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IT IS surprising that nobody thought of producing a game based upon the trials of Ulysses a long time ago.

Hellfire takes you from the hills at the entrance of a sacred temple, past the minotaurs which guard its inner sanctum and through a complex adventure maze where you are continually hounded and your only weapon is a mace.

The game involves three distinct tasks each of which leads into the next. On the first level you must jump on to hills, avoiding boulders and the stony stare of Medusa. Once inside the temple you must use the trampoline to move nearer the top of the screen and dodge in between the pillars to avoid the minotaurs. Each pillar will transport you to a different level of the screen until you get the sequence correct and enter the door at the top of the temple into the labyrinth where the fireball thrower and the reptilian assassin await your arrival with glee.

The small degree of skill needed to complete the first level is sure to turn players off fairly quickly. If the early levels had been more difficult to complete its graphics and plot would have made it a candidate for a number one spot in the charts.



John Gilbert

HELLFIRE Melbourne House Price: £6.95 Joystick: Kempston, Sinclair Gilbert Factor: 7

HELLFIRE
Melbourne House / £6.95

Roger: "Re-enacting the trials of Ulysses" through the good offices of arcadia should be cerebral and poetic, 'cos when Ancient Greeks did their derring-do, even a punch-up outside the boozer was worth about 48K of epic verse. But somewhere in this knockabout translation of stupendous and stirring stanzas into mundane machine code, excitement is lost and cultural dilution occurs on the same scale as the day you discover that doner kebabs contain nothing more than reconstituted donkey lung!
On-screen odysseys involve hopping up hummocks and dodging dangerous debris, to enter a sacred temple lurking inside the mountain. Erratic keyboard control suggests that our hero has already been at the Retsina. Once indoors, sneaking past terminal minotaurs by nipping from pillar to pillar is the business, followed by a maze in which monsters can be bonked on the bonce.
It took the 'real' Ulysses a fair few years of frenzied and fantastic fisticuffs to fight his way home to mum. Try to be a bit quicker, or you'll end up pulling the plug with boredom, as I did There again, I'm only a legend in my own lunchtime ... 1/5

Ross: It says on the cassette insert that it takes a week on average to complete. Well, it didn't quite take that long, but it's pretty good! 3/5

Dave: There's some very nice, thoughtful screens in this game but, overall, I'm not sure there's enough here for a hit. 2/5