MONSTERS IN HELL PUBLISHER Softek Software International Ltd. AUTHOR Martin Lewis YEAR 1983 SPECTRUM 16K CATEGORY Platform DESCRIPTION It's Panic! in a slightly more Dungeons and Dragons form. In other words, instead of digging holes and letting beasts fall into them, you dig holes and let wizards fall into them! CONTROLS Cursor Keys Q,A,O,P,zero Cursor Joystick INSTRUCTIONS Your stick-man is trapped on a single screen of levels and ladders. A warlock stands on the top left, creating minions which work their way towards you with the intention of draining your holy power! When your holy power is gone, you die, so it's generally not a good idea to let them get to you! To help you, you have some kind of magic hammer which you can use to bash holes in the floor. The minions are pretty thick and will fall down the holes if you lead them to them. Some minions will die from a fall of a single level, later ones are more resilient! Care must be taken not to fall into the fires of Hell which burn beneath the lower level, but on some stages the fire is the only way you're going to get rid of the nastier minions! Your holy power drains slowly, but you can replenish it a little by collecting the crucifixes that appear at random around the level. There is no end to the game, it just keeps getting harder and faster until you're dead! :) SCORES RECEIVED Monsters in Hell was DEFINITELY released before any games reviewing magazines were about. I guess that makes it kind of old. GENERAL FACTS It has to be said that even for the era, this is a pretty dismal game. It was a very early Speccy commercial release, true, but it reminds me of someone's first attempt at a Basic game (and indeed, it could very well be written in compiled Basic!). The graphics are simple UDGs with no animation, and movement is in large blocks of eight pixels at a time. The game's only redeeming graphical feature is the "flames of Hell" effect, which is actually not too bad. Shame about the rest of the game. NOTES It's actually worth having a look at just to see how bad it really is! I guarantee you will be amazed by the quality! ;)