Please login to submit a screenshot

SOFTWARE Projects, a company responsible for bringing out more repeat plots than Dynasty, has done it again with a new space hero called Astronut.

He is a galactic Willy but without the bounce to get him out of trouble. His chums in the space freighter, headed for home planet CS, have thrown him out to collect resource blocks, blown from the ship in a meteor storm.

Luckily, the ship has crashed on an unknown planet, which has ladders and levels, so you do not have to swing around in space. You can also select which level you want to enter, unlike Manic Miner or Jet Set Willy.

The monsters include jiving robots, jumping green fish and spinning rotary saws. To destroy them you drop bombs but be careful as explosions have a time delay of several seconds.

When you reach a block push it down the levels to the ground and onto the flashing transporter pad where it will be beamed over to the ship. When you have placed one block on the transporter another will appear and you repeat the process.

The game is difficult enough, and high scores are a luxury, but when first loaded there are no instructions for travelling to the various levels or for getting into the game. You are not even told how to drop bombs, though with a joystick it is easy. An attempt should have been made to include minimal instructions.



John Gilbert

ASTRONUT Software Projects Memory: 48K Price: £7.95 Joystick: Kempston Gilbert Factor: 7

Astronut is produced by the same company responsible for Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, although it's not billed in any way as a sequel to Matthew Smith's games. Written by Patrick Richmond, the game is attractive and colourful - but as a 'platform' game, I'm sure Software Projects are hoping that their reputation for this type of package will help this one on its way to the high street shelves.

The lack of instructions both on the cassette sleeve and on-screen (at least with the copy I've got anyway), didn't actually inspire any confidence that it was a particularly polished piece of software. To start the game, you need to press the 'S' key - and the 'Q' key is used to turn off the terrible sound effect (you'll find this is probably the most useful key in the whole game!)

Astronut's a game of some 15 screens; the object of the exercise on each screen is to push three resource blocks from various platforms down to ground level. You control the little two-cursor man and can move him left or right, or get him to drop bombs. To move the figure up the screen, you have to position him above a volcano and wait for it to erupt or, on the later screens, you can manoeuvre the figure up the ladders. Beware though, once you've started to climb there's no turning back.

Stopping you gathering the power capsules and moving the resource blocks are, of course, many assorted meanies which have to be negotiated. There's also the problem of extending platforms, which have an annoying habit of collapsing just when you want to use them!

The sprites move fairly smoothly by one or two pixels and come in the usual horizontally and vertically moving varieties; some are even more tricky and cascade back and forth along the platforms, defying gravity more often then not. The stationary graphics characters aren't your average run-of-the-mill platforms either - you may encounter dragons spitting fire and amazing castle towers - and they certainly go some way to brightening up the game.

Despite the pixel movement of the sprites, our man moves by cursor block stages, although the figure is animated within each stage. Unfortunately, this, coupled with the 'attribute collision detection' routine used, sometimes causes your figure to be pronounced dead even when there's lots of clear air between you and your killer.

Astronut is visually appealing, but it's too easy! Dropping bombs to protect yourself and timing the jumps to collapsing platforms do add an element of skill, but overall I didn't find it challenging enough. Each of the screens can be reached independently of the others by instructing the program to start on a specific screen - in my view, this spoils any suspence for the enthusiast.

Use of Graphics 8/10

Ross Holman