Producer: Melbourne House
Retail Price: £8.99
Author: D S Whelan, from an Arcadia coin-op

The planet of Armageddon, the last world to be destroyed under the rule of the Galactic Federation, is encircled by moons, interconnected by vertically-scrolling Space Roadways.

But the safety mechanisms that regulate the status and safety of the Roadways have gone awry - and electric arcs have formed across them, destroying all they touch.

The Roadways must be cleared, one at a time. Two very manoeuvrable robot droid craft, known as Battlespheres, are to do the job - and you control them.

Both Battlespheres are protected by strong shields which can be drawn back to reveal heavy cannon, and with this weaponry the dark panels which are causing the problem sparks can be destroyed. But if you take out too many of the panels you'll go off the Roadway yourself.

And destructive globes also occupy the heavenly highways: on collision they can destroy a battlesphere with lowered shields, and do some damage even if your shields are up. Spikes in the surface of the Roadways also threaten your vehicle, chevrons can do major damage, and to add to this misery satellites hover at the roadside shooting lasers.

If the battlesphere takes too much damage, the protecting shields are lost and your only hope of survival is quick movement. But to add a little zest to the life of the battlespheres, one can push the other from the roadway to avoid collisions.

You can run over arrows to increase your fire power, but be warned - from a distance they're difficult to distinguish from the spikes. No wonder motorways never get repaired.

COMMENTS

Joysticks: Kempston, Sinclair
Graphics: good perspective, with little colour
Sound: title tune and poor in-game effects
Options: one or two players

It's a shame the scrolling of the track isn't smoother, and there are a few problems with the battlesphere's movements - they're responsive, but having four actions (sphere left and right, gun turret left and right) controlled by three keys takes some getting used to. And though the graphics are fine and the idea good, these interplanetary roadways are so long that Roadwars soon gets monotonous - there's nothing to do but shoot up the same nasties on the same track again and again.
BYM [66%]

I was enticed to play by the large, colourful graphics, and though Melbourne House has done an admirable job on the presentation and packaging this Spectrum conversion falls miserably.
MIKE [46%]

Melbourne House
£8.99
Reviewer: Rachael Smith

There's a moral in this one. In the early 25th century everyone is living in peace, not doing any work, picking flowers and talking to the trees (rather like the YS office)... apart from the tyrannical Tar'SIans.

Being a fun bunch of baddies they're into B&B (Bovver and Breaking Fings), which brings down the massed GBH of the Galactic Federation on their poor little heads. But does their home planet get trounced? Not one bit of it. Instead, the fall-out falls on Sarac, one of the Federation planets that they've occupied.

Once the dust has cleared it becomes obvious that to save Sarac, first the Feds had to destroy it. Whoops! With friends like that - etc. Not to worry. Everyone goes to the moon - or more accurately, moons - because Sarac, now re-named Armageddon and a major tourist attraction for ghouls who want to gawp at the last world destroyed in a war, has several.

Living in a different orbit to your office could make it hard to get home in time for tea, so the Federation builds a series of adjustable roadways, each computer controlled. But an overheating power-supply in the Spectrum +76 means that these Severn Bridges of the stars are no longer safe. Guess who has to secure them.

Yes, once again you're rolling down the road (fitting, really, as you're driving a sphere), dodging and blasting at various hazards. There are patches of spikes, deadly road markings, bowling balls from hell and worst of all, grey walls which shoot out electronic arcs. These short-circuiting barriers are crucial, because until you've cleared them you can't proceed to the next level.

The roadway scrolls automatically, so all you have to worry about is gliding left and right, lowering and raising your shields, and aiming your gun. You set out with a partner and in two-player mode you'd be advised to work together, though you can also blast each other.

And that's about it. If you can imagine driving down the M4, taking pot shots at the road-works and every Reliant Robin that comes towards you, you've got a pretty good idea of what's involved - and how boring it all becomes.

