Amstroids

Copyright : Robin Nixon | Reviewed by : Malc Jennings

Developed by Robin Nixon, compiled and distributed by one of the popular Amstrad magazines "CPC Computing" this is one of the many arcade remakes of the classic videogame "Astroids" which has cunningly been renamed Amstroids by Robin.

The idea is simple, Earth is in a state of "Red Alert" after a batch of Asteroids were spotted heading towards our planet, your mission is to blow the crap out of the asteroids before they hit you and destroy earth in the process.

Graphics

Amstroids is an obvious conversion of the Atari classic "Asteroids" for your beloved CPC. Robin has dones a great job in converting this arcade classic as it looks better on your CPC than it ever did in the original arcade and on the console conversion which was prepared for the Atari 2600. In the original game everything was drawn using lines, nothing was filled in with any kind of fancy texture or colours, Amstrods on the other hand as a much more detailed set of graphics and doesn?t compromise the speed of the game in anyway. A top notch job has been done all around in terms of graphics, well done Robin.

Sound

Sound is again another great element of Amstroids, the original didn?t contain much sound and certainly didn?t contain any sampled speech like this version does. After the rather cool countdown screen you get the chance to listen to a brief part of the story line been spoken out of your Amstrad CPC. The game itself also contains a nice set of gun sounds and explosions before giving you more sampled speech on the game over screen - not that we?re saying it?s hard or anything.

Gameplay

The gameplay remains much the same as the Atari 2600/Arcade version but increases the enjoyability of the game by adding a few new extra features and sounds. The only thing we would pick on is that the thrust in the original game was much slower than this one which makes it that little bit harder than the original arcade conversion.

Amstroids is without doubt a good example of bedroom programming at it?s highest level of greatness. For fans of the original game we strongly recommend you give this version a whirl, you won?t be disappointed.