Producer: Hodder & Stoughton
Retail Price: £7.95
Language: Machine code
Author: Five Ways Software

There is one thing which troubles me about writing this column. I have to weigh up how much I should go over the same old points I've made in the past and balance this with my rather low boredom threshold. However, to say 'for my views on this subject see CRASH blah blah issue pages x to z', seems too reminiscent of those pompous, stuffy academic reports so I think I'll settle for a little rehashing of old thoughts.

The point I'd like to make here is that publishing companies should be careful when producing computer software. This little industry has quickly come of age and the matching of what the public wants to see on a computer to what the public gets has come a long way some outstanding software has been produced. Programming skills on the Spectrum have improved to the point where there's little room for programming innovation; just about everything the Spectrum can possibly do, it now does.

If programming expertise is near its zenith then program design and implementation aren't far behind. It is in these fields that software producers must be very careful. When designing a board game, the questions at the end of the day are: can someone actually play it, given the instructions; and if they can play it, is it any good? The same must go for computer software. Can the games player play the computer game and if the player can, what does he she think about it? With this game The Rats, I can barely answer the question 'what did I think about it' because I could hardly play the darn thing and, after an (unfortunately) long while, I didn't much care one way or the other. No doubt many of you will buy it because of its interesting theme and slick presentation. It looks great. As a programmer, though, reviewing the game was disappointing as it drops too many own goals.

The way the game loads is clumsy and downright unfriendly. The instructions are all over the place and have that far from endearing quality that has even the most clear-headed reading paragraphs time and again. It interleaves garbled loading instructions with details on game play which don't fully explain exactly what you have to do. Playing the game does not make light of these instructions. For example, the system for deploying troops is clumsy and once they are deployed it's difficult to keep track of them. I'll admit you could direct many of these comments at other prominent pieces of software it's just that The Rats seems to embody all the worst aspects of clumsy design and implementation.

The problem of sensible input has been successfully tackled in the game by reducing the number of options available to the player at any one point to, at most, two or three. The result of this system is sensible input sure enough - the program always understands what you want to do as it itself offers the options - but sometimes the actions you are channelled into do not make much sense. It is a game for much to-ing and fro-ing and exploration as new avenues can appear almost unnoticed.

The Rats is based on the chilling bestseller by James Herbert. Although it is not necessary to read the book to enjoy the software I would guess reading it would greatly enhance the player's understanding and sense of purpose. The game details your struggles with oversized rodents, which you attack through the eyes of minor characters such as Paula Blakely, and major characters like Harris, Howard and Foskins; a resourceful and courageous hero, a young rat scientist, and an Under-Secretary of State respectively. These characters are introduced in a similar way to films eg Close Encounters. The game might cut away from Paula Blakely struggling with the rats on a very personal scale to Foskins whose job is to coordinate London's Emergency Forces from General Headquarters.

Rat-Kill, Police, Fire and Military forces can be deployed against the rodents along with equipment such as protective suits, chemical gas, flamethrowers, electric stun pods and Anti-Rattus gas. Marked on the screen map of London (which, unlike the rest of the presentation, is scruffy) is GHQ, Harris' flat, and the Research and Development Centre where the important work on the origin, nature and vulnerability of the super-rats takes place at the greatest possible speed as the security forces seem ill-equipped to quash the rodents' surge across London.

COMMENTS

Difficulty: may take some time to halt the rats
Graphics: average
Presentation: good
Input facility: option-driven
Response: good

Producer: Hodder & Stoughton
Author: GXT (Five Ways Software)
Retail Price: £7.95

A plague of rats is swarming through London at an incredible pace. The government refuses to face the seriousness of the problem and won't give you the resources you need. Stopping the rats is proving tremendously difficult you're racing against time and losing. The pace is electric but you wonder... are you likely to succeed in your task before you get sick to death of reloading the game...

There are several examples of computer games based on famous books on the market. The Electronic Pencil Company's The Fourth Protocol is perhaps one of the best examples of current success in this field, and now Hodder and Stoughton have released The Rats based on James Herbert's chilling novel. It is a fascinating mixture of semi-graphics adventuring and real time strategy. Unfortunately it is also a mixture of innovative successes and miserable shortcomings.

The title sequence is one of the most original and atmospheric ever designed for a computer game. A prologue is written out in bold white letters across a black screen to set the scene. A brilliant animation sequence follows, in which a pool of torchlight wanders around in the blackness before red eyes appear in the dark. Just as the light moves onto them, a superbly drawn rat pounces into view! Then you are presented with the main, blood-spattered loading screen. The pathetic little tune accompanying this is more amusing than annoying in the context.