The graphics are pretty but the pace is sluggish and there's far too little variety in the hazards. A two-player game should offer a twin-joystick option in these days of Plus 2's, particularly when the keyboard responses are a little slack.

The packaging goes on about 'the power of your 16-bit machine' and includes Amiga screen shots. Well, this may be okay for those poor fools who invested a second mortgage in a supermachine with no real games available - but more discerning Speccy owners are liable to drive off elsewhere, real soon.

Label: Melbourne House
Author: Binary Design
Price: £8.99
Memory: 48K/128K
Joystick: various
Reviewer: Tamara Howard

If you were one of the many people heard to mutter 'Coo, fab' at the sight of the Arcadia machines on the Mastertronic stand at PCW last year, then perhaps the news that Road Wars is to be released on the Spectrum will make you giggle a bit. "S'not possible on a Speccy, is it?" people were saying left, right and centre.

Well, fill my trousers with sand, turn me upside down and call me an egg timer, 'cos Road Wars is on the Spectrum is fab.

The plot is strongly garbage collection orientated - unusual in an arcade game. It has been decided that you are the ideal person to clean up the roadways that surround the moon of Armageddon. Now, since Armageddon's moon has got dozens and dozens of bits of roadway floating around the place, you'd think that whoever commissioned the road-sweeping in the first place would provide some decent equipment. Giving you what looks like a large chocolate orange and telling you to get on with it seems a tad strange.

The chocolate orange is not all it seems though and by pulling back on the joystick you can 'peel' the top off your orange, and wammo - there's a dirty great gun nestling underneath. Very useful in road clearance this since tidying the road depends on blasting away selected 'bricks' in the road barriers.

Each road is a continuous loop, you zoom on round and round until you've managed to take out all the tinted bricks on the barrier. A deceptively simple task, you may think, but in fact it's easy to roll on round and round in circles just missing one elusive brick every time.

There is another problem between you and getting your bricks, - a whole other battle ball. Another large chocolate orange rolls alongside you, trying to get in the way and stop you doing your job. If you play with a friend, then the whole thing becomes vastly more exciting, as you can play 'Push-yer-Mate-off-the-Road-into Oblivion'. This gives lots of opportunity for you to get stuck in and shove the opposing ball into spikes, walls and the bottomless void.

The sensation of travelling down and round the road itself is very well done. Smooth and effective the illusion of perspective is superb. Things appear as specks on the horizon, whizz towards you, trip you up without so much as by your leave and whizz off again. And with the other ball getting in your way, your chances of dodging the offending object are usually pretty slim.

When you manage to shoot out all the bricks on a level you'll be shunted to the next roadway, where a whole new ballgame (if you'll pardon the pun) awaits you. On some roads there are bricks which emit sparks, you must either shoot out the bricks, or quickly pop up your protecting cover dome (joystick up) and thus roll past unscathed. You can't just stay in this defensive mode, though. Other levels feature spikes, rolling balls, people-who fire at you and large walls on which to trip yourself up.

If the idea of piloting a battleball round varying roadways in space isn't an idea that tickles your senses, that's your funeral. Road Wars is one of those games that grows and grows on an original idea, and tribute to some brilliant programming.

Melbourne House let the sparks fly.

Rogue computers are favoured subject matter for scenario writers, and those at Melbourne House are no exception. The computer in Roadwars was responsible for maintaining the many roadways that linked the moons of the planet Armageddon. Since the computer went haywire, the roads have have been unsafe to travel, so it's down to you to restore order.

The player takes charge of one of two Battlespheres (your computer or a friend takes charge of the other) and the game involves travelling down a roadway and blasting away the malfunctioning panels that appear at the side of the road. The offending panels are easy to spot because they are of a different colour and usually come in pairs, one on either side of the road, with a huge electric arc between them. Destroying one of the panels will remove the arc but you'll have to clear each roadway of all the disrupted panels before the exit appears and you can progress to a different, harder level.

