Jocky Wilson's Darts Challenge

BUDGET BUREAU

£1.99

New on Mastertronic's 'flippy flippy' label this month is Nonamed (56%), a tale of kings, wicked wizards and courageous knights. You have to battle your way (ninja style) through the Castle With No Name which has been filled full of terrible ogres. All the graphics in the game are excellent and would do any full-price game proud, it's just a pity the gameplay isn't so good - it takes ages to get used to the continual attack by various nasty creatures. After a bit of practice you can get some enjoyment from just walking around and admiring all the locations.

Another Mastertronic 'flippy flippy' game, with the Spectrum and Amstrad versions on the same tape, is Reveal (24%). The object of the game is to memorise an onscreen isometric pattern. Then, when the screen is plunged into darkness, you have to manoeuvre your object, lighting up the blocks again (sounds like fun, doesn't it?) Once they are all fully lit you can move onto the next screen and repeat the process. This soon gets extremely tedious, especially when aliens decide to darken the blocks on the opposite side of the screen again (fume!). I doubt whether anyone would find Reveal worth even £1.99.

If, on the other hand, you'd rather suffer with blocky sprites and plenty of colour clash then Gamebusters have for the very thing. Zone Trooper (30%) is another arcade adventure but this time you're the lucky crew member chosen to collect plasma pods scattered across a spaceship. This involves bouncing around the ship - and surrounding landscapes - while popping the odd alien and collecting anything in sight. Some particularly nice sequences are the airlocks and the ship's computer but it's hardly worth buying just for those. Zone Trooper could provide an hours exploring for the hardened arcade adventure player, but it won't last long.

If you liked the last two Atlantis titles - Gunfighter and Cerius - then the author's latest should prove welcomed. Called Tank Command (71%) it asks you to fight your way across an island in a tank, blasting away the enemy with a choice of either grenade or bombs. This may sound easy but you soon find out that if you don't bomb the enemies in the correct order you will end up in lots of little bits all over the screen. Simple sounding, but incredibly addictive. Tank Command is a pleasing mixture of arcade and strategy wih simple, but effective graphics. Well done, Atlantis.

The new offering from Silverbird this month is a simplistic race game, International Speedway (24%). you have to test your streetwise racing skills in the world of league racing. All it involves is racing around track after track of simplistic graphics, the most exciting part is when you crash into another racer - not my idea of fun. If I had £1.99 knocking about this would be one of the last games I would buy, definitely not recommended.

£2.99

Code Masters dominate the £2.99 slot this month with three games, the first of which is yet another of their famous cartoon adventures. This time it's called Bigfoot (47%) and stars a furry monster who goes by the name of Footsy! The graphics in the game are just mindblowing, not because they are any good, but because you just can't tell what's going on. There are three colour options to try but they are all pretty bad and cause clash unless you them totally monochrome. There just isn't enough in this game to keep me occupied for long and I don't recommend it unless you are a hardened Code Masters fan.

What, another Code Masters BMX game?! Yes, I'm afraid so. The programmer that brought you 4 Soccer Simulators has now come up with BMX Freestyle (76%). It's a great improvement on the original BMX game that had an overhead view and tiny bikes but BMX Freestyle is just too hard. All the graphics are excellent (what I've seen of them); well-defined bikes and backgrounds on most sections with the usual jolly Code Masters tunes and effects. The only problem is that it's almost impossible to get past the first section (wheelies), I did it once, only to foul up and squash my mates on the ramp section that comes after (splurt!). If you think you are skilled enough to do well, give this one a whirl.

Flushed with the success of winning the Embassy World Darts Championship Jocky Wilson has gone and got himself a darts game, Jocky Wilson's Darts Challenge (54%) courtesy of Zeppelin Games. It's one of theose games where all you do is aim the wobbling dart somewhere near the place you want it to go and hope for the best. You would have thought a beer drinking tournament would have been included but alas all you get is the screen where you throw the dart and an aerial view of some beer belly throwing a dart at the board. It's a fair simulation and I'm sure fans of the sport will rush out to buy it.

Another Zeppelin Games offering is Rally Simulator (27%), a dire car racing game that just has no appeal at all. The car skids and slides about the monochrome play area seemingly out of control and it can even run over the houses causing hardly any damage. There are no decent sound effects to speak of and to complete even the first level is an impossibility. Rally Simulator would simply be a waste of money if you bought it, stay away! (No way! This is a great game - well, not bad. Phil and I had great fun struggling to complete the first, incredibly hard level. Level Two is extremely hard - Stu.)

