Murder and mayhem

Press, 1 August 1989, Page 32

Murder and mayhem

By

GARETH POWELL

I have been son-sitting. My son, Ben, has a minor attack of tonsillitis, and I have been deputed to keep him quiet and amused.

He has a computer, an Atari 1040 ST, and we have now completed a marathon session of computer game-playing. Let me admit at the beginning that I was beaten hollow at everything. Not one single game have I won despite the fact that Ben, a seven-year-old, is quite gentle and caring towards his rather elderly father. The first game we played was called MiniGolf, and comes from a company called Magic Bytes.

It is set on a miniature golf course which I vaguely remember from the seaside resorts of my youth. Ben consistently hit holes in one. I regularly went over the stroke limit. On the one occasion I did hole in one, by slavishly

copying Ben’s every movement, the computer played a triumphant three notes to let me know how good I was. It gave me a smug feeling.

There are two disks with this game and the second disk contains an advanced version. Ben said that taking into account my advanced years and inability to grasp even the rudiments of the elementary version, it would be best if we skipped the second disk. There is nothing so cruel as the condescension of the very young. We moved on to Crazy Cars II from Titus. I am against this program. It involves driving a Ferrari F4O across four of the States of America at speeds of more than 300km/h. You are at the wheel of the Ferrari and you are in a race against corrupt police. If you get it wrong you crash, the car explodes. It then miraculously rebuilds itself and you start again. There is a decent interval of* 10 years between Ben playing this game and actually getting behind a real car to learn how to drive. I would not like him to think this is the way a real car works. Hostages, from Infogrames, trains the player, In this case Ben, to become a member of an SAS French division. The plan is to get inside the embassy and rescue hostages — the ones in the white shirts — while zapping the baddies who are in green. At this I am not good.

I zapped the ambassador, one of the hostages, when he was used as a shield by a baddie. I am not good at holding my fire. On the other hand, I got very good at leaping over walls and doing forward rolls to avoid detection.

This is a game in which you become very involved, and despite the fact that I was less than proficient, I found it extremely enjoyable. The graphics are quite astounding and the music very French and atmospheric. After playing the game, Ben was unwilling to believe I had ever served in a real army.

We then moved on to Wanted, which is again French and again comes from Infogrames. This time the scene is Arkansas in 1880 and you are a bounty hunter. You have a Colt 45 and a bag of dynamite. I promise you Samuel Cody never made a gun like this. Not even his famous Peacemaker as used by Wyatt Earp and other villains. (Wyatt Earp was not a nice person despite what the movies suggest. On the other hand Bat Masterson, another renowned gunman, ended his days as a sub-editor on a newspaper. Read into that what you will).

This Colt 45 is a sixshooter. But it shoots all six rounds simultaneously and they move in a horizontal line in groups of two. This gun also never, requires reloading. As you move through two town-, ships, a ghost town and through the gulch that connects the three, you shoot down bad men. I counted 230 but I may be wrong. At times like this the body count is not easy to keep accurate. When you finally arrive at the baddie you are hunting, you find he is dressed in brown overalls, throws rocks and must be shot 36 times (again the figure may be slightly off) before he bites the dust.

Ben managed to get his man. I never quite got there.

Do these games encourage violence in the young? I simply do not know the answer to that question. They kept Ben amused and contented in between glasses of Ribena. The only one that aroused violence in my heart was Mini-Golf, which drove me wild.

What is fascinating is the quality of picture and sound. I keep comparing these games to Lodeßunner, which had no sound and only stick figures. That was written at the end of the seventies. In 10 years games have come a long way.

Ben has now asked me to come and play Purple Saturn Day, which is from Ere Informatique. If I do not return, tell mother I died game.