Amstrad Action

Zzap sixty-four, Newsfield’s Commodore sixty-four sister to Crash, scored ninety percent in issue fourteen with Gary Lidden, Julian Rignall, and Gary Penn on the panel.

On the Amstrad, Amstrad Action, Future Publishing’s first magazine, hit eighty-one percent in, uh, issue eight for the CPC port and across five reviews.

Spectrum Computing’s average comes out at ninety-three percent, which is a cracking number.

Ninety-five from Crash and ninety from Zzap is the kind of agreement, uh, this show rarely gets.

Trevor Inns on the conversion work.

Zaps ninety suggests they felt the castle survived the trip.

Amstrad Actions eighty-one on the CPC is warmer than a Howler and cooler than a Smash with the colour CPC helping in places while the puzzle design stays the Spectrum one.

So Spectrum for the landmark look and the awards, sixty-four for the soundtrack, Amstrad for a colourful middle path trade-off said plainly, which is how this desk likes it.

Commodore User, EMAP’s Commodore magazine, put Mike Pattenden on eight out of ten.

On the Amstrad, Amstrad Action, Future’s first magazine, hit ninety percent in issue twenty-five, and The Games Machine liked the CPC color at eighty-seven.

Ninety from Zzap and, um, fifty from ACE on the same sixty-four tape is exactly the kind of magazine scrap this show thrives on.

Hold that five hundred because it colors everything after.

You can love the motion and still side with Ace's fifty if the combat feels off in your hands.

The Amstrad brings more color and detail.

Amstrad Action's ninety and the games machine's eighty-seven back that up, though some later notes call the, uh, look a bit messier than, uh, the Spectrum's clarity.

Um, plain trade-offs then.

Uh, CU Amiga, EMAP's Commodore title, went 86.

And Amstrad Action, Future's first magazine, uh, scored the Amstrad version 94, even though they only gave the sound 67.

67.So we've got gold medals and smashes everywhere, Lee, uh, and one EMAP mag refusing to join the party at seventy-six.

Uh, that will give us something to argue about when we do our own scores later.

So who wins? The Amiga gets it for me on the samples and the weight of that title tune.

The 64 is a close second with a cracking SID arrangement, and the Spectrum one two eight is the nice surprise in third.

Amstrad Action only giving the Amstrad sound sixty-seven tells you that machine drew the short straw on this one.

Looks and speed next.

[laughs]

Amstrad Action, just because there-

Ah

... was no Spectrum magazines there.

If Amiga Format was the only mag you read that month, you'd have walked straight past it in the shop.

And the Amstrad got 68 from Amstrad Action, uh, the mag that launched in '85 at a pound, a penny for every page.

They said it was a fighting game without the fight because whoever gets the first punch in wins.

That's a cracking line from Amstrad Action, Lee, and it might be the fairest review of the lot.

So we've got everything from 93 down to 42, and we'll have to settle it ourselves at the end.

Right, the telly.

The Amiga had a full-screen scroller, uh, streaming off the, uh, floppy disk with loads of sprites at once and two players together.

Zzap! said the colors were a bit pale, but, uh, there was plenty of variety and detail in the levels.

Forty-four.

On the Amstrad, uh, Amstrad Action, uh, the magazine that Chris Anderson started, uh, Future publishing with down in Somerset, gave it eighty-one when that version came out, which isn't bad, but not good enough for its master game badge.

Forty-four from Zap is savage, and what makes it funnier is that Crash was sat in the same building giving the Spectrum one eighty-eight.

I'd love to have been in that office on press day with two lots of reviewers glaring at each other over the kettle.

I think the Spectrum one plays the best because you can always see what's coming at you.

If I'm getting one out of the loft this afternoon, it's the Spectrum with Cooksy's tune playing on something else in the corner.

Scores then, just to recap the mags, Crash gave it 88, your Sinclair 9, Sinclair User 5 stars, Commodore User 8, Zappa Miserable 44 and Amstrad Action 81.

I'm giving it an 8.

Yeah.

I'd say that's one of the few full-price games of the time that was actually a bargain.

Right, I want to know whether the critics agreed with me.

Oh, they agreed, and loudly.

The One, eMap's glossy for 16-bit games on, uh, the, uh, Amiga and ST, got in first with a review in its January issue and gave it 96%.

CU Amiga, which had only recently dropped the 64 from its title to go all in on the Amiga, gave it 94.

Amiga Format, uh, the Bath-based mag from Future Publishing, went 92 in March, and Zzap, which by then had a whole Amiga section bolted onto, onto its Commodore pages, went 94 in April.

In-