The Rats is, to all intents and purposes, two games in one. The Strategy game involves stopping the spread of the rats from the city of London and eradicating them as soon as possible. The opening screen is a simplified map of London with an option window at the bottom. The main options are 'Report', 'Forces', and 'Research'. A flashing cursor on the map indicates rat activity, and you can call information on areas of activity, deploy forces, or ignore the cursor and work on research instead.

If you ask for a report, you will be prompted to define which area you wish to access information about. Moving your own cursor over the chosen area on the map and pressing enter, opens a smaller window on the screen which provides basic information such as 'Old lady attacked by monster rat'. You may then eliminate the window and move on.

You can also ask for reports from various groups you may have deployed in the field. Three icons on the screen indicate the R&D centre, GHO and Harris' flat (Harris is one of the major characters from the adventure section) and reports can also be sought from these places. It is fairly important to follow the reports so that you become aware of the nature of the attacks, but to concentrate too much time on them will leave you no time to allocate forces.

The deployment of the fire service, police and professional rat-killers is vital to your success - if you fail to contain the rats and they leave London you lose the game. The three types of forces have varying ability and choices of weaponry. Initially, weapons are fairly conventional, with dogs, gas and high pressure water hoses. You must equip a unit and then move it to the area where you require action (fortunately you don't have to figure out how many of what to give to whom; the limitations of each force are worked out for you). Later you may ask for that unit's progress report.

Your forces are very limited and trying to stop the rats with them is in fact impossible. What you need to do is delay the rodents for as long as you can and eventually, the army will be brought in by the hopelessly reluctant government, thus giving you a second lease of life. This does not happen for some time however, and there's plenty to keep you busy beforehand.

It's also vital to devote resources to research, but you have finite resources and must decide how to use them to best advantage. The areas for research are origin, nature, offence and defence. Spending points on offence and defence will help develop more potent weaponry to use against the rats but making discoveries about their origin is fundamentally important to the adventure game.

The adventure game, like the strategy, is real time. You are shifted to the adventure section at random intervals throughout play. Each entry into the adventure section, which is really a series of mini-adventures involving various minor characters' encounters with the rats, is precluded by an alarm sound from the computer. Don't worry if you lose minor characters as you often will to start with. Allow a major character (such as Harris) to bite the dust, however, then you've had it!

The format of the adventure is excellent. A large window on the right of the screen contains all the text output in slow-scrolling format, which helps emphasise the real time aspect of the game. At the bottom of the screen is a small window with three major command options which give access to further sub-options presented in the left hand window.

A heartbeat sound (at least it's supposed to be heartbeat) accompanies the text. As the situation becomes more tense, the heartbeat speeds up, adding greatly to the atmosphere. Because the game uses options instead of text input, conversations with the computer can't be ambiguous, which results in very fast and efficient play. Occasionally a new option will appear in the window, implying an impending application - sometimes using it will not help, but generally the appearance of new options works like an inbuilt hint sheet!

If you lose an encounter with the rats, the page seems to tear open and a rat pounces out at you. The use of a simple scream sound is quite effective here too. This is definitely one of the highlights of the game. The narrative quality of the text is superlative and gory, in true Herbert style. Definitely not for the squeamish, this.

The two games integrate perfectly, with good strategy needed to keep going and good adventuring necessary to finally subdue the oversized vermin. With automatic returns to the strategy game after completion of the 'mini-adventures', this smooth play must be credited for the faultless piece of design it is.

The 'miserable shortcomings' of the game already mentioned don't really exist in the game, but rather around it. The loading sequence is very unfriendly: the tape has to be stopped during the animation sequence. Although the instructions mention a way to skip the animation, it didn't want to work, and very little leeway is left between loading sections. When the animation ends you do not receive a prompt to restart the tape, but have to wait for the tune to finish and press play. Problems arise which could easily have been avoided.

While the game is loading it is easy to believe that an error has occurred - the tape error warning used in the sequence is totally useless and it's difficult to tell whether the program is being received. This problem is aggravated by the disablement of the speaker, and for some totally inexplicable reason, some of the blocks are not actually received at all, to judge by the border during loading. It is natural to assume that the system has crashed - but if you leave well alone, the game loads perfectly in the end. This weird pretence of failing to load is very annoying - particularly since it isn't referred to in the instructions. Very unfriendly.

Once loaded, it's wise to save the game as soon as possible as as there is no restart facility because the program possesses massive data files and the game itself continues on the second side of the tape. If you haven't saved a game, you will have to load the entire thing from scratch! There is no menu of options to help clear up matters, and the instruction booklet is misleading and practically unintelligible.

