Zzap


Mega-Pack
By Prism
Commodore 64/128

 
Published in Zzap #81

Mega-Pack

As you can probably guess from the non-committal title, Mega-Pack contains four games with no connecting theme whatsoever. Judging by the quality of these titles, they could easily have called it Trash-Pack, but that wouldn't shift many copies!

The collection opens with Star Ray (60%, Issue 47), a dodgy Defender clone which they describe as "The perfection of the horizontally-scrolling shoot-'em-up". Hardly - the Commodore 64 version is just a badly converted parody of its Amiga counterpart. The gameplay is slow and uninteresting, and the sprites often get lost against the garish backgrounds. Could have been a winner, but is ruined by weak execution.

Metaplex is a game that promises little, and delivers less. Shoot-'em-up maze games were all the rage a few years ago, but now the entire genre looks extremely dated, and Metaplex is no exception. Silly name, silly game!

Behind The Times

Time Fighter is so bad you'd think it came from a rival magazine's cover tape! The sprites spiters look like overfed matchstick men, animate like they're moonwalking in slow motion, and when he throws a punch... Ha ha ha ha!

Time Fighter is boring, tedious, and an all-round disaster. Scoring 12% in Issue 37, by today's standards this looks generous!

Eye Of Horus is the best of the bunch, but it still fails to impress. Although advertised as an arcade adventure, it plays more like a maze-based shoot-'em-up (aarrgh!). It's better than Metaplex as it does feature some interesting graphics and nice touches, such as the main sprite turning into a bird at will. Even so, the adventure element is almost non-existent, and the shoot-'em-up bit isn't enough to save it. The 75% it scored in Issue 57 seems ridiculously generous.

Recommendation

When the four Prism compilations arrived at the office, I made a bee-line for this one expecting it to be the best. How wrong I was! Mega-Pack is a useless collection of mediocre games, and even at £3.99, it's not worth the money.