I tried this one out of curiosity, thinking it may somehow be an official tie-in of Cronenberg's surreal 1983 horror/thriller movie of the same name. Alas, I can't quite tell what this game is - other than to say that it doesn't really bear any resemblance to that movie. Admittedly it was a few years since I last saw the flick, however I don't remember any scene where a row of men stand lined up against a brick wall under a starry sky whilst getting zapped by some sort of targeted "zapping" weapon (controlled by the player).
I only award a score of one to this title, not so much to describe it as "awful" (although it is by no means good). More so because it's not a completed game as far as I can tell. It just looks like a bundle of routines, thrown together - almost a demo of a game, or perhaps a game that was started and then later abandoned. For example there's no loading screen, intro screen, instructions, score, lives or anything like that. No completed game should make you have to read the BASIC source in order to work out the key mappings. In any case, they are 1 - up, Q - down, G - left, H - right, V - zap, or any on the same half rows.
So it seems pretty purposless from the viewpoint of entertainment, but I guess I just don't understand what this one is meant to represent, since it is devoid of any accompanying or in-game documentation. A most peculiar find in the archive for sure, but the low score is indicative of the amount of enjoyment you'd likely get out of it.
Nice zapping sound on the laser weapon though and the in-game characters are quirkily drawn, being the opposite of "bow legged", which made me reailse I don't think there is a word meaning "opposite of bow-legged".
Review by YOR on 08 Nov 2017 (Rating: 1)
Here's another one from Stuart Campbell of Nuclear City Bomber "fame" and according to WoS it's even worse, and it has a point because this isn't a game either. I have no idea what you're supposed to be shooting at but you are shooting at something and when you shoot something, like its head, it falls down to the chest area and so forth. I don't even know what the goal of the game is? Do they all have to fall to the bottom? Well if so you can't, because when you go to the ones at the far left or right of the screen it just scrolls and resets the screen and you start all over. So while in Nuclear City Bomber you can't lose the game, here you can't win the game. Oh, and you can't play the games either because they aren't games.
