Label: Ocean
Author: Andrew Deakin
Price: £8.95
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tony Dillon
Hurgh. Ugh, ugh ugh! Heuurrrgh!!! (Sound of gunfire) Aargh! Urgh! He drew first blood! The classic lines of a classic movie. Which one? Any of Sylvester Stallone's. To be a little more exact and topical, I'm referring to Rambo 3, the latest offering from the Boom, Splurt and Ugh Movie Company.
You play Roger Rabbit in a daring raid across enemy borders. No, I'm lying completely, you in fact play John Rambo in a daring raid across enemy borders, all based on the film of the sequel of the book of the game of the gun of the death of the court case of the 12 year old axe maniac come Rambo fan of the, oh, you know what I'm on about.
The game is divided into three wonderful and totally different sections. The first has your friend and mine, JR, racing around inside a huge enemy compound in search of his ol' buddy, Major Trautman. Trauty is hidden behind a door. A metal door. A metal electrified door. Ah, you say, that is a problem, and yes, you've hit the nail right on the head. The first section is a flip screen maze with dozens of problems, the ultimate bit being to get a pair of rubber gloves (snurk) which stop him from receiving any electrical shocks.
In the bottom right hand corner of the screen is a picture of Johnny baby, and as he takes the battle damage, he slowly generates into a ghastly skeleton, just like the turkey in Atic Atac. Weird.
The second section isn't all that different from the first, other than being outside the base rather than inside and the only problems you have are finding the eight bombs you have to prime and detonate.
The third section is quite wicked, but gets really boring, really quickly. You are in a tank racing full pelt in the direction of the border. Looming out of the distance are enemy soldiers, tanks and rockets. Now I might be wrong, but this section does bear more than a slight resemblance to a certain product also being released this chrimbo and happens to be programmed by the same team. You are in control of a crosshair and have to shoot everything until you reach the border (a counter in the corner counts away the distance). This isn't exactly hard requiring a strategy of left to right and reverse joystick sweeps.
The graphics on the whole are pretty nice. The third section is amazingly fast and very smooth, impressive all round, in fact. The first two remind me of nothing more than games like into the Eagle's Nest and Fernandez Must Die.
The problem with Rambo 3 is not that it's a bad game, it's just too drawn out to be an arcade game and not complex enough to be an arcade adventure of any merit. In the words of that immortal hero. "Do we get to win this time?" Didn't you win last time, jonny-boy?
Label: Hit Squad
Memory: 48K/128K
Price: £2.99 Tape
Reviewer: Chris Jenkins
He's been a bit quiet lately, old Rambo - time was when you couldn't cross the street without seeing a big poster of Sylvester Stallone toting a enormous weapon and making grunting noises (fnarr!).
Well, the movies became more predictable as the series went on, but oddly enough the games got better, and Rambo III is consequently the best of the lot.
It's in three sections, the first basically a flip-screen maze seen in top-down semi-perspective; Rambo searches an enemy compound for his captured CO, picking up objects such as rubber gloves which get him through electrified doors.
In the second section, which has the same basic format, Rambo searches outside the base for eight bombs which have to be defused; and in the final bit, which has a Operation Wolf style forward-scrolling format, you take control of a tank and blast your way through enemy armoured cars, soldiers and rockets.
It's all good stuff, good enough to be a budget bargain if not original enough to qualify for classic status. It just goes to show that old soldiers never die, they just reappear on budget.
All information in this page is provided by ZXSR instead of ZXDB