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MAMA
LLAMA
Llamasoft, £7.50 cass, joystick only
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O
Yak the Hairy's freakiest yet |
The
long awaited follow-up to Ancipital is here at
last to take you through another 100 waves of ultra-freaky
shoot-em-up.
One
of the game's original features is that instead of having
one hairy animal in your care, you have three: a mama
llama with two babies who imitate her every move. Any
of the three can be killed separately, but the game
continues until Mama herself perishes.
Each
of the 100 screens offers a different attack wave, as
varied and freaky as ever. In many ways they're reminiscent
of the Minter classic Revenge, although in this
game the action can scroll left or right, according
to which way you move the llamas.
There
is also a fairly strong puzzle element. In many attack
waves it's not just a matter of destroying aliens, you
have to work out how to do it. This is extremely difficult
to do. Unlike Ancipital, there are no 'help'
screens offered.
Being
hit by an enemy will sap energy, depending on the enemy
and on how many shields you have. Losing all energy
ends the game, but it can be recovered by making the
llamas sit down for a spell.
Mama
and two babies walk in front of an Inca
background. The killdroid is at top centre.
The
backgrounds are more colourful than in previous Minter
games, maybe TOO colourful: sharp flashes and lack of
crispness make the game look coarse and gaudy. Gameplay
is damaged by the confusing colour changes, and after
playing for a few hours my eyes started aching.
Another aspect I found frustrating was the new approach
to killing the creatures: rather than shooting, you
have a large cursor (so-called 'killdroid') which zooms
about the screen at high speed. To gain control over
it, you press the fire button and then try to position
it over an attacking object. This is very hard at first,
and even after a lot of practice it still seemed to
have a mind of its own. However, you can adjust the
'inertia' setting of killdroid during play, which helps
a bit.
In
addition to this, there are no less than SIX 'parameters'
which can be set at the start to give you a custom-made
game of your own. These cover such features as warptime,
number of shields, rate at which enemies are being generated,
and the number of times you can mistakenly select a
'nogo' symbol on the grid (see panel).
A nice tune plays throughout the game -- apart from
that, only a few zaps and crunches make any impact on
the eardrums.
Animation,
as always, is up to Minter's high standards, but the
graphics overall aren't as good as his other shoot-em-ups.
They are marred by the high speed of play and confusion
in the background -- and with the killdroid whizzing
about the screen, the whole screen becomes almost a
graphical mess.
JR
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