BOMBER
Save your spaceship from destruction in David Taylor's mini-arcade game
You are out patrolling the asteroid belt beyond Mars hot on the trail of intergalactic pirates when your trusty old spaceship, deep space destroyer Spud 1 is hit by a large chunk of debris while taking evasive action during a violent meteor storm.
Badly damaged, you manage to limp to the nearest planet, Mars, and descent through the dusty upper stratosphere. Your fuel tanks have been ruptured causing valuable rocket fuel to leak away, and you are rapidly losing altitude.
There is no time to scout around for a suitable landing pad- it's got to be right here and now, or you can kiss your pension goodbye.
The bad news is that there is a large city below and nowhere to set down. The good news is that it's one of the early Mars settlements that have long since been abandoned.
Luckily your cargo hold is full of high explosive - confiscated pirates' booty - so, you decide to flatten the buildings below and create your own landing pad.
You are descending rapidly and getting closer and closer to the tops of the skyscrapers. As you fly over each one you must drop a cannister of high explosive and flatten it. If you succeed you'll be transported to the next screen where the buildings are even higher and the mission much tougher.
The only control key used throughout the game is the SPACE bar. Use it to start and when flying over the city, to drop bombs. Displayed at the top of the screen is your score, the current high score, the number of bombs left and the difficulty level.
RALLY DRIVER
Try your hand at rally driving in Anthony Houghton's fast-paced arcade game
Have you ever watched rallying on the television and wished that you could have a go at this exciting sport? Well, now you can, with RALLY DRIVER - a test of reactions, sense of direction and manual dexterity.
The action takes place in a large town which takes on the appearance of a 32 by 32 character maze, but the screen only displays a small section of it at a time, scrolling to show your immediate surroundings as you drive around.
Your car is a fast turbo-charged roadster and the object is to scour the town for strategically placed flags. When you find one collect it by running over it. Try to pick them all up within the time limit and then you'll be allowed to progress on to the next stage of the rally. If you don't, you'll be knocked out of the contest.
There are two hazards to watch out for - boulder blocking the road and rogue cars aiming to eliminate you from the rally by ramming you. Fortunately you have a couple of back-up cars in case you write one off.
At first there is just one rogue car, but this figure increases every other level up to a maximum of eight, and each one has a fixed start position. There can be up to 61 rocks, which are picked at random from a list of positions. This ensures that flags are not completely blocked off.
Control instructions are included in the game, and although the sound on/off feature is event-drven and can be used at any time, the pause can only be used from the machine code loop - that is, not when you are in the process of losing a life or receiving a bonus.
The long pause during the instructions and between each level is to allow the next mage to be set up. To keep the maze as compact as possible the walls and passages are stored in binary code and the rocks, flags and cars added afterwards. To stop the wait from being too inconvenient it is placed where you would normally expect a pause anyway, but perhaps not quite as long.
Game Controls:
Z - Left, X - Right, * - Up, ? - Down