Aaronfay Marketing
£12.95
When any new computer comes on the market place there
quickly follows a glut of those easy to program games that usually
end up in the public domain. The ST seemed to avoid this area of the
software market, mainly, I think, because of the time it took the
average programmer to come to terms with sixteen bit computers. Some
of these games are only now appearing on the market. I must hasten
to add that I don't decry these products. Many of them, like BANK-IT
reviewed here, are very creditable, I only wish that the programmers
had been a bit more adventurous.
BANK-IT is a mixture of fruit machine and poker game. The machine,
which is totally mouse controlled, is equipped with five reels and
hold and chance buttons. At the bottom of the screen are twelve
poker hand selectors. You have twelve goes and each go is split into
three spins of the reels. Each of the twelve poker hands is
allocated a score and your aim is to amass a high score.
Game play is fairly simple. Pressing start spins the
reels and once they have stopped spinning you can decide what sort
of hand you want to go for, five cherries for instance, or maybe
five penguins. Pressing the hold buttons stops those reels from
spinning when you press start again. Once you've spun the reels
three times the machine decides on how many nudges you can have.
Finally when you have nudged as far as you can you select one of the
hand buttons. The machine will then total your score.
The machine may give you a chance to gamble on your score. Pressing
the chance button may double your score if the light stops at Yes or
it could halve it if it stops at No. More points can be added if you
manage to get five of a kind or if you manage to light the makers
name at the top of the screen. The hands have to be chosen carefully
to get the highest points total. Four cherries for example will give
you twenty points whereas if you select the four together hand, you
get thirty-five points. There
is a high score table which will save your high scores to the game
disk.
The graphics in this game are very well executed. I especially liked
the LED read outs for the credits and score. The spinning reels are
particularly well done. A game of this type does not give much scope
for sound so don't expect anything flash. Bank-it is a good game for
the younger computer user, it is easy to learn and play. Anyone else
will probably tire of it pretty quickly. It is, however, one of
those games that is pulled down off the shelf once in a while just
to see if you can beat your last high score.
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