BANNED!
Friday 13th turned out to be unlucky for Red Rat Software for on
13th November they launched Little Devil, their latest Atari
release, only to discover that it had been banned by Silica
Distribution and certain overseas distributors! What is more Silica
went totally over the top and banned their next release entitled
Nightmares even though they hadn't seen a finished version!
So what is so evil about these titles? Nothing at
all, they are just variations on traditional arcade style games.
Little Devil just happens to be set in Hades where you have to
collect lost souls in order to rescue a Princess, and Nightmares has
some superb monsters in a scrolling shoot-em-up format. So why ban
them? Silica say that they will not touch anything that deals with
the occult because it 'is harmful to children'. Talk about double
standards! How come it is perfectly acceptable to kill people with
karate, bombs and guns and wipe out every living alien just because
they don't happen to come from your planet, yet rescuing a Princess
in Hades is harmful? We suspect it has a little to do with
distributors losing interest in 8-bit titles and finding a
convenient excuse not to stock them. It will be interesting to see
how many ST titles get banned (we can think of several candidates)
in the coming months.
In the meantime, Red Rat need the support of every
Atari 8-bit owner because they are one of the few to stick to
supporting this format. In a difficult market they are trying to
bring you new titles regularly and if they can't get them onto the
market, you will lose another software company. If your local dealer
can't get these titles you can order direct from Red Rat at P.O. Box
12, Prescot, Merseyside, L35 5HG. Tel. 051 426 9085. Both titles are
£7.95 on cassette and £9.95 on disk.
Other new releases from Red Rat, (censorship
allowing!), are SPACE WARS, DOUBLE PACK No. 1 with PLANET ATTACK and
MADJAX, LEAPSTER, DOUBLE PACK No.2 with BURGLAR BILL and POTHOLE
PANIC and SPEED RUN. All are £7.95 on cassette and £9.95 on disk.
Two new releases for the ST at £14.95 are Pengy and Screaming Wings.
Support Red Rat, they are supporting you!
PCW RECORD
The computer industry is alive and well judging by
the recent PCW Show. Anyone who went on the Saturday will testify
how crowded it was, there were even rumours that they might have to
shut off the gallery because of the number of people!
The official attendance figures show that over 72,000
visitors turned up making this the biggest UK computer show in
history. With repeat visits included, the attendance was over
80,000.
Getting that many into the Novotel will be a bit of a
crush, but let's hope that the Atari Christmas Show, just gone,
enjoys equal success.
GAME OF THE YEAR
The Guild of Thieves, available in Atari format, has
been voted Game of the Year in the 1987 British Micro Computing
Awards, a double achievement for Magnetic Scrolls following earlier
awards for their first release, The Pawn.
Magnetic Scrolls Managing Director Anita Sinclair is
delighted that their second game should win an award because "it was
probably judged on the quality of gameplay ... rather than the
technical achievements of the parser and the visual delights of our
graphics". The Pawn was widely acclaimed as breaking new ground with
its parser and graphics and following up an initial success is
always difficult.
Rainbird Software have just released the third
Magnetic Scrolls adventure, Jinxter, and are hoping that it will be
just as successful.
GNOME RANGER
Level 9's latest release, Gnome Ranger is being
marketed directly rather than through Rainbird Software and is a
3-part, light-hearted adventure concerning a bossy Gnome called
Ingrid who leaves her dreary farming village to study gnome
economics at college. She returns with all sorts of new-fangled
ideas and sets about modernising her family whether they like it or
not! Every improvement ends in disaster but Ingrid is not put off,
she chronicles every event in a diary which accompanies the game.
Eventually, after a secret meeting, the gnomes give Ingrid a magic
scroll but when she reads it it transports her far away and she must
find her way back, putting the wilderness to rights as she goes!
Level 9 have tried to make this a different style
from their previous adventures whilst retaining the parser and text
abilities found in Knight Orc, their latest release through Rainbird.
Unusually for Level 9 this one is available on disk
for the Atari XL/XE at £9.95 or on 2 cassettes for the same price.
It is good to see Level 9 finally recognising Atari owners with disk
drives and doubly good that they can put the product out at the same
price as on cassette. Why can't others do it?
top
