Producer: Arcade Systems
Retail Price: £5.95
Author: Mats Emilsson

Legend tells of an ancient place of worship hidden in the jungle - a temple containing priceless treasures. Over the years many explorers have tried to recover the treasure, but all failed in the attempt. The entrance to the temple is guarded by natives who fire poison arrows at anyone approaching. Nobody has yet passed the portals of the temple known as Doom.

You've travelled to the jungle and want to grab the treasures for yourself, but are starting to get put off by the stories of the one-way journeys that your predecessors have taken. If you want to live long enough to collect an explorer's index-linked pension it would be sensible to avoid the Temple of Doom.

Unfortunately you haven't got enough money to cover the journey home. Finding the treasure is your only hope. Life is looking pretty bleak until a native offers to sell you a magical amulet that protects its wearer, allowing him to be 'killed' twenty three times before expiring. This is just the sort of comprehensive insurance policy you need before embarking on a treasure hunt in the Temple of Doom. So off you trot into the jungle a little poorer and clutching the magic amulet.

Apart from an Indiana Jones style hat, you have no useful equipment, and success depends on your running and jumping abilities. The jungle is split into screens, and each screen contains a key that is needed later on in your quest. To collect a key a fairly complex physical puzzle has to be solved. The background is made up from Kingly objects such as trees and swaying creepers. Most of these can be clambered over in real Johnny Weismuller style, using the left, right and jump keys.

Platforms are created by the branches of the trees, and swinging vines similar to the ropes found in Jet Set Willy abound. Once you're on a rope or creeper, pressing a direction key opposite to the direction in which the rope is swinging moves you up; using the key which takes you in the same direction as the rope's swing takes you down. The jump key allows you to let go - just like JSW.

The playing area is made up from flip screens and a new piece of scenery appears as you move off the edge of the current screen. All sorts of nasty thingies try to hinder and disrupt your progress. Tribal warriors trog along tree branches firing poisonous arrows at you. Apart from the archers, lions patrol patches of jungle and some of the trees contain people who hurl rocks in an awkwardly random way.

Touching a baddie or being hit by a weapon loses you a life... Remember - the amulet's only good for twenty three lives. Exploring takes it out of a chap, and a constantly shrinking bar reveals the drain on your energy. Fortunately, a munch on a piece of jungle fruit boosts your stamina.

If you survive the jungle hazards you enter the underground section of the game where different meanies and backgrounds are encountered. Scary things such as ghosts, spiders, stone throwing gnomes and all manner of death dealing obstacles try to thwart you in the Underground section, which is followed by The Ship, The Haunted House and The Pit. Just keep a tight hold on that amulet!

COMMENTS

Control keys: Z left, X right, P jump, (L fire on some screens)
Joystick: Kempston
Keyboard play: a bit sluggish
Use of colour: hardly state of the art
Graphics: a bit dated
Sound: minimal
Skill levels: one
Screens: unknown!

AArrrggghhh! Not another Jet Set Willy copy! Okay, it's not identical, but it is similar enough to be pretty unoriginal. The graphics aren't brilliant, and the colour clashes like crazy. Sound is pretty BASIC and really there's nothing outstanding about the game at all. If it were a budget game, then maybe it wouldn't be so bad, but I'm afraid that to me, buying this for £5.95 would be money down the drain.

Gosh! A JSW rip-off. I haven't seen one of these in ages. Don 't be fooled by the obvious similarities like the swinging rope - this game isn't half as good. l would have expected to have seen the graphics in an average game early in 1983 - they are jerky and there's a lot of colour clash. Sound is virtually non-existent: only one tune, which is a great shame as it would have added to the atmosphere of the game. Gameplay is very slow which leads to the old complaints of boredom and monotony. It's infuriating, as well: losing a life means you have to spend ages tackling the same screen again. I can't recommend Raiders.

What an amalgamation of old material! There don't seem to be any original features in Raiders of the Lost Ring. The main format is very similar to Jasper. The swinging rope comes from Jet Set Willy and the game itself is just a platform game in the now standard, and extremely to loos, Matthew Smith format. The worse thing about this game is the terrible collision detection - it gets very annoying to have objects drift by you before they kill you. At the price I suppose it's not too unreasonable, but only if you like this sort of thing. I don't.

Arcade Systems
£5.95

Indiana Jones has been a gift for programmers ever since he burst onto the cinema screens so the basic plot is familiar - visit the screens and collect the keys. Each of the screens (or the ones I managed to get to anyway) is set in the jungle and you have to swing through the trees to get your paws on those elusive keys.

Publisher: Arcade Systems
Programmer: Mats Emilson
Price: £5.95
Memory: 48K
Joystick: Not stated

Is the thought of searching for a misplaced ark too much? How about starting with something smaller, like a £1 coin or a contact lens? Or how about a ring? And why not change your name to California Smith while you're at it, because you wouldn't like to infringe anybody's copyright, would you?

This game proved very difficult to load but, unfortunately, eventually it did, to reveal a jungle landscape filled with falling apples, nasty natives with deadly arrows, vines to swing on and a key to collect. Quite why you should need a key in the jungle is a puzzle but let that pass.

To achieve that end you are given 24 lives but an amount of energy which wanes even as you stand. Fairly accurate timing is called for but a bit of practice will get you into the next screen which adds deadly bushes, a rabid sheep - probably intended as something slightly more ferocious - and a black blob which throws fireballs at you. Oh yes, and there's another key.

No Harrison Ford, your tiny hero - more a Harrison C5 - though he does have the useful ability to stand in mid air. Perhaps he was having trouble seeing where the branches finished, the pink-on-cyan colour scheme being delightfully Habitat but less than clear. Another novel feature is that if you hit 'Jump' immediately after 'Forward' you leap forward instead of straight up. making accurate timing difficult.

The minimal instructions claim "about 50" screens but I've no desire to find out, as each one repeats the same elements, although there is the promise of shooting on later screens. If you are looking for some mindless sub-arcade game at a budget price this might suffice, but as it's selling for the price of far superior programs, leave well alone.