Well, didn’t we have a luvverly time when we all
went down to the 20th ZX Microfair?
This time the Fair was held in the Central Hall, Westminster, rather than
its more regular venue, the Royal Horticultural Hall — just a bit further
down the road... Apparently, the Horticultural Halls were already booked up, so
it was a case of cramming the show into several rooms and various floors at
Central Hall, or having no show at all.
With twenty MICROFAIRS under his belt, Mike Johnston busily
took stand booking for the celebratory 21st ZX MICROFAIR. The 13th December is
the date for your diary, and it’s back to the Horticultural Halls...
Although slightly disorientating at first for regular Microfair attendees,
once you got the geography of the building sorted out, it wasn’t too bad
scampering between floors. But you could suddenly find yourself bursting in on
a Methodist Bible Class or a choral rehearsal by mistake... Quite a few folks
said they actually preferred the cosy atmosphere to the rather cavernous, high
roofed Horticultural Halls, which just goes to show you can’t please all
of people, all of the time!
As usual, the Fair was crammed with people — all shuffling round an
increasingly stuffy and overheated hall packed with stuffy and overheated
retailers flogging their wares at knock-down prices.
New products were few and far between, however. The Professional
Adventure Writing System (PAWS) was due out ‘real soon now’,
according to the fellows on the Gilsoft stand, who
explained they’d been up half the night making a monster display book
with which to decorate their stand.
Tim Gilberts of Gilsoft proudly
displays the home-made tome used to advertise THE PROFESSIONAL ADVENTURE
WRITING SYSTEM
Christopher Stone made the long trip down to London and
arrived at the CRASH Stand in search of some headgear...
Among wonderful facilities, this new utility is said to have a really
amazing parser which recognises complex sentences, including nouns, adjectives
and prepositions (LMLWD). There is a 1500 word vocabulary, RAM save/load, and
256 counters/flags, diagnostics, and time-outs that between them allow the user
to create ‘real time’ adventures. All in all, it left Sean
(FRONTLINE) Masterson running for his phone making ‘I’ve got to
have a copy of that’ type noises.
PAWS is due out in two forms: a split pack for the 48K Spectrum
with one pack containing the text editor and the other the graphics routines:
for the 128K Spectrum, the two halves are combined in one program. On the 128K
Spectrum, PAWS allows adventures that occupy up to 110K to be written,
so some monster games should be on their way. £22.95 ought to secure
either version roundabout the time you read this.
As usual, there was plenty of hardware on show — and a few Plus Twos
were even on sale! Rockfort Products introduced
their disk interface for the Spectrum — The Disciple. It
includes a Centronics parallel interface which gives full screen dumps, two
joystick ports and an Interface-One-style network port. The commands are
claimed to be Microdrive compatible, so any program designed to work using the
Microdrive should work with the Rockfort
interface. A ‘snapshot’ button allows programs loaded from
cassette or Microdrive to be saved to disk — up to 16 to a side. The
Disciple will set you back £84.75 including VAT — all you have
to supply is your own Shugart compatible drive and the system is up and
running. TECH TIPS might be able to take a peek next month...
Romantic Robot had made the Dutch connection in
time for the Microfair, and were demonstrating a new Spectrum digitiser
they’re importing from the Low Country.
The new little black box goes by the name of the Videoface, and captures
pictures at a rate of three frames a second, saving the last six screens
scanned. The final price has not yet been set, but should hover around the
£70 mark.
D-DOUBLE TAKE
A cunning new game is nearing completion in Denton Design’s Liverpool offices: Double
Take should be published by Ocean any day
now.
An evil personage has come to dominate a universe which is the mirror image
of the universe in which we all live and play games. Bored with being the Big
Cheese in his own universe, the antihero has taken advantage of a wormhole in
reality created by an experiment in a physics lab, and now seeks to gain entry
to our universe and become an evil Big Cheese all over again.
The locations in our universe are mirrored in the baddy’s universe,
and every so often you find yourself transported from a location to the
corresponding place in the opposite universe. Objects have been displaced
between the two universes. To restore stability they have to be taken to their
rightful universe and deposited in the correct place. And no use hanging around
in the negative universe holding an object that needs to be taken to the
positive universe and waiting for the transportation sequence — objects
held during the journey flip to their mirror image unless they have first been
‘fixed’ by taking them to a sparkly cloud...
That white coat in the middle of the screen is, in fact, you!
In the Anti-Universe, lurking in the bathroom
What’s this. Unreality is fading — the link
between the universes has been activated... things fade away
The normal universe begins to take shape around you...
In the bathroom again, but this time in our universe, not the evil,
mirror-image one...
