Label: Melbourne House
Author: In-house
Price: £8.95
Joystick: various
Memory: 48K/128K
Reviewer: Graham Taylor
Bazooka Bill is at least as relentlessly violent as Rambo and involves as much running and dodging as Green Beret. It adds to these vote winning elements a missile firing Jet Fighter and an exploring element.
So who wants yet another violent game where you kill hundreds of people, climb ladders and jump backwards and forwards? Almost everybody I should think.
There is a plot, considerably more subtle than Rambo it is too, you are Bazooka Bill a legendary soldier armed only with those weapons you happen to find lying around. Curiously enough, one of these may be a Bazooka. You must fight your way around a series of islands in the south Pacific seeking and rescuing General Macarthur (the real General MacArthur was a loony who nearly brought the world to nuclear destruction in the Korean War).
You get to fly between islands in a Jet Fighter and move around and through buildings, past walls in front of scenic mountain peaks and between city streets. They aren't tremendously exciting but there is more variety here than in the competition.
The graphics are odd, there are various ways of doing sprites which (not being technical) I would characterise as being either not-attribute-clashing-much-but-kind-of-translucent-looking or solid-looking-but-changing-colour-horrendously, the sprites here are somewhere between the two ie a bit translucent and a bit colour clashing. Nothing beats Dan Dare or Dynamite Dan II for graphics in this style of game yet.
Anyway, if you should ever get tired of killing people there are large numbers of less squidgy objects for you to blast including tanks and trucks. Here's a handy tip: you won't take out a tank if only armed with a knife. This is software verite.
In terms of variety at least Bazooka may actually be better than the competition, even if you've been killing the guys in Rambo you'll want to kill even more of them in Bazooka Bill.
It isn't a game that filled me with much joy mainly because there isn't actually anything new in it either themewise or programmingwise but it ought to do well.
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