Manic Miner

INVENTIVE CAVERNS DESERVE MORE SUCCESS

Mutant telephones, killer penguins and caverns of ice are all part of Manic Miner for the 48K Spectrum. The game includes some impressive graphics routines which you will encounter when you take your player-character, Willy the miner, through a series of caverns inhabited by all kinds of strange creatures.

To exit from a cavern you have to pick up a series of keys hung from various parts of the ceiling or from bushes which are deadly if you touch them. To reach those keys you must jump on to ledges which are situated at various heights and you must jump in the correct order or you will fall back to earth again.

If you are not careful you could bump into a patrol robot, shaped in various guises, which will take away one of your lives.

The other killer is a fall from one of the ledges which disappears as you walk along it. If the ledge is high a life could be lost.

The game is very inventive and a great deal of thought must have gone into creating the many screens full of colourful characters. It is one of the few games on the market which deserves to succeed automatically because of the effort put into it. It has the depth of concept and quality of sound and vision to make it an instant winner.

If you cannot pass all the caverns and discover the secret of the game in the last sector the author has included an excellent taster routine which runs automatically at the start of the program. It shows the various caverns as they can be seen in the game.

Manic Miner should keep anyone, child or adult, enthralled through the long winter evenings. It costs £5.95 and can be obtained from computer branches of W H Smith.

The all-time classic of arcade games on the Spectrum. Written by Matthew Smith, originally for Bug-Byte, it proved to be the ultimate in ladder and level games, and has caused an influx of lookalike software from other companies.

Your aim is get through as many weird and wonderful screens as possible to collect keys to the mine in which Willy works. You must escape from mechanical penguins, mutant toilets, poisonous pansies and mining robots. At the end you can access a special screen of evil goodies which will finish off any miner.

Position 3/50