Wheelie

Producer: Microsphere
Memory Required: 48K
Retail Price: £5.95
Language: Machine code

Microsphere seem to have done it again, following up their excellent Train Game with another wholly original, beautifully put together game in Wheelie. You have just taken delivery of the ultimate two-wheeled machine - the four cylinder fuel-injected turbo-charged Zedexaki 500. While you're out on the road trying it out, you see this sign saying 'Private road - no speed limit to brave riders'. All excited, you enter the driveway, the gates slam shut behind you, and you are trapped in Nightmare Park. Your only way out now is to find the ghostrider, who's dozing somewhere off to the right, wake him up and then race him back. The park is full of wildlife, all trained in karate, so bumping into any is not so good for the health.

The screen display takes the form of four 'roads' stacked one on another almost like a cross section through caves. There are not always four visible, and any road travelled may well go steeply up or downhill to another level. There are thin 'up/downhill' lines across some, and the bike will travel down a level if the down key is pressed, and the same for uphill.

Apart from the vicious wildlife (includes leaping kangaroos and giant hedgehogs getting their own back for truckers) there are other problems to be encountered. Humps in the road can only be got over by accelerating rapidly at the last second and doing a 'wheelie' - front wheel riding up and over. Sometimes you have to jump over a bus! There's also ice on some roads, which must be taken with caution. Running into a dead end will kill you off if you don't brake in time, and going downhill too fast can also be rather fatal! Gas stations are few and far between, so it's worth backtracking for them. To be promoted to a new level requires completing the one you're on, when you'll be given a code to let you enter the next one up. Good riding!

COMMENTS

Control keys: left = bottom row left, right = bottom row right (these act as accelerate and brake), second row = down, third row = up and top row = freeze
Joystick: Kempston, AGF, Protek and user-definable keys
Keyboard play: very responsive
Colour: good
Graphics: excellent
Sound: good (excellent on bike effects)
Skill levels: several
Lives: 4
Screens: new regenerated, and scrolling

When I first saw another reviewer playing 'Wheelie', I thought that it was totally different and looked good. Then I got round to reviewing it and my impression that it was a sort of 'Scramble' game faded! It's much, much more! Revs are important when jumping cars and buses - too fast and the bike cartwheels, flinging the rider off, too slow and you won't make it. Once you get to the end of the complex you meet the ghost rider, a tune is played, and the race back begins. You must beat him but he has a distinct advantage - he can travel in a straight line across the screen, but only at about a third of your top speed. All that I can say is that I spent about three hours playing before I remembered I was supposed to write something about it! A dangerously addictive game. Great, Brill, Fantastic - super words fail. Just buy it!

The makers boast that Wheelie has some of the best graphics you're ever likely to see on a Spectrum. I'd like to think that there's still room for improvement as time goes by, but certainly these are exceptionally good. Smooth, very detailed with loads of animation. The spills the biker takes are all quite varied, depending on the type of mischance he hits. It's all quite realistic. At first you might assume that you can memorise the layout of the caverns, but I'm afraid not, each game they change. All in all, this is one of the most enjoyable games I have played for a long while, and I'm sure it's going to keep players entertained for hours.

If you're playing with the keyboard, it has a very sensible layout, but there's a menu for selecting Kempston or cursor type joystick as well as a routine for setting up other joysticks via user-defined keys. Very good. As for the game, well it is pretty good. Lovely graphics, very, very difficult and challenging. Excellent value.

Producer: Microsphere, 48K
£5.95 (2)

Overall on percentage, the highest rated game in Issue 2, and a worthy follow up to their excellent Train Game. You are riding the ultimate motorbike in Nightmare Park, a place full of lethal animals like hedgehogs and kangaroos all trained in Karate! The park has four 'floors', interconnected by hills and optional hills. You must drive along, collecting fuel on the way, avoid the animals, drive carefully over ice, leap buses and cars, do 'wheelies' over humps in the road and squeal to a halt before running to dead ends. If you get to the far right of the park you will wake the Ghost Rider who will race you back to the start. He may travel slower than you, but can do it in a straight line, whereas you must retrace your path through all the obstacles. The graphics are amazing, the biker is really well drawn and animated, falling off his machine in all sorts of different and realistic ways, depending on the particular accident that befalls him. It takes reall skill to get through. Quite good control keys but they may be user-defined. Almost any joystick will work. A very difficult and challenging game with progressively difficult skill levels. Rated as addictive, generally excellent and very good value. Overall CRASH rating 93% m/c.

