Sinclair User


Friday The 13th
By Domark
Spectrum 48K

 
Published in Sinclair User #49

Friday The 13th

Sanctuary, sanctuary from this awful game. Jason Voorhees has come back to reclaim his hockey mash and has an arsenal of weapons which seem to have come from Domark's only good product on the market, Gladiator.

Jason has just done a Rambo leap out of the lake at Crystal Lake Holiday Camp when you arrive. In order to give him the death he deserves, and splatter fans await with hot, sticky, lolling tongues, you must herd your friends to a place of sanctuary, get one of the weapons Jason has kindly left around and kill him.

Before you get nine of the ten teenagers to safety you must create a sanctuary in the barn, church or library. Collect the Sanctuary Cross from the graveyard - at a holiday camp, you've gotta be kidding - and stand it in one of those buildings.

Friday The 13th

To warn the kids about Jason just pass over them. They will immediately go to the Sanctuary but - bites knuckles in terror - they will soon get bored and wander into the open where they are easy prey for the masked moron.

While all this is going on you should have picked the many weapons Jason has discarded - (he's so careless). They include a chain saw. arrows, tridents, machette, short sword and what looks like a rolling pin.

The problem with holding and using weapons is that you can only walk right, down and upwards. To walk left you move backwards continually flashing your weapon, which slows down movement. All Jason has to do is run to the left of the screen and you've lost him.

Not to worry, you can amass thousands of points by using your charms on corpses. You score points by brushing up against people and sending them back to Sanctuary. You can do the same thing with corpses which, like weapons, lie around in all sorts of strange places. Just settle yourself over a corpse and watch the points clock up.

Your ability to fight Jason is shown by two icons at the bottom of the screen. The first shows your face and, as you get more scared by Jason's activities, your hair begins to stand on end.

Your strength rating is shown as a bar bell which starts at the top of the window and journeys down as Jason claims more victims. When it gets to the bottom of the screen, or your hair is at its uppermost, your time is up and you get the axe - that's another of the ten weapons in the game.

Domark seems to have turned the appalling graphics into a feature of the game. All the characters look the same and when they turn to face you they all look as if they're wearing hockey masks.

Sometimes characters get caught up in the nooks and crannies of the scenery. They struggle on matchstick legs to get through walls, fences and even trees and hay bales.

The first signs of madness appear in a little window at the bottom of the screen in the form of a hockey mask.

Yes, you too can be as wacky as Jason - who, I've just discovered, plays a mean game of baseball with peoples heads. As the first part of the game progresses and the body count gets higher you slowly become insane and incapable of killing Jason. My suggestion, to stave off a visit to the funny farm, is to rip the tape from your data recorder and throw it in the nearest bin.

Before you do that, though, listen to the competition recorded after the game - it'll crack you up. There are ten horror sounds, all of which sound like the Domark programmers having their breakfast. I have some ideas as to what the sounds may be. There's the hiss of fried larynxs, the split of brussel heads and the gentle scraping of burnt fingers.

If that wasn't enough to have you in fits of vomit then suck on the blood capsules you get in the packaging. Domark says they contain red coloured sugar water. They certainly provide the highlight of a rather dim package and, unlike the game, they're frothy man.

John Gilbert

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