Regular SAM Centre readers will be not at all surprised to see the words 'FRED Publishing' spring out of nowhere. The 'premier' Coupe publisher (in the 'My God they're everywhere, has the Monopolies and Mergers Commission heard about this?' sense of the word), FRED has snaffled Fish and Chips and made it their own - you can only get the demo as part of Issue 28 of FRED disk magazine. (So that's the 'public domain' tie-in shattered then, but we'll plough on regardless.)
    Fish and Chips is a three-parter featuring, quite naturally, a large amount of aquatic creatures and some cut potatoes. The first part is a fine demonstration of the PALETTE command as various denizens of the deep zap across the screen at tremendous speed, changing colour as they do so. A gentle lean on SPACE and the second part pops up. This is a scrolly special, with yer basic message zooming across the screen and disappearing into a shark's maw. Oh, and there's a bouncing Electron Affinity logo in one corner. The scrolly goes on for ages, and is really very funny, even if punctuation seems to have gone out of the window. I especially liked the greetings section, which starts sensibly enough, but ends up with hellos to several people called John, every hardware manufacturer ever, lots of people with the letter combination 'od' in their name... and so on. This silliness is accompanied by a rather nice and very mellow tune, which is a welcome change from the usual drum beat mania.
    The last part of the demo is another huge scrolly with some things flying about the screen. It's another fun-packed wibble trip that occasionally remembers to mention fish and chips in order to justify the title of the demo. All in all, a very enjoyable piece of writing with a few nice effects tacked on.