Use of Computer: 89%
Graphics: 86%
Playability: 90%
Getting Started: 95%
Addictive Qualities: 99%
Value for Money: 99%
Overall: 93%

Wheelie got the best overall percentage in CRASH issue 2- 93%. In fact that makes it one of the highest scoring games in any issue of CRASH. Even now, it is fighting it out in the top five of the HOTLINE chart and has been successful in most popular sales charts as well. What do we think today? All I can say is that Wheelie is still the same compulsive, addictive game that it ever was. Nobody has tried yet to copy this game because it cannot be bettered. This game is so panicky, I just can't put it down. All the features are well structured to test the skill of the player and develop those skills in preparation for the final race against the biker. The graphics are so realistic, especially the crashes, but also the way in which the speed of the bike relates to hazards. They just haven't been improved upon by anyone yet.
MU

Wheelie was a highly original game when it came out, and looking at it now, one can only say that it is still original because no one has done anything like it. I rather doubt that any other version would be better anyway. I don't know yet what the Eddie Kidd game from Martech will be like, but if it's anything like Wheelie it will have to be really good to be better.
LM

(Matthew) I think the graphics are marvellous and I would want the rating to go up from 86% to 90%. I'm tempted to put up the playability (90%) a percent as well, as for addictive qualities (which were 99%) I'm only disappointed they weren't lower so I could put that up too!

(Lloyd) Wheelie seems like a good wine, put it down and when you open the bottle it tastes even better than when it was new. I agree with Matthew - a real curve of a game.

GHOST RIDER RULES IN DUEL OF DEATH

Memory: 48K
Price: £5.95
Joystick: Most joysticks - key program option

Find the ghost rider and race to death in Wheelie, a motor-cycle game for the 48K Spectrum. Before you can take part in this death race you will have to hunt through the many strange roads in the cavern scenario for the mysterious figure on a motor-cycle who will be your opponent.

In the caverns you will find hazards such as buses and cars to jump over, ice and gas to avoid, and ramps to pass over to reach the various parts of the cave system.

Your machine has all the latest equipment and will accelerate to phenomenal speeds. You should be careful, however, as many of the roads in the ghost rider's world are dead ends.

When you crash your rider will fly from his machine and skid to a halt on the road. While the animation is excellent, during those effects the crash sequence is a little too graphic and some people might find it tasteless.

Wheelie can be obtained from Microsphere Computer Services Ltd, 72 Roseby Road, London N10 2LA.

MACHINE: Spectrum 48K
JOYSTICK: Optional
CATEGORY: Arcade
SUPPLIER: Microsphere
PRICE: £5.95

Guide your bike through a large scrolling maze jumping over cars and buses and avoiding monsters. The skill lies in getting your speed right, and picking the most sensible route. It's fun and it'll keep you interested.

SOFT FOCUS

New this month. Softfocus will be a regular feature, providing short reviews of the newest software for the Sinclair Computers. This month the focus is on the way ahead for software.

Late last year, programs produced for the Spectrum Christmas market pointed the way for software in 1984. Ant Attack by Quicksilva and Android 2 by Vortex both included stunning animated graphics routines, setting a new standard for other programmers.

Artic Computing has now produced Bear Bovver for the 48K Spectrum, a shining example of animated graphics, which are used in an arcade-style game. Satan's Pendulum by Minatron Computing (48K) also includes animated sequences and, for keen programmers, gives a guide to how they were produced in the accompanying booklet.

While such excellent original software is being produced, software houses which cling to versions of Space Invaders and Pac-man are looking more and more outdated. The Romik Galactic Trooper and 3D Monster Chase are competent and bug-free games but do not have sufficient new ideas to make them attractive in 1984.

Realistic screen displays are becoming more and more common. Wheelie, from Microsphere for the 48K Spectrum, sends the player hurtling past obstacles and through caverns in search of the ghost rider. In the program, crash sequences are very graphic and tend towards the tasteless, while in Deathchase from Micromega - 16K Spectrum - the view from a motorcycle is shown in realistic detail but the death of another rider is not depicted at all.