LATE ARRIVALS
Isvar confronts a four-legged member of the local fauna in
FAIRLIGHT II
Stablemates Fairlight II and Artist II arrived
from The Edge — they were finished a little
too late to make it into the review section, so here’s a screen shot or
two to feast your eyes on while you wait for the full reviews.
Fairlight II will look very familiar to fans of the original: the
same Worldmaker system has been used, but the size of the playing area has been
doubled and the game loads in two parts on the 48K machine, fitting into the
128K after one huge load.
In the game, Isvar embarks on another mystical quest. Up to five items may
be carried, depending on their cumulative weight, and as usual, the place is
packed with baddies who have to be put to the sword. The setting is rather
more pastoral, with trees and leafy glades replacing the uniform interior
locations of the original. Clearly a game Fairlight fans won’t
want to miss.
One of the demo screens from THE ARTIST II, illustrating the
pull-down menu control method
The Artist II also arrived, courtesy of the productive Bo Jangeborg
and his Spectrum. You may have seen this product reviewed elsewhere some weeks
ago, but, according to Dr Tim from The Edge we are
“the first magazine ever to see the final commercial version.” The
tome-like manual, still in final draft form (only just finished, you see) was
whisked away by one of our tame techno minions, and if we can persuade him to
let go for long enough to put finger to wordprocessor, the definitive review
should arrive in time for the Christmas Special...
DID THE EARTH MOVE FOR YOU? NO COMMENT!
David Kelly, snapped at the ZX Microfair: “No Comment”
According to another Spectrum magazine, the world should have
been shaking by now, as a new force filled the senses. “Computer
magazines won’t ever be the same again,” its readers were told in
October. Purchasers of the magazine, however, may have felt a little aggrieved
when the New-look November issue “exploded into the shops”.
It was “going to have 146 pages” — “A simple
fact”, according to the announcement. Justifying the 2 pee price rise,
the blurb writer insisted that “we’ve also put the number of pages
up — by over 20 percent”.
Asked to comment on the arrival of the November magazine, which sported 126
pages (Fact: a rise of 6.8%, and some 15 pages slimmer than his readers had
been promised), its editor asserted that his December Issue would be 146 pages
large. “No comment”, was his response when asked how he would
approach any complaints from November purchasers who spent their £1 and
realised they hadn’t got quite what they were promised...
WINDOW WARS
IJK Software, returning to the
Spectrum games scene after an absence of over a year immediately ran into a
little trouble with its latest release, Crime Busters.
According to a spokesperson for Mastertronic,
the game is “a blatant rip-off” of the budget hits written by David
Jones: Knight Tyme and Spellbound.
Crime
Busters employs a pull-down menu system that bears more than a passing
resemblance to the Windowmation technique of game control developed
for Magic Knight, and even uses the same character set.
Following an approach from Mastertronic, IJK have withdrawn their new release and are currently
considering their position. Mastertronic’s
spokesperson was unequivocal: “They must be out of their heads, trying to
have a quick clean up before Xmas and then bugger off afterwards.”
Unlikely to be the case, considering that IJK is
certainly no fly by night (or even Knight) firm. They have been around for
over five years...
BANG GOES PHUT!
A few days before Bonfire Night, BANG fizzled out. The weekly
newspaper published by Specialist Retail Press
— the firm behind trade paper, CTW — survived in the cut-and-thrust
marketplace of newsagents’ shelves for a mere ten weeks.
Launched at the PCW Show in September, BANG set out to cover music, video
and television as well as computer games — Computer Gamer
Editor, Tony Hetherington was tempted into the BANG fold to head up a computer
section. The decision to close BANG, an ambitious attempt to take on the
weekly market with an A3 tabloid paper, was taken just before the tenth issue
was due to go to press.
“Our little dream is over,” commented BANG Editor, Greg Ingham
ruefully, “all that is left for me to say is many thanks to our
readers.”
Supertuff hero BUTCH HARD GUY fights his way towards the lair
of the evil Dr Fu..
BUTCH HARD GUY LIVES!
A spoof beat em up is on the way from a new outfit called Future Concepts. In Butch Hard Guy, subtitled
Who Cares Who Wins, the aim is to progress through 20 screens, kicking
and punching combat droids until the bad guy’s lair is reached. Mr Fu
(for it is he) lives in a castle, and BHG is so hard he has to destroy Mr
Fu’s castle with his bare hands.
Early January should bring the release of this comedy combat extravaganza,
scheduled to appear on the Advanced Software
Promotions label. A trio of Butch Hard Guys is behind Future Concepts: David Thompson, Sean Lally and Dennis
Mulliner.
