Thrax Lair

Thrax Lair is like a bag of salted peanuts. The salt makes you keep on eating them. Are you full? Do they taste good? Is there something else you could be doing or eating? None of these matter. The salt drives you on. It makes you shovel them in come hell or high burp.

The game pits the mighty bird-like Tarp against the Thrax creatures, a kingdom of nasty insects - Worker, Soldier, Stinger and Monitor. Tarp flies heroically up a sinuous, tortuous tunnel. The joystick will take Tarp forward (i.e. up) but not backward. Crawling through the muck of the various twists and turns are the entomological terrors. Tarp can lose them or waste them. Point the joystick in the direction you wish to shoot and press the fire button. Of course Tarp, too, can be destroyed. You start with three Tarps and get an additional Tarp with 10,000 points. Points come from speed and kills. Each of the four beasties is worth a different amount of points (ranging from 30 to 250). For the 350-point premium bugs, you must zap their eyes for a kill. The faster Tarp travels (and the more speed points it gains), the harder it is to do fancy shooting. The more slowly you travel, the better your shooting but the lower your score.

Thrax Lair certainly is a logical idea for a game. The tragedy is that it's only slightly better than boring. It offers a modicum of tension, a degree of surprise and an opportunity for ever higher scores. Those creepy crawly insects are not threatening - they're irritating. There's no more joy in killing a lot than a little. Increasing your score is not so much an end as a vehicle by which you get to play another mildly interesting and not terribly involving game.