Reviews

One of the more challenging darts games on the ZX Spectrum. Compared to 180 and Wacky Darts this is pretty much as close to a simulator as you can get, complete with the odd bounce-out meaning your dart is worth nought. It can be very tricky to get a maximum 180 here as the dart more very quickly which adds to the difficulty.

But there's a number of different games like Shanghai and Bowls that really adds to this game and will keep you going for a little longer.

So in all this is good and it's worth a go if you enjoy darts.

The second game to bear Jocky Wilson's name, and it has multiple modes, which would be why it's called a compendium. We have Football, Dart Bowls, Scram, Ten Dart Century, Shanghai and the traditional 501. Unlike the first game where you competed in a tournament, here you only face Jocky. The board looks a lot nicer and moving is a bit better though the speed of moving the dart goes change but doesn't change as frequently like Darts Challenge did. What's annoying here though is you have bounce outs, which means the dart has hit the wiring around the board and dropped onto the floor. Realistic? Yes. But what's annoying about it is it happens far too frequently and it can happen even when you've hit a fragment on the board, so either it's a child's board or it's made of hard wood. The opponent view is now on the side with a player looking nothing like Jocky, which is what you'd expect really, but he's too tall and fat to resemble anything like Jocky, he had a belly yes but not this extreme, he actually looks more like Leighton Rees come to think of it. Plus he's likely to have teeth whereas Jocky didn't have any bless him. It also doesn't tell you what you scored in each throw which is a tad annoying.

So what are the games like? Well, football has you hit a bullseye to start and then hitting doubles to score points, first to 10 wins, not really understanding how that can been called football really. And I lost. Dart Bowls is essentially like bowls, the player throwing first throws a jack and the player have to throw darts close to the jack and the player closest scores points. First to 21 is the winner. This kind of works but the problem is, it drags. First to 11 was probably a better idea but 21 for this game is such a bore. I won though so I'll take it. In Scram the player throwing first hits number to take them out of the game and thus cannot be scored from, the second player must score with the numbers that aren't greyed out. Once all the numbers are taken out the roles are reversed and the player with the highest score wins the leg. First to 3 legs wins. This again quite works but again because a bit of a drag, either that or Football was too short. I lost. Ten Dart Century is basically throwing ten darts on the board to score 100 and if the players score more the closest to 100 wins the leg, first to 3 wins. This works quite well and you can play it at home so easily too, but you can cheat by scoring 100 with 3-5 darts then miss the rest of the time without penalties, bounce outs also aren't penalised, unless there's a tie-break rule where I used 6 darts but Jocky scored with all 10 thus he wins. I won. For Shanghai, a number in the board is highlights and you must hit that number to score points depending on which segment you hit, 1 for single, 2 for double and 3 for treble. The player with the highest score after all the numbers have been hit wins. Again it kinda works well and it's a game you can easily play at home. I lost. And of course the traditional 501, players start on 501 and work their way down to 0 whilst finishing on a double, Jocky ripped me 3-0.

Compendium of Darts is quite a mixed bag. The 501 game is as bad and difficult as the first game but this has some other modes that work pretty well and would work on a standard dartboard, unlike the modes seen on Bully's Sporting Darts. Football didn't make sense and Dart Bowls might be best played if the bull was the jack, but other than that the other modes played pretty well and they work to a degree. My favourite might be Ten Dart Century, it was a really fun game that made you really think about your scoring because hit a big number and you have to score low to avoid going way over 100. Because of the other modes working well I feel I can be generous with it and give it a mark of 3 because they saved this game from being as boring as Darts Challenge.