Rick Dangerous, eh? What a guy! Last year he dodged boulders, leapt impossible gaps and tussled with pigmies (amongst other equally risky things). This time round he's sneaking aboard alien space ships, wrestling polar bears, and bounding up rather tall trees. 'I'd rather stay at home and watch Baywatch actually,' says MATT BIELBY...
    Picture the scene: there we all were on the grass outside the YS shed, trying to make some choices for the Games Of The Year '89 award thingies. As you might expect a lot of people plumped for the obvious (Chase HQ, Carrier Command and the like) but every so often a really simple looking, unpretentious little game would get mentioned. It wasn't a big arcade or film licence, it didn't push forward any great technical boundaries, to be honest it hadn't really attracted that much attention at all when it first came out. But somehow it'd still managed to make a surprisingly large impression, and it soon became crystal clear why that was. And why? Well, simply that everyone found it dead playable, of course! It didn't win any awards (either from us or elsewhere, if I remember) but nobody had a bad word to say about it.
    That game (as you should have guessed by now if you're not ultra-thick) was the first Rick Dangerous, and a right little corker it was too. At the time ( mid '89 I guess) it was mega-gigantic things like Carrier Command, Times Of Lore and Total Eclipse II that were making all the headlines, so when little Rick - something you didn't need a 124 page manual to play! - came along it was like a breath of fresh air.
    Actually, I lied a bit a back there. People did have a bad thing to say about Rick - just one - and that's that they found it a little bit too hard. Just because a game is easy to get into doesn't mean it can't be incredibly tricky, and Rick is a case in point. MicroStyle actually brought out a special 'easier' edition of it fairly recently for all those people that never got past level two - an almost unprecedented step.
    But anyway; the new Rick Dangerous game. Those who completed the first one (ie. About three people probably) will know that the end of Rick (1) rather neatly sets the scene for Rick (2) - yep, they apparently planned for a sequel that early on! His first adventure completed, Rick is entertaining a lady friend in a restaurant in Hyde Park when - yikes! - a giant alien space ship plops down right next to them! Everybody else runs away (of course) but (Rick being Rick) our hero legs it in the opposite direction - straight up inside the alien ship! - thus paving the way for this newie. Yes, you guessed it, it's Rick in space!
    
Blimey! But wasn't Rick meant to be a jungle hero (just like Indiana Jones)?
Well yes, and then again, no. As you so cleverly deduced, Rick (1) was (ahem) 'heavily influenced' by the Indiana Jones films (and the various jungle adventures that came before it). However Rick himself wasn't really conceived as an Indiana Jones type only - he was more your universal hero, who could (in sequels) look and act like any traditional adventurer the programmers fancied.
    Thus Rick (2) leans heavily on another series of classic cliff hangers - those '30s Flash Gordon serials with Buster Crabbe and oodles of gothic space ships with sparklers sticking out the back. The levels in this new Rick are all pastiches of the environments from those films - the ice planet, the forest world, the mud mines (from Buck Rogers this one, but never mind) and (of course) Emperor Ming's Palace. (Doing the research must've been fun at least.)
    
Let's see how it all works shall we?
In game design Rick 2 is pretty identical to the first one. There are five levels this time (not four) but the flip screen horizontally/push scrolling vertically way of working and the slab side viewpoint remain the same. It's very colourful, with cute, squat little sprites and gameplay that more or less equally combines bits that require sheer game playing skill with sections where a bit of clever thinking is required. Actually I think I'll stress that colourful bit again (I skipped over it a bit back there). This is actually one of the most visually attractive platform and ladders games of recent times, packed with colour (but very little clash) and plenty of visual variety. Though the levels feature much the same sort of gameplay, they each have a very different atmosphere and feel. I won't stress it any further, but if you thought the first Rick was pretty (and it was) then check this one out. The other main improvement should (though I can't vouch for it yet) be that the game has a rather easier learning curve. Instead of bunglng you straight into things (though the lazer-bolt packed opening screen is similar to the 'leg it!' start of the first game) it tones things down a bit for the first level. Though it gets very hairy later on, this first section should give most gamesplayers few real problems - it's almost set up to show you how things work and get you into the feel of the game. I'll explain what I mean further as we take a look at the individual levels.
    
Level One - The Alien Mothership
A-ha! The very 'learning' level I was going on about a minute ago, though to be honest I'd be lying if I said it was as easy as all that (it isn't, it's just not as hard as some of the later ones). So where are we? Well, it's the 1950s, you're in a restaurant in London's Hyde Park, and there's a giant alien space ship hovering above you. Instead of fedora, whip and so on (the outfit from the first game) Rick now comes in a fetching red jumpsuit thingie, (nasty) blond quiff and blue cape, and comes equipped with a few sticks of dynamite (useful for clearing blocked doorways or whatever) and the traditional hair-dryer style ray gun.
    The screens themselves? Well, they're very colourful (pink, mainly!) and metallic looking, and in typical Rick style are basically a mass of platforms, ladders and dangerous drops. Typical gameplay elements, like the fact that you have to backtrack to press wall buttons (some of which are unfortunately booby-trapped!) on earlier screens in order to activate doors, moving platforms or whatever crop up a lot, and are rather easier to work out than they may be later on in the game. The first of the tricky floor surfaces you'll come across throughout the game crops up too, this one being magnetised so you can't jump up onto platforms until you find an unmagnetised bit.
    
