, with some very odd animation of some very odd sprites. The deadly guard dogs are the worst offenders - they sort of sit there looking like carved lard, then suddenly breakdance over to bite your legs off. (Vicious tykes too - takes most of a clip of ammo to finish them off.) At least there are some nice'n' chunky 128K sound effects. So, apart from looking awful and trickily playing about with difficulty levels (you can't fire on the run, which gives the enemy ample time to surround you), Moving Target is a barrel of laughs. From the snazzy effect of just seeing the muzzle flash of your gun rather than having the bullets fly across the screen to the ratings table that starts at 'Rookie' and improves as you go along (er, to 'Second Rate' in my case), the game just, well, gels. There are thousands of baddies to zap, many obstacles to avoid (that barbed wire is really rotten), a massive map to memorise and those blimmin' guard dogs to curse. I enjoyed every cordite-permeated moment of it. [One of the "Ones That Got Away" reviews --NickH]
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Jonathan Nash has kindly authorised this site | ||||||||||
| LOOKING FOR EX-YS WRITERS! Do you know where any are? | ||||||||||
| READERS NOTE: The original YS articles on this site were written many many years ago, and should provide no indication WHATSOEVER of the author's present writing style. Judge these people on their current work, not articles they wrote decades ago. | ||||||||||
| All original YS text is still copyright to their original owners, including BOTH publishers and authors. Permission has been granted to reproduce these articles by a few of these owners - if you see your work on here and would like it to be taken down, e-mail me and I'll do it straightaway. All other pages have similar restrictions - email me for more details. None of the pages on this website may be reproduced in any way, nor sold to the general public (i.e. put onto a CD-ROM) without the consent of Nick Humphries and the author of each article. If you want to include any of these articles on a site or a CD, contact me for more instructions. |