Skramble by Microdeal Released 1983 This review originally appeared in Rhetoric Issue 4 Microdeal were a company famous for their support of the Dragon and to a lesser extent, the more uncommon machines such as the Oric. For some reason they chose to ignore the vast Spectrum and Commodore 64 markets, only releasing a few titles for these machines. Skramble was one of the few programs they released for the Oric and was programmed by Rita Jay. On loading, the game enters a demo mode reminiscent of an old arcade machine, alternating between the Hi-Score table, a view of the game itself and a screen showing the scores obtained by destroying the enemy objects. Pressing the Space Bar starts the game. Skramble was also released on the Dragon and the graphics are very reminiscent of this machine. For a start, the main colour on the screen is green, which made a significant appearance in most Dragon games. The graphics are also rather blocky in appearance and lack detail, especially when compared to say, Lone Raider or Krillys. The blockiness of the game pieces is also emphasised by their relatively large size. Chunky graphics are evident on level 1. Still chunky in Level 2. As the name of the game suggests, this is a Scramble clone and as the game starts, your craft makes its way across a red landscape which scrolls from right to left. The scrolling is perfectly acceptable but not completely smooth. Movement is via the cursor keys and you can move in the standard eight directions with ease. You have two weapons, a laser (press B) which can have up to 5 shots onscreen at once and bombs (press space), of which two can be onscreen at anytime. The bombs are nicely drawn, although simple, and fall in a diagonal trajectory making a whistling sound as they go. Anything that is destroyed explodes in a large yellow explosion (a simple octogon - again, nothing fancy). It is possible to collide with your bombs or any explosions so be careful. Across the top of the screen from left to right are displayed your score, the screen number and the number of craft you have left. Fuel status is shown down the right hand side and when the tank empty, its game over, regardless of how many lives you have left. Every time you destroy an enemy fuel dump, you are rewarded with a little extra fuel (see, I told you it was like Scramble). If you lose a life, you fuel status remains the same - you don't get a nice new full tank! The game is split into a number of stages which are seamlessly joined together. Level one involves you flying over the enemy terrain bombing fuel dumps and destroying rockets, which lift off as you get close. Level two is similar, but at times you find yourself having to cope with a roof as well - the slightest contact with the terrain and your craft is destroyed. Small blue blobs also hover around the landscape and must be shot or dodged, but the rockets no longer take off. Fuel is a bit thin on the ground on this stage. Level three is very much like level two, except that the blue blobs are replaced with indestructible yellow fireballs. You have no choice but to dodge these. This level is very hard as you are likely to be low on fuel and desparately need to destroy every one of the precious few fuel dumps that appear. At the time of writing I have not got any further. Although the game looks a bit dull to begin with, once you have played it for a while you realise that you are playing a half decent version of Scramble. The biggest flaw is that the game is initially quite difficult. Because of the size of your craft and the enemy obstacles, you have very little room to manoeuvre in order to avoid a collision. What makes this problem worse is that the explosions are quite large and contact with them is deadly. Imagine you are faced with an obstacle in your way, you blow it away only to find it replaced by the even bigger and harder to avoid explosion. It is a good idea if an enemy gets close to try and slip past it rather than destroy it. Fortunately, there are a few safe places for you to find, where you can travel a fair distance with relatively little hassle. Add to all that the scarcity of fuel dumps on levels two and three and the fact that running out of fuel means game over and you have a tough but not impossible game. If you want to try and beat my Hi-score, its 6500. Final Conclusions: * Graphics not very polished. * Good sound effects but no music. * A better game than first impressions suggest, but very challenging. * A fair effort for its time but overshadowed by later releases.