MINDTRAP

Startle your brain with a series of fiendishly tricky puzzles - only
the quickest thinkers can survive in MINDTRAP, a game that calls for
dexterity and quick decisions.

LOADING INSTRUCTIONS

Spectrum: Put your machine into 48k mode. Type LOAD "" and press ENTER.
Press PLAY on tape. Program will load and run.

CONTROLS

Spectrum: Q - up; A - down; 0 - left P - right; M - fire; space - swap.

Or Joystick

Up, down, left and right move the frame used to manipulate the cubes. The
four cubes inside the frame can he rotated anticlockwise by pressing Fire
and Left or clockwise by pressing Fire and Right.

MINDTRAP - What you're up against .....

Keeping the world a neat and tidy place is not easy, especially if you find
yourself inside the world of Mindtrap. Coloured cubes have been scattered all
over a floor, and your objective is to shuffle them around until the screen
contains six neatly colour-coded columns of cubes. Stack the cubes up so they
align vertically with the colour markers at the bottom of the screen, but don't
hang around - there's a time limit on each level and you've only got a finite
number of moves in which to get everything neatly in place.

A giant cursor, or frame, can be shifted around the screen and is your main
ally as you attempt to restore order. The frame 'holds' a group of four cubes,
and can be pivoted around its centre in order to move a quartet of cubes clockwise
or anticlockwise in 90 degree increments. Run out of time, or use up all the moves
allowed on the current level and Mindtrap has won .....

In the early stages, the challenge is fairly straightforward - you're working in
two dimensions, dealing with cubes scattered on a single plane, or floor. When you
hit Level 33, however, things start getting a mite trickier: from here on, the
world of Mindtrap becomes three dimensional. Level 33 contains two floors which
have to be sorted into tidy order, but only one floor is shown on screen at a
time - it's up to you to decide which floor to start work on. Then, just as you've
nearly tidied up one floor you realise that you haven't got all the cubes you need
to do the job. Some ratbag has shuffled cubes between the floors .....

Fire/Up and Fire/Down can be used to move the display between floors, and the swap
key is used to move cubes between floors - pressing it exchanges the four cubes in
the frame on the current floor with the four cubes in the corresponding position on
the floor above. The swap system 'wraps around', so pressing the swap key on Floor
One exchanges a set of cubes with the bottom floor.

Just as you reckon you have mastered tidying up two floors at a time, Mindtrap piles
on the challenge. Try working against the clock with three floors to a level. Or
even five.

Taking Bite-Sized Chunks

Even the most puzzle-hardened game player would he scared by the prospect of solving
a million levels of Mindtrap. So we told the programmers to cool it, and limit the
size of the challenge. So they put in 999,999 levels to keep you amused. Even if
you've played the game several times, it's simply not going to he possible to zip
through from Level One to the end in an afternoon - so the programmers have devised
a special, personalised password system so that you can leave the game and restart
at exactly the same point.

After loading, you can choose to start a new game or resume play exactly where you
left off. Type in your name, and Mindtrap generates a detailed password after each
level is completed ~ passwords are linked to the name typed in when the game started,
so to resume play another day you'll have to remember the password and your own name!
Difficult, huh? Restoring a game by using the password system allows you to continue
from exactly the place where you left off - the total number of moves and the time
elapsed in the original game are restored along with the game position.

The only advice we can offer, is to try and get coloured cubes arranged in the frame
in pairs, and then move pairs into the right place until everything is hunky dory.
Until the next level, that is. Enjoy the challenge!

(c)Activmagic 1989