Problems as to how players should be made to suffer for the misdeeds of their on-screen persona, whether they should watch deaths in graphic detail or miss them completely, are resolved in the new Automata game for the 48K Spectrum, Pi-Eyed. The hero, the Pi-man, wanders from pub to pub, drinking beer and avoiding obstacles. Wandering into other buildings for safety results in the telling of very bad jokes, a fate far worse for the player than any graphics representation could be.

With programs such as the Legend Valhalla (48K) and Melbourne House Hobbit (48K) on sale, other adventures fade into insignificance. The Island, produced by Virgin Games for the 48K Spectrum, is an enjoyable adventure, with added sound effects and short games contained in it. Demon Lord by Javlin Software is an enormous adventure, made up of four 48K adventures on two separate cassettes. Pictures are given, in painstaking detail, of each location, but the vocabulary is small, making it extremely difficult and very frustrating to play.

Computer magazines receive a constant stream of letters enquiring about software other than games for computers. Mansfield Park and Nineteenth Century England, both by Sussex Software for the 48K Spectrum, act as secondary-school-level revision aids. Their subjects are those suggested by the titles and each subject is divided into different areas, for which questions and detailed answers are given on which the user can be tested.

New ZX-81 games, so plentiful a year ago, are becoming rarer and rarer. Contrast Software has produced Fort Apache, a 16K strategy game, in which the player takes the part of a general with 300 men to command, laying siege to an Apache fort. It is a game involving thought and forward planning rather than fast reactions.

Cyborg Wars, by Stratagem Cybernetics, is a more complex 16K strategy game involving up to four players in an imaginary galactic conflict between four nations of androids. The game relies more strongly on the instruction booklet than could be expected from a computer program but it is a carefully-thought-out and exciting game.

Three games for the ZX-81 are included on the cassette accompanying the book ZX-81/TS-1000 Progromming for Young Programmers, published by McGraw Hill. Bomb Run, written in machine code for the 1K ZX-81, is a version of the popular City Lander type of program in which the player must bomb buildings from an aircraft to avoid running into them.

Mazer, also for the 1K ZX-81, is a simple maze game in which the aim is to avoid the ghost for as long as possible. More complicated is Golems, on the same cassette, for the 16K ZX-81, a strategy and fantasy adventure in which the aim is to outwit the Lord of the Black Tower.

More detailed reviews of all these games, together with their respective Gilbert Factors, can be found in Sinclair User.

As the well-printed documentation will tell you "in the 48K game 'Wheelie' you have just taken delivery of the fastest thing on two wheels"; namely the Zedexaki 500. During a quick spin on the road you happen to see a sign saying 'PRIVATE ROAD - no speed limit to brave riders.' Being the hero you undoubtedly are, you enter the sinister driveway only to discover that the gates have shut behind you and that you are imprisoned in a labyrinth of horrifying alleys infested with hedgehogs, kangaroos and terrifying birds (all trained in karate of course). As well as the undesirable fauna there are other dangers in store, such as spectacular jumps (over buses or cars) and bricks which you must 'wheelie' over; not to mention perilous slopes, patches of dangerous ice and unexpected dead-ends. There are only a few petrol stations so you have to watch the revs' a bit while you speed about.

On the screen there is a cross-sectional view of four roads at the most, and these are connected by steep slopes which can be used by pressing the 'up' or 'down' key, according to whether you wish to travel uphill or downhill. To attain the next level you must first find the 'ghostrider', who will be a few miles off your original starting point, and then race him back to the start. If you succeed in beating him he will tell you a code which allows you to jump to the next level, of which there are five. Although the game is hard, it provides an excellent challenge to the budding Hell's Angel!

The graphics are fantastic especially if you crash, For example, if you go too fast down a slope the bike will cartwheel and crush you under its fuel-injected engine; and if you go too slowly over a car-jump you will be thrown over the handlebars. At the beginning I found myself crashing on purpose just to see the amazing effects! As well as this there is a good use of colour and a constant engine revving sounds which is very authentic, and adds to the brilliance of this game from Microsphere.

Kempston, Protek or AGF joysticks can be used and if you possess none of these, there is a routine for defining your own keys which is very helpful indeed.

On the whole 'Wheelie' has all the properties of a bestseller and is great value for money. It combines excellent graphics with stunning sound to create one of the best and most addictive games I have ever seen for the Spectrum.