Reviews

Geoff Crammond had already made a name for himself with the excellent flight simulator Aviator and the realistic car racing game Revs on the BBC Micro but this original 3D puzzler was the first of his games to be ported to the Spectrum.

Being designed around the four colour capabilities of the BBC Micro and C64, the game doesn't quite look at its best on the Spectrum, although programmer Mike Follin did a good job of recreating the effect with shading. Tim Follin, as usual, ekes some excellent multi-channel ditties, albeit very short ones, out of the Spectrum's beeper into the bargain.

Mainly though, it's the gameplay that impresses. There's a nasty creature, the Sentinel, which stands on the highest point above a 3D landscape, slowly rotating and absorbing everything it can see. You can teleport around the landscape, but only to where you can look down on your destination. This usually means you've got to move around the landscape to gain height bit by bit and gradually build up towers of blocks that will allow you to finally look down upon the Sentinel and absorb it.

With 10,000 algorithmically generated levels, there's plenty to keep you busy, although you don't need to complete all of them to finish the game; depending on how well you do at a level you can skip several of them. Indeed some levels seem impossible and you might have to backtrack to an earlier one and finish with a different score to progress.

Overall, whilst it's full marks for the concept I'd give the faster and more colourful BBC Micro version the nod over the Spectrum one, although it's a game worth experiencing whatever format you choose.

A masterpiece of a game, which will absorb you in the quest for the ultimate landscape. Imagine the child's game of hide-and-seek, the law of conservation of energy and the Cartesian principle of dualism between mind and body, all rolled into one, and you will have a partial idea of what this experience - more than a game - is. A pinnacle in video gaming for every system it was converted to.

Read The Sentinel instructions and finally learnt to play it after 30 years. But I'm still totally crap at it, and, anyway, it's so slow, especially when you try to do something while the sentinel is sucking all your energy off.

This is a videogame difficult to understand today, if only for the 1-bit color graphical presentation. But there's more, because it is slow and confusing.
But it was a revolution.

Let's start: it laid the foundation for true three-dimensionality (at least on limited 8-bit computers). It tried to bring the complex experience of first-person action to a machine based on a Z80 microprocessor. With limitations (the rendering is not in real time, the scene is memorized and displayed "fisheye"-style), but in its own way it did.

An enormous merit that should not be neglected.

As far as gameplay is concerned, programmers knew how to masterfully compensate such inevitable limitations, for the enormous ambition of what they wanted to achieve.

It brought an experience never seen before. All in all, a masterpiece for the puzzle games


give it a try if you want a true challenge!!

Sentinel IS ONE OF
the historical ones who were most able to revolutionize the panorama when it seemed that it was already saturated.
One of the best, without a doubt, thanks to its great technique and excellent programming.
As a First Person Shooter could not be done for the Spectrum (it could not be rendered in real time unless speed was sluggish) they did this: render and capture the image so you could scroll it and therefore navigate across the landscapes.
A Great example of solution - searching and solving problem abilities

It was misunderstood by many, but even those of us who did not understand it knew that there was something very large and very deliberate there behind those strange polygons.