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EVERY platform game released compares itself, and is compared to, Jet Set Willy. Most, of course, come nowhere near. Dynamite Dan, however, surpasses it.


The plot