Level Two - The Ice Caves Of Freezia
This is based on the Ice World (I think it was a moon of Mango, Ming the Merciless's planet in the original, but I'm not sure) from the original serials and (before that) comic strip. Everything is very blue and icy looking of course, and really rather pretty. Baddies are yeti-type creatures, sort of mechanical penguins and various monsters that start off trapped in blocks of ice. These are quite neat - they fall from the ceiling as you pass by, thawing out quickly to reveal the nasties. The surface can be a bit spooky too, including (if I remember it all properly) deep snow that slows you right down.
    
Level Three - The Forests Of Vegetalla
Rather like the Ewok villages from the last Star Wars film (or Prince Barin's land in Flash Gordon), this basically takes the form of a whole series of platforms, ladders, huts (which you can walk into and out the other side) and so on based around the trunks of three giant trees. Unlike all the other levels, this one actually gives you a choice of routes - one up each tree, more or less, so you can chose a different one each time. Special bouncy floors help you jump to the higher platforms, and baddies take the form of Rick-eating plants, pigmies, super heavy leaves that knock you over if they land on you (!) and so on. It's the level that's most like what I remember of the original Rick, but perhaps a teeny bit more colourful. It even features some tiny Ewoks bouncing around as a little joke in the 16 bit versions, but whether these'll filter down to the Speccy isn't clear yet.
    
Level Four - Beneath The Alien Citadel
Urn, don't know quite as much about this one, I'm afraid (perhaps because at the time I went to visit the programmers they'd hardly started it) but it's apparently very, urn, brown and muddy looking. It's basically set in a mud mine (an idea nicked from an old Buck Rogers apparently) filled with slimey mud men, conveyor belts, sticky floors that slow you down and moving mining carts. (It all sounds a bit like a '90s version of Wanted: Monty Mole.)
    
Level Five - The Citadel
Urn, er, um. If they'd only just started the second level, they're hardly likely to have got very far with this one, have they? And indeed, they haven't. Expect bright, over the top decorations, lots of guards and various booby traps, I should think.
    
Core blimey!
So who are the guys behind Rick The Dick 2? Well, they're the same bunch that did Rick 1 (surprise surprise). Namely, Core Design - a bunch of about 12 or 13 mainly ex-Gremlln programmers who set up on their own a couple of years ago. Their stuff has included Dynamite Dux for Activision, Action Fighter for Firebird, Impossamole and the 16 bit Switchblade (but not the upcoming 8 bit version) for Gremlin, Monty Python for Virgin (Just finished, and a bit of a nightmare to complete, apparently) and of course the two Rick games.
    'It's quite fitting really,' says main man Jeremy Heath-Smith (an ex-Gremlln Sales Manager), 'we took the idea of Rick to Firebird a couple of years back and it turned out to be our first game as independent programmers. Now Rick 2's almost ready and it'll be our last. You see, we're going to be publishing our own stuff from now on so we won't be doing programming for anyone else. The first of our own games will be out in August but it's 16 bit only I'm afraid - it'll be a long time (if ever) before you see another Speccy product from us.' The way Core tends to work is much more like a production line than you get at most developers. In this case Terry Lloyds and Simon Phipps (who designed the first Rick) came up with the basic ideas and then did the graphics, while Dave Pridmore wrote the code and did the music. All fairly normal you might think, but then a guy called Bob Churchill comes in, whose main job seems to be to actually work out the order in which each trap, platform and enemy appears. He's an experienced gamesplayer and tests the thing for ages, moving elements about until they appear at what he judges to be just the right time and in just the right order. If he thinks the first trap comes too soon after the second he'll move it along a bit. If he thinks half way through level two (say) is a bit boring, he'll shunt everything around to spice it up a bit. (It's a weird job alrlght but, well, somebody's got to do it).
    Since everythlng's being done effectively in the same few rooms and each version is being developed at exactly the same speed as the rest, ideas filter through from one programmer to another quite rapidly. You'll find graphical differences between the machines of course, but the idea is that gameplay will be near as dammit exactly the same whatever version you buy.
    So Jeremy, did you come across any major massive problems doing this game? 'Not at all. Not a sausage. Really, we knew what we wanted, we knew we could do it, and everythings's gone incredibly smoothly.'
    'We ran out of tea once,' chips in Bob, 'that was a bit of a disaster. We had to go down to Macro and buy 11,000 bags of new ones'.
    'The best bit, ' continued Jeremy,'was doing the research. Luckily the Flash Gordon serials were on TV quite recently so we've watched them all, and the film was on too so we got some ideas from that. Someone brought In a whole load of the original Dan Dare comics which got us into the feel of '50s sci-fi stuff too. Like with the first Rick we went through them all to see how they'd used each trap and situation and grabbed the best ideas for ourselves, then mixed them in with some we came up with on our own. Hopefully the game will remain very faithful to the spirit of the originals. And that's it really. Rick's a lot of fun to write and a lot of fun to play. We hope this one does even better than the first.'
    And if it's as good as (or better than!) the first we can only agree. Well done chaps, and if you change your minds about doing more Speccy games, give us a bell, y'hear?

Ratings given by other magazines

9/10      9/10    Crash Review ---

Info supplied by the SPOT*ON database

YS Cross-references
		Rick Dangerous II/MicroStyle	YS59	90