These arcs are the least of your troubles, however - you also have to contend with various objects found on the roadways. These other obstacles include spikes, small balls that turn into spaceships, and satellites that appeal at the roadside. All these hazards are destructive to your Battlesphere if you should happen to run into them with your shields down.

To aid you with your task you have a laser cannon with which to shoot out the panels and some of the hazards. But the laser can only be operated with your shields down indiscriminate fire will not only remove the offending panels, it will remove any panel. Once you've only got a few panels left on either side of the road it becomes very difficult to dodge the hazards and remain on the roadway, so caution when firing is recommended.

Extra weapons are available to help you with your task - whoever manages to run over an arrow icon in the road is graced with a drone that orbits his Battlesphere. The more arrows you manage to run over, the more drones you get, but if you lose one of your three lives you also lose any benefits you might have collected.

There's certainly plenty to keep the player busy in Roadwars but the game seems to be lacking something in the playability department. Control of your sphere is extremely difficult, and even if you master the controls you could find the fun soon disappears.

Reviewer: Andy Smith

RELEASE BOX
Amiga, £19.99dk, Out Now
Spec, £8.99cs, Out Now
Atari ST, £19.99dk, Out Now
C64/128, £9.99cs, Imminent

Predicted Interest Curve

1 min: 85/100
1 hour: 90/100
1 day: 70/100
1 week: 60/100
1 month: 30/100
1 year: 10/100

Spectrum, £8.99cs
C64/128, £8.99cs
Atari ST, £19.99dk
Amiga, £19.99dk

If you're after cut-throat competition with a friend then Roadwars could provide the answer. You take charge of one of two Battlespheres that career down the continually scrolling roads of Armageddon. If you're feeling cooperative you can help each other to take out the rogue panels that are to be found at either side of the road. But if you're feeling mean you can compete with your friend and try to force him off the road. The Amiga version may be by far the best looking, but the Spectrum version actually has more playability.

MACHINES: ST, Amiga, Spectrum, CBM 64
SUPPLIER: Melbourne House
PRICE: £19.99 ST and Amiga, Spectrum and CBM 64 £9.99
VERSION TESTED: Spectrum

How do you get into the lucrative arcade licence market without coughing up the obligatory telephone numbers of readies?

Easy: just start up your own arcade arm and convert the games yourself.

With such logic has Mastertronic entered the fray. Despite the modest smoke screen of putting the game out on their Melbourne House label, Roadwars is just such a product. How well it has done in the arcades has yet to be assessed, but it certainly looked mighty impressive on the Amiga. It has many of the right ingredients mentioning "road" in the title (thus cashing in on the driving game craze) and having a two player option for those gregarious arcade types.

The player controls a Battlesphere moving down a roadway (the Battlesphere actually stays still and the road scrolls towards you, but it all amounts to the same thing). The sphere moves from side to side and the gun turret on top rotates.

To get to the next level, all the shaded blocks moving past the side of the road must be blown away but naturally the road is strewn with hazards. These include balls, spikes, laser barriers and hovering satellites.

The balls give the Battlesphere greater firepower if hit but things get really tough, the Battlesphere has the handy ability to do hedgehog impersonations and roll up into a ball. This protects it against most hazards.

One major problem can be the other Battlesphere that hangs around. If this is controlled by the computer, it plays a fairly passive role, but obviously if in the hands of another player, it can either be a help, knocking out threatening balls, or a real pain in the posterior, barging you off the road.

Converting this game onto the Spectrum has meant that a lot of the frills have gone. The multicolour graphics have become monochrome and the odd beep is no substitute for digitised sound.

Unfortunately, as so often happens, stripped of its gloss the game turns out to be nothing special at all. Once you've got the hang of the first few hazards, you have to go through half a dozen levels before anything new comes along.

The graphics are well drawn and smoothly animated and the whole package is very slick, but in the overcrowded market of shoot em-ups this is not one that stands out.