AQUANAUT 

 Not to be confused with AQUAVENTURE (an upcoming game from
Psygnosis), AQUANAUT is an underwater arcade game from Fissionchip
Software, the people who brought us THE KRISTAL. With such a great
game already to their credit, my hopes were high for this one. 
Unfortunately, AQUANAUT is nowhere near as successful a design as
their previous efforts. 

 The game comes with a nice little story to prepare you for play. In
the confidential "Preliminary Report," various memos and documents
are gathered that indicate the likelihood of radioactive space
aliens having landed somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, near the
Yendor Isles. It is your task as an undersea diver to fight your way
through hordes of killer sharks and jellyfish and increasingly
bizarre underwater creatures to get to the Alien Underwater City and
dispatch the Menace From Below once and for all. 

 It all sounds like a potential adventure, and with the three disks
included in the game, you're prepared for an interesting, 
extensive, and varied experience. In fact, what you get with
AQUANAUT is a collection of three story-related, slightly different
horizontally-scrolling arcade games, the latter two of which are
inaccessible until completion of the previous section. 

 Game1, "Encounter at Shark Reef," requires that you swim through
the shallows near the enemy ship, collecting supply tanks, stopping
for replenishment of your air supply, blasting and collecting
chained storage tanks for power-ups, and doing your best to destroy
any dangerous fauna heading your way. The sound, while minimal, is
bubbly and appropriate, and the graphic representation of the
underwater world is dark and mysterious. Animation of fish, 
jellyfish, and sharks is all nicely done, and the sharks blend so
well into the darker backgrounds that they'll often completely
surprise you before an attack. 
  
 Not all sharks attack: The Great Whites (so-called) tend to pursue
you, but the smaller ones are often best left alone. You have plenty
of ammo, but your swimming abilities don't always allow you to
out-distance the sharks; turning around and heading the other way
often helps, but you frequently get caught in the turn, and have
little time to position yourself and fire. As you get closer to the
enemy ship, progressively bizarre life-forms appear, as well as an
increasing number of dangerous jellyfish and sharks: Be prepared for
some tough arcade action! If you swim close and kiss the mermaids
that periodically appear, you can collect extra lives. (When you
die, the story goes, another diver is sent down to take your place
where you left off, up to a certain limit; it _almost_ works as an
explanation.) 

 Collected objects are various, and serve the usual arcade
purposes: more firepower, more speed, more maneuverability. You
scroll through and access your inventory with function keys, which
is one of the primary weaknesses in the design: Things are happening
much too fast onscreen to give you time to stop and search for an
appropriate function key to change your options. You can work around
this as you become more familiar with the game (there are ways of
anticipating what's going to happen next), but it's nowhere near as
convenient as a similar control design in STRYX. 

 Once you've reached the end of Game1, you can save, thus enabling
you to start up in Game2 without having to replay all of Game1. I'd
be gloriously happy if this were a standard feature in all arcade
games! 

 In Game2, "The Labyrinth of the Abyss," you continue in a
horizontal mode, this time struggling through an underwater
labyrinth. This is your typical maze arcade game, with underwater
graphics and features. The gameplay is nothing unusual, but amusing
enough. 

 In Game3, "Rescue from Atlantis," you finally reach the underwater
city. (So Atlantis was constructed by space aliens, eh? Put that in
your NATIONAL ENQUIRER and smoke it!) Here you hit a good
platforms-and-ladders game, which is graphically less entertaining
than either of the previous two, but chock full of objects to pick
up and use, along with hidden levels to access via the right
objects. The innovation here is that you can aim and fire upward at
an angle ("NE" and "NW"), as well as duck and roll ("SE" and "SW" on
the joystick). Angular firing is possible only when you're
stationary, which makes good sense. 

 AQUANAUT comes on three copy-protected floppy disks, which
(according to the documentation) use "a special data format in order
to accommodate such a large program." In other words, you can order
a set of backup disks from the publisher ($7.50 for a set of three, 
not a bad deal). Along with on-disk copy protection, there is a
variation on the purple-brown lookup-paper torture included as part
of the game startup: You must check the purple-brown topographic map
for the water depth at a certain longitude and latitude near the
Yendor Isles. Much careful squinting will provide you with the right
answer and access to the game. The game will run in 512K on all
A1000s, A500s, and A2000s, and requires a joystick for play. 

 AQUANAUT's not a particularly bad game, and each of the three
arcade games included is large for the genre. The graphics provide a
nicely detailed representation of an underwater gameworld. And I'm
glad people keep trying to design a good underwater action/adventure
game, as it's definitely an environment worth further exploration. 
But if you're looking for something really fresh in an arcade game, 
you won't find it here. I still like the underwater sections of ALEX
KIDD on my Sega SMS much better. 

 AQUANAUT is published by Addictive Games and distributed by Miles
Computing. 

*****DOWNLODED FROM P-80 SYSTEMS (304) 744-2253