| ADVENTURE
INTERNATIONAL |
16K
CASS. |
| 1/2
PLAYERS |
32K DISK |
What about an arcade style game that is nice and relaxing, instead of
having you jumping out of your seat? At first sight SEA DRAGON appears
to be just the thing.
Your submarine glides slowly along and you can dive or surface at
realistically slow speeds all the while accompanied by the soporific
deep 'bleep' of the radar. All you need to do in the game is to shoot
mines which are either tethered or on the seabed and then negotiate some
underground passages. Great, I thought, no more ending up a nervous
wreck after fighting off the first hoard of aliens. Wrong! There are no
aliens, but SEA DRAGON turns out to be just as nerve wracking to play as
all the best arcade games. The problem is. believe it or not, the very
slowness of the game. The mines on the seabed break loose at random and
float upwards. Unless you have anticipated them and have time to fall
back, you are stuck trying to slowly back away whilst knowing you are
not going to make it! Negotiating the underground passages is difficult
as there is very little room and rising vertically takes some control as
the screen is scrolling at a constant rate. You have to both go up and
backwards at the same time to avoid deadly contact with the walls.
Farther on into the game the passages get narrower, the mines more
frequent and ships above drop depth charges. Oh, and by the way, there
are 'Supershooters' protecting some of the passages and forcefields
protecting the Master Mine. And you can run out of air if you don't
surface regularly.
I started off thinking this a very easy game, got fed up with it when
I found out how hard it is but now that I have managed to negotiate some
of the passages, have become quite addicted. One minor criticism is that
the High Score feature is set at 5000 before you start the game and it
takes a long while to have your scores registered!
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