Sut197829 Dec 2021
Initially slow and unappealing but stick with it and fun can be had. Not a masterpiece by any stretch but a decent time waster. Not sure an ideal console type release for the XEGS.
AbbotKinneyDude13 Dec 2020
It's a great game to play in its cartridge version and, to a lesser extent, in its disk version. However, I would avoid the tape version for obvious reasons (slow multi-load, need to load the whole program again when game over). BTW- The XEGS version only has 1 title screen out of 2 versus the disk version.
ChrisTOS25 Jan 2018
I had it on tape too. Still it was not that bad. I spent the time waiting for it to load doing my homework. I was pretty good at cutting corners when doing homework as well so I was done at the 34-40mins it took to load.
Thinking back, most games that took 5mins to load (or around 100 at the tape deck meter) were crap. I was always disappointed to see a game load so fast..
Auntie Pastie29 Sept 2008
Alex; let me guess... you had the tape version- I had that too! It was a *horribly* slow multiload made all the worse by the Atari's painfully slow tape drives.
I'm guessing that this was originally written and intended as a disk-based game, since it was developed by an American company (AFAIK the U.S. market was mainly disk-based by the mid-late 80s). I'd also guess that the tape version was an afterthought, possibly only commissioned by U.S. Gold for the UK release.
Here's the annoying thing- although quite a lot of UK Atari owners had disk drives (because the Dixons chain sold 800XL/1050 bundles at a very low price in the mid-1980s), the UK 8-bit market as a whole was still fairly tape-driven. The "Budget" computer games market (originals and cut-price reissues of full-price games) in particular was built around cassettes, and they were almost never available on disk. So even us disk-owning Atari users ended up with lots of stuff on tape and suffering slow loading and "Load Error" messages. That's why I had this game on tape. Aaaaaargh! Wish I'd known how good "Transdisk" was much sooner.
Alex23 Nov 2006
Ha ha ha, damn i remember this, the first thin was it took an eternity to load, and when the game started i was in some sort of cockpit before being shot down by something ( less than 1 minute into playing)and then it said something bout loading the game over...
Absolute long thing
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