These are major faults, considering the size of the game. On any other game they would be totally crippling, but because of the input format, even badly explained sections can be picked up fairly easily.

The game's percentage based scoring system is silly. We scored 35% for playing what was apparently a good game, full of successes. Yet on a new game where the computer was left to win without any player input, the final score was 21%! Also, when in the adventure section and the pace gets fast, minor system crashes seem to occur in the form of text character decay and randomly appearing multi-coloured blocks, though these do not seem to affect play.

If Hodder & Stoughton had ironed out these faults, the game would have been declared perfect. However, its shoddily finished format may detract from the success the game deserves.

DOWNTOWN RATS

They were big (well, ish!). They were black. And they were ugly. Soon there were swarms of them. They teemed into the shops and took over people's homes. They were The Spectrums. Now Hodder and Stoughton has released a new game designed to tame them. YS Pied Pipers, Peter Shaw and Penny Page, have joined The Rats race...

Once again, London is at war. But this time the enemy is already within its walls... waiting, waiting, for just the right moment. And then the black army emerged from the dark recesses of the sewers to do battle. First, they were like shadows unsettling a sunny day - black and swift but seldom seen. Soon though, they were everywhere - rats, giant rats driven on in a frenzy by an obscene craving for human flesh...

It's your task to staunch their crazed bloodlust - to stop the horrific slaughter and mindless massacres. The gravity of the situation calls for a three pronged attack. Howard is in charge of Research and Development working round the clock in a bid to create a weapon that'll get the rats on the run. To Foskins falls the unenviable task of deciding where the meagre resources he's been allocated should be deployed. Both of them are generals in the war, initially isolated in offices and distanced from the battlefields. Harris, however, is in the thick of it - he has come face to face with the monsters, seen how swiftly they can devour a human body leaving only bloodstains and polished bones. Above all, he knows what it is to face death and feel fear...

Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton
Price: £7.95
Memory: 48K
Joystick: Kempston, programmable

Man's worst fear waits eagerly in the darkness. The scent of human blood is overwhelming and the taste of cool, moist, rubbery flesh is still remembered and savoured. The time is near for the invasion of The Rats.

The game, from Hodder and Stoughton which publishes the book of the same name, is an experience as well as being a menu-driven adventure with a touch of strategy. It loads in sections, the first being a demo program with a nice line in cellar graphics. The sound is not too hot, but the excellent and superbly fast animation sequence, in which a torch scans a watery cellar to reveal hundreds of the plague carriers, is one of the best I have seen.

Once the demo is over, or if you break out of it, the main game is loaded from random routines on the first side of the tape. Loading is confusing as the main operating system of the game chooses the sections to be included within the program at random. Therefore, some of the code on the tape does not load and, if you are a first time user, you may think that the tape is faulty. It is not an error, the tape is loading in the random encounters for the game.

Once the game is running you had better be prepared for some fast action. There are two levels of play, over which the computer has total control. The first level involves a number of scenarios which deal with minor characters. As in James Herbert's book, those people are expendable and can be sacrificed for information about the mutant rats.

Those scenarios are heralded by a warning siren. The screen then splits into three windows, the largest of which displays the action as text. The long window on the left provides command options and the one at the bottom of the screen is your command window. Making your character act is simple - just construct a command sentence at the bottom of the screen using the options provided. The effect creates a feeling of tension as you do not know what options are available until a specific menu is displayed.

If you are unlucky enough to meet a rat, it can kill you in a number of ways. First it might rip through the screen and bite you or, alternatively, it could try to rip through the text with its claws. Once an attack is made, a human face, full of terror, is shown falling from the rip in the page.

It is possible to escape your fate as one of the minor characters. For instance, the little girl doing her paper round would be better off if she did not go into the house across the road, but then you would not discover the rats' secrets.

The major characters, including Harris and Foskins, are just as vulnerable to attack as the minor characters. In some situations, Harris must be mercenary and let the rats kill friends in order to gain information about their habits. For example, when he goes to capture a rat he must make sure that his companion leads the way - the leader becomes a rat victim.

The other part of the game is a contest between the rats and Government forces. You are in charge and must allocate resources on a giant map which shows the spread of the rats through London. If they go over the boundaries you have lost the game, just as you have lost if one of the major characters is killed.

You use icon menus to allocate forces and resources. Those go into action on the part of the map which you have indicated with your cursor. At the same time you must specify the research into the rats' behaviour.

The Rats is a complex and brilliant game with above average graphics - if minimal sound. I can recommend it without reservation to those with strong stomachs.

The Rats is a game based on the book by James Herbert, in which giant killer rats threaten London.

