!TimeSlip
An adventure through time
An expensive waste of time
Available from: ProAction
40 Honiton Road
Romford
Essex
RM7 9AJ
Price : £5.95
Game Type : Challenging Puzzles
Scenario :
TimeSlip is set in the year 2641, and you play the part
of Hugard, a universal Field Physicist who has invented a time machine.
The first experiment you make is to travel back three seconds through a
black hole but, horror of horrors, it all goes wrong and you end up 500
years back in time and without any fuel.
Thankfully, the black hole is still there so, by collecting the
powerful crystal arionate, you can provide enough power for your
machine to travel back to 2641 - but only in steps of ten years.
Size :50 levels providing different challanges.
****
This is the first games review (and probably my last after I have
finished with this game ) I have ever done, but I actually played this
game, as a demonstration game, on a subscriber disk from the Micro
User. One of the only few good points about this game is, that it was
released as a demonstration game which, as far as I have seen, has not
happened for the BBC Micro, even in it's heyday. The first time I
played this game I thought that it had very good graphics even though
there wasn't a lot of them, very smooth flowing and quite nice music. I
actually thought about buying this game at full price at the time,
which was £9.95, but like most things I didn't get around to it. My
opinion after playing the complete game, I now have in my collection is
that I would have been wasting a good £9.95 at the time. The Micro User
review on the back of the box reads. "If it were budget priced I could
thoroughly recommend TimeSlip. It's the sort of game that will come out
of the box from time to time rather than one for consistent and regular
use."
Roger Frost, June 1992
The above quote says "Budget Priced", even at it's current price of
£5.95, it's not worth it, in it's current state. After playing the game
for several hours and a couple of hundred years into the future I found
that after my sudden demise I was searching for a password to jump back
to where I left my Head Stone, but after reading through the
instructions several times, searching the main screen and getting
someone else to look for it, I had to give it up as a bad job, it just
isn't there. The other point is, that on the main options screen if you
press <escape> you will actually escape from the game which is very
annoying and means you have to load the damn thing in again.
However the parallax scrolling, as mentioned on the back of the box,
seems to me to be quite good.
Overall :
As a full priced game I don't think it's worth the money, maybe if it
had a £5 discount on it I would consider buying it. A possibility of
putting it into the 8BS Catalogue for a pound a time would yield a
bigger profit for ProAction.
I am not a games programmer and I don't like to criticise other peoples
work but this game seems not to have been tested. I still have not
played this game through to the end because after 2 hours it just lost
it's appeal.
Sorry, this is just not a game for me.