Your Sinclair Feb 1993, p. 4 Okay. What's the hardest game you can think of? Most probably last month's Guardian 2 - all that pixel- perfect movement, advanced strategy and a huge number of keys to boot. If you've been with the Speccy a while longer you might even vote for games like Lunar Jetman, Lode Runner or TLL (after Level Two). The privileged few who've actually seen the blessed thing would undoubtedly make a case for Astroball, and in doing so they'd earn themselves a pat on the back for feeding us a neat link line into Turbulence. Turbulence, y'see, is extremely difficult. It's also the sequel to Astroball. Sort of. Actually, to make things easier, let's say it is. It's quite a while since we had a completely original game to describe, so listen up. The screen shows two balls - the small, polished form of Astroball herself and part of an enormous chequered planet. Astroball can bounce freely about the place, but the planet can only be spun left or right. You don't control Astroball. That would be far too easy. In fact, you control the planet. By rotating it left or right, or decreasing the gravity by holding down the fire key, you can make Astroball leap around. (The idea of the game is to collect all the diamonds on each level, but let's get the jumping about bit straight first.) Now, the gravitational field of the planet extends to the top of the game screen, as these things tend to do, so by spinning the planet while Astroball is in mid-air, you can still control her flight. The only thing you can't do easily is decrease her height. You see, by pressing (and holding) fire you cause Astroball to jump higher with each successive bounce. Tragically, to reverse the effect you have to let go of the fire button and let her naturally settle, which takes a mite longer. But that's not all! Drum this vital fact into your nervous system - to make the planet rotate you have to move the joystick in the opposite direction. (Physics, eh?) Plus! The direction the planet's going in when Astroball hits it will influence the direction of rebound. (If you imagine a game of Breakout, with the planet as the bat, that should help.) Phew. And so to the object of the game. Scattered around each of the twenty(ish) levels (we think - nobody's got past number six yet) are a number of glittery diamonds. You'll need them all to finish the screen. The first level is merely unfeasibly difficult - take the first couple of games to acquaint yourself with the control method. Then, when you start playing in earnest, watch out for two things. One - those huge spike walls aren't impassable (big hint), and two - every little thing on the level, apart from the diamonds and the planet, will kill you on impact. Pretty harsh odds by anyone's standards, but there you are. Now it's quite probable most of you will have one go of Turbulence, get nowhere and give up. That's fine. But folks who like their games in a slightly tougher flavour should persevere - like the fine games of yore, conquering the controls is half the fun. And for the whingers - count yourself lucky you've got nine lives, matey. Before we tickled the code, you were expected to complete the entire game with a titchily mere three. So there. Nyah, and so on. CONTROLS Joystick or keyboard Z - left, X - right, K - fire [Re-typed in 2005 by Alessandro Grussu from a scan of the original page.]