A&B Computing


Laser Command
By Micro Power
BBC Model B

 
Published in A&B Computing 1.07

Laser Command

Laser Command is a very good version of the Missile Command arcade game. When the program has been loaded, there are many options to be set. These are: one or two players, skill level, type of bombs, a special "page mode" that waits until you are ready, spaceships, joystick/keyboard control, and full or half speed.

This last option appears to be undocumented. Once you have selected your options, the game begins. Control of your sight is using joysticks or W, E, O, P on the keyboard; DELETE fires a missile; N and V lay and detonate mines. You can even store the mine pattern using f0 - f9! This is a very powerful function. You may also pause using Shift.

The idea of the game is to defend six cities. To do this, you have a missile dump and a sight. You position the sight to fire at bombs faling from the sky. If your laser base is hit, then you lose ten missiles. Worse than that, you must wait until it is rebuilt before you can fire again. Every 10,000 points you score you are awarded a bonus city to defend. The game ends when all your cities are destroyed. There is no high score table in this game.

Laser Command

The graphics are fairly good, but then again there are not opportunities to show off the good graphics of the Beeb in this sort of game. A medium resolution has been used as this is ample, although there are some quite violent colour clashes at times.

Also good is the sound quality. There is not a wide variety of sounds, but those included are different if not completely original.

The instructions are adequate as little explanation is really necessary in this game. You are told of (nearly) all the options and even how to load the program (not standard).

Altogether it is a good game.

Dave Reeder

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