The book isn't supplied with the game. And although the background of the story might make the game more enjoyable, having read it beforehand I can assure you that it is not essential.

Play alternates between strategy sessions and adventure "interludes", the objective is to organise your strategy in such a way that the Research and Development establishment comes up with super-weapons capable of destroying the rat population.

In the adventure episodes you take the part of various characters in the story.

The greater area of the screen comprises a text window, to the left of which is a vertical column. Below these runs a strip offering a choice of COMMAND, INVENTORY, or REDESCRIBE.

The mini adventure starts off by telling you where you where and what objects can be seen. By moving a highlighting cursor you can select one of the three options. The most frequently used option, of course, is COMMAND, which causes a list of verbs to be displayed in the column to the left of the text window. Only verbs which can currently be used appear in the list.

Next the cursor must be moved over the verb required and selected by pressing the fire button. Options for the next command word will be displayed following this. In other words, the game is controlled by text icons, either through the keyboard or joystick. Thus a command sentence is built up by selecting a combination from the lists.

To a certain extent you are playing blind. Supposing you had selected OPEN from the verb list - you would not know what things could be opened until after committing yourself to the verb, but then you would know exactly what was openable.

This is a novel way of entering commands in an adventure but gives the feeling that the options are more limited than in a conventional adventure and that you are being led by the hand.

A mini adventure may end in success or failure, (usually a grizzly death being chewed to pieces by rats) and although the outcome affects the progress in the overall strategy, it is not fatal to the game as a whole.

The adventures, played in real time, rely on strategy in dealing with an urgent situation rather than solving problems. During play, parts of the text window are overlaid with graphics, to the accompaniment of sound. These depict attacks by the rats, and their horror-stricken victims.

Even successful strategies in the adventures can lead to failure as there is a random element built in, and sometimes the rats are just too powerful, whatever action the player takes.

Between the adventures come the 'real' strategy parts of the game, during which the player can allocate his research resources to different aspects dealing with the menace, and as more information becomes available, deploy and equip his forces to defend the population and eventually annihilate the deadly creatures.

The strategy must be directed at containing the rats in the London area, for once they get out into the country at large the game is lost.

As with the adventure sections, the strategies are executed by moving the highlighting cursor.

The presentation of graphics and sound effects was rather disappointing as the semi-animated pictures didn't come up to the standard I had expected of the C64 version. I felt there was scope for them to have been far more dramatic.

The text, white on grey, called for a lot of fiddling with the colour, brightness and contrast on the TV set before it became easily legible. Even then it lacked enough contrast to make a comfortable read.

My other criticism is that once ended, no option for replay is given, and a complete reload is required, as the computer locked solid and has to be turned off before it is any further use.

It takes a little experimentation and practice to get the hang of playing the game, and to understand what is going on.

The Rats is a novel and entertaining game, and should be enjoyed by those to whom the format I have described appeals. On the other hand, I would not recommend it to someone looking for a mainstream adventure.

The Rats is published by Hodder and Stoughton and is available for the 48k Spectrum and Commodore 64.

Hodder and Stoughton
£7.95

An interesting program which combines strategy and adventure by the use of multiple choice input. The game is based on the James Herbert novel and it does help if you have read this book, however it is not essential and the game can be enjoyed on its own merits.

Your prime task is to deploy your forces around London to contain and defeat the rats, this is done by moving a cursor around a map of the city and viewing appropriate sections. Once a section has been chosen, information on the number of men and their equipment is displayed. You can then modify this.

Every now and then the game changes into adventure mode where one of your characters, either one of the main four or one of the many supporting characters, is faced with a meeting with the revolting rodents. In this mode the text input is built up word by word from a bank of options.

Graphics are used to good effect, when you make a fatal mistake the rat leaps through the text. The whole thing is quite an unusual concept and I enjoyed it greatly, however the vivid descriptions are quite gory and not for the squeamish. It will take quite a bit of playing to master this game, especially as the secondary characters load in a random fashion making plenty of game play variation.

This latter feature is not clearly explained and caused a couple of aborted loadings as I thought the program had crashed. If a block is not loading then leave it, it is probably simply not required for that variation of the game.

James Herbert's best-selling horror pulp is translated here, in all it's gory detail, to the Spectrum screen. A blend of strategy and adventure, you must oversee the defence of London against the squealing invaders, hoping your scientists come up with some answers before it's too late.

Everything is icon driven in best modern fashion. In between bouts of strategy, mini-adventures take you through scenes from the book with other characters. Success helps final victory, but there are plenty of chances for the rodents to leap through the screen if you slip up. Absolutely horrible, highly atmospheric.