Seven alien contestants and one human contestant (that's you) are about to participate in the Purple Saturn Day games, which consist of four events - Ring Pursuit (a high-speed slalom race around Saturn's rings), Tronic Slider (a bit like ice hockey), Brain Bowler (a very original game in which you attempt to light up chips on an electrical circuit), and Time Jump (collecting sparks of energy in the hope that you can travel through time). The graphics are of an extremely high standard, and all of the events, with the notable exception of the Time Jump, are great fun, although it will take some practice to master them - especially the Brain Bowler! My only complaint is that there is no two-player option.

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Puzznic
(Ocean, 1990)

If brain-teasing puzzles are your thing then you'll like this. It simply involves matching tiles with the same pattern on them together, and making them disappear. The difficult bit is that there is also gravity, and you might move a tile into a place where it's blocked and can't be matched! Additionally, later levels require you to remove three tiles at a time. Another nice feature of the game is that you can choose several routes - if you have trouble with one set of puzzles, you can try another. The excellent graphics add to the appeal of this great game.

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Somewhere underneath the Atlantic Ocean lies the mysterious, lost city of Atlantis, and an expedition has been sent out to find it. Moving your boat around the Atlantic, you must journey down to the depths of the ocean in a submarine and scour the ocean bed in the search for the city. Now, the ocean is a vast place, and you are given no clues whatsoever as to where the city might be. All you do once you're on the ocean bed is move around - everywhere you go, the scenery looks the same. The graphics are good, especially the perspective view, but the rest of the game is extremely boring, unless there's something I don't understand.

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Narud Pendaryn is searching for a magical chest within Pyra Mydya, but in order to locate it, he must find four pieces of a stone tablet, and then find a model of the pyramid so that the hieroglyphics on the tablet can be translated. The pyramid consists of an enormous maze full of monsters which you can either avoid or shoot, but you only have a limited supply of ammunition. There are also lots of other trinkets which merely increase your score. The game is obviously inspired by the works of Ultimate (in particular, Sabre Wulf), but although the graphics are colourful, exploring the pyramid becomes a bit dull, and overall, the game lacks sophistication compared with Ultimate's games.

See also: Darkwurlde.

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This is a clone of Pacman, except that you're a snake, and as you eat pills, you grow longer and longer. The trick is to eat all the pills without becoming stuck in the maze and crashing into yourself! There is also a time limit on each level, so you can't wait and think for too long. Thankfully, if you lose a life, you won't have to restart the entire level. The graphics and sound effects are pretty basic, although there's some nice music to listen to on the menu. With thirty levels to munch through, this should keep you occupied for a while.

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7

Python Pete is hungry, and you must guide him around ten levels of a garden, eating the fruits and avoiding the walls and the poisonous mushrooms. Yes, it's a snake game. This effort is mostly written in BASIC, and it really shows. The graphics are rather crude, although they do the job, and the music (if it deserves to be called that) is awful. The game would be quite enjoyable if it wasn't for the very unresponsive controls; by the time you've pressed a key to change direction, Pete has crashed into one of the walls. Some of the fruit is tucked away in tight corners, so the game needs to be responsive - and it isn't. This game feels more like one of those listings that featured in some of the CPC magazines in the mid-1980s, and that's where it should have belonged.

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