The final £2.99 priced game this month is from the Hewson budget label, Rack-It. Called into Africa (69%) it is, unsurprisingly, set in the jungles of Africa. If your Spectrum days go back a few years you may remember the classic strategy/adventure Lords Of Midnight, well into Africa is very similar in look and feel to that. The control method is the first thing that hits you, for some strange reason it has only three keys to select a whole host of options making it slightly difficult. The game itself should provide hours of play for adventure fans with forty controllable characters, eight radio operators and a massive landscape to explore.

JOCKY WILSON'S DARTS CHALLENGE
Zeppelin Games
£1.99
Reviewer: Marcus Berkmann

Any sport in which the participants are generally fat, ugly and full of beer is my sort of sport, and personally I do like a game of 'arrers.' Spec-chums seem to as well, 'cos about eight billion darts sims have come out over the years, the latest of which appears with a photo of Jocky Wilson on the front. And as we all know, there's no one fatter, uglier or fuller of beer than Jocky.

Appropriately this one's on the Zeppelin label, since that is the form of air transport that Jocky most resembles, and it's really rather fun. Like the real thing there's actually some skill required here, as you try and bung in treble twenty after treble twenty, and inevitably score three.

You can play tournament (up to four players and great fun), head-to-head (useful to have someone else to play this with) or round the clock, which is a race against time. It's not too easy to see where young Jocky fits into it all, but so what? It's good fun anyway, with excellent graphics and well thought out gameplay. Only the shockingly bad and incomprehensible instructions let it down.

Label: Zeppelin
Author: In-house
Price: £2.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Jim Douglas

Eee. Take a sup o'yer Tetley's and waddle up t'oche and sling yer arras, lad. Magic. The thought of spending any time at all playing a game based on the beery antics of the fattest men in the country (whether they be Members - fyak - of the British Empire or not) didn't do much to excite me.

So imagine my disgust to find that Jocky Wilson's Darts Challenge isn't a dreadful flask of cat squirt after all. In fact it's very good indeed.

There are three stages of the game; Head to Head is for two players, each trying to score 501 before the other. Round the Clock speaks for itself really - you must try to work your way from numbers 1 to 20 in the shortest possible time. The Championship, though, is by far the most exciting, where you play against a host of wittily monickered opponents. Defeat them all and you can take a crack at the "big" man himself... Jocky Wilsonnnnn!

Although the different stages require different strategies, the core of the game is how realistically the "arras" are "bunged". Obviously a degree of wobblyness has had to be incorporated - when was the last time you saw a darts player with a perfectly steady arm? Here we have to live with a sort of perpetual drift which causes your ghost-like dart to move in circular motions at the time. Not a bad solution to the problem, although I'd like to think that in real life I could hold myself a little bit more steady than this. Still, if all the fun of the sport is to be captured, I guess all the effects of the beer must be included too.

Once you've thrown your darts it's the turn of the machine. You get a plan view of the oche and board with an extremely unrealistically slim darts player who regularly throws straight 180s.

The more successful you are, the tougher your opponents become, throwing darts with astonishing accuracy.

Obviously I never managed to challenge The Jock himself, but I was surprised quite how addictive I found this game. Even though I loathe and despise darts in every form, Jocky W had me reasonably enthralled for a lengthy period. You are thankfully spared all the skull splittingly dull maths involved, as the computer tells you how many you scored, how many you need etc. The only thing it doesn't do is suggest which shot you should aim for. Since I'm especially incontinent (eh - GT) when it comes to getting to grips with figures (arf, arf - AS) this would have been a bit of a boon, but I'm sure it would only be of use in especially dense players.

So there we are then. Corpulent Darts Star in Successful Licence Shock. A super bargain. Smashing. Lovely.

C64, Spectrum: £2.99

Darts games have appeared regularly over the last couple of years, and seemed to have hit the heights with Mastertronic's 180. However, undaunted by numerous predecessors, Zeppelin continue the genre and have released their product with the dubious blessing of sporting megastar Jocky Wilson.

So how does this latest oche simulator shape up? Throwing darts is achieved in a similar way to previous offerings, whereby a wobbling dart hovers in front of the board and is released by pressing the fire button. Although this proves quite tricky at first, it does introduce the correct amount of randomness into shots: the darts can be grouped easily, but a 180 is still difficult to achieve.

Normal "501 down" rules apply and the program supports a two player head-to-head, a solo player competition against computer opponents and also "round the clock" darts, competing against a timer.

Certainly a very capable rendition of the game, JWDC's only drawback is that it's all been seen before. Great if there isn't one in the collection, but otherwise it hits the wire.