Please login to submit a screenshot

A SHADOW stalks the cloned terraces of monotonous streets. You are that shadow. You will remain a shadow unless you reach the Pleasure Dome, the world within the world within the world in which you live.

Who can take you to the Pleasure Dome? Frankie can. Move your shadow through the screens of kitchens, lounges, dereliction and prissy suburban streets, collecting what may help. Floppy disks open worlds of arcade fantasy where aircraft bomb Liverpool, where only you can save the lives of your friends. There's a murder to be solved; eight suspects - where's the clue? In a revolting pair of socks perhaps, but there are many entrances to the Pleasure Dome.


Screens explode with colour as windows open out onto new scenes - walk the shadow from behind and step into the frame, step into pleasure. Shoot Thatcher, watch Reagan and Gorbachev spit at each other. Once in the Dome you're no longer a shadow, but there's a dozen or more scenarios within the game, and four symbols to collect before you reach the centre.

Text intrudes slightly in the form of clues - 'the sea of holes is a sea of rooms' - triggered by the successful completion of problems. You must recognise the alternative possibilities of ordinary objects - light switches, telephones, televisions - and experiment.

Faithful to the spirit of the band, if necessarily less outrageous, Frankie is a beautiful program, an adventure of great imagination, with some superb programming techniques in the use of expanding windows and icon-like objects to pick up and use. The screen shots shown here are from a pre-release version, but they give some indication of the quality.

The game comes with a 15 minute live version of Relax supplied on a separate cassette, recorded in the States and previously unreleased. The reverse side of this tape features playing tips for the game, narrated by Patrick Allen.

Symbols x Shadow = Frankie Goes to Hollywood. Frankie x. Spectrum = Buy it.


Publisher Ocean Price £9.95
Memory 48K Joystick Sinclair, Cursor, Kempston
****

Chris Bourne

Frankie Goes to Hollywood was previewed at length in the June issue of CRASH (otherwise known as 17). A great deal was written about this game so a brief introduction should suffice.

It's not really fair to talk about targets or objectives in relation to Frankie Goes to Hollywood but at the end of the day your ultimate desire should be to reach the Pleasuredome. That's going to be a problem because at the start of the game you play a dull and drab character, one of the great unwashed who leads a life that is special only because it is so drab. However, this dreary lifestyle is shattered by the discovery of a murder.

Perhaps this single event can be the beginning of the re-awakening, an event so horrible that only a 'real' person would want to discover why? and who? To be a 'real' person (only real personages are allowed into the Pleasuredome) you must prove your worth by making the most of the opportunities presented to you in your drab world of terraced houses and Radio One disc jockeys. But the terraced houses of today ie filled with elements of the world, television and, of course, murder. Within the drab ordinary houses you are offered the means to escape to the Pleasuredome.

Throughout the game you control a character (not Frankie, he has already been to the Pleasuredome) which can be made to walk through doorways and so into houses and rooms, and can also be made to reach out and touch objects. This reaching action is later extended in some of the games to a firing action. At most times the player is able to call up an inventory of the items collected so that they may be used if the situation demands. A bottle of milk can be collected and later given to a cat for instance; a key can be kept in the same way. The inventory is displayed on a sub-screen, which opens out rather like the iris of your eye to reveal a window in the main screen; a hand within the window can be moved about until it is positioned over the object required.

Whenever you do something tremendous, like feeding the cat, another window will open onto the screen giving Frankie's latest opinion on your performance in the form of pleasure points and an indication as to how much of a 'real' person you have become.

While you explore the houses you must touch the objects within. The touching action can open everyday items like chests, fridges and cupboards. Inside a fridge you may find a kipper or a floppy disc, these objects can be added to your inventory for future use but the number of items that can be carried is limited. You may find yourself forced to choose what to keep and what to get rid of. By touching other objects like a television or phone, you can sometimes open a doorway onto another level, when another type of 'window' opens on the main screen. If you decide to accept the challenge then move the character into the sub-screen, and it will expend to fill the whole screen and your character will be in a new location.

There are a number of mini-games incorporated into the main one, which are of a pretty simple format and are accessed by stepping into them. You may only have to bounce a pleasure pill through a tiny hole, or control Reagan while he spits at Andropov over a break Qut-type wall. One game takes the form of a jigsaw puzzle; another requires you to solve a complex maze, yet another sub game requires you defend Liverpool by shooting German bombers as they fly over Merseyside.

For some sub-games you will need acquired objects, and in that sense there is a very strong adventure element. Pleasure points are awarded if you do well in the mini games, but if you lose or even decline to play at all by not walking into a windowed gamelet, then your pleasure rating will take a tumble. Failing to complete an element of the main game does not spell the end. This is a perpetual game - you will always get another chance because although you may have activated all of the 'events' in one room, sooner or later you will be able to go back and activate another, perhaps different event. The only problem that you will have to be wary