Home Computing Weekly


Penetrator
By Melbourne House
Commodore 64

 
Published in Home Computing Weekly #104

You don't get any points for guessing that this is a scramble look alike. In fact, this game appeared many moons ago on the Spectrum and has now been converted to the 64.

The scenario is quite standard and involves piloting a space ship/aircraft down a network of tunnels. The floor of the tunnels are littered with radar scanners and guided missiles. These can be bombed or shot for points. Unlike scramble, you don't have to bomb to gain fuel. Additionally, it appears that the longer the Radar scanners are operative, the more accurate the missiles become. There are four stages to the tunnels and you must destroy a neutron bomb cache in the last phase to complete the mission. To help you gain expertise at negotiating the tunnels, there is a training mode which enables you to try any of the four stages with unlimited lives.

The graphics are nicely drawn with jolly mushroom cloud explosions and nicely animated radar screens. A potentially useful option is an editor for customising the landscape. That is, if I could get it to work properly. I can only assume that there was a bug in my copy since the editor wouldn't work as described in the instructions.

Overall I found this game a little easy and rather boring. In spite of the additional features this game is not an improvement on the classic scramble game and Melbourne House is probably about 18 months too late in releasing this game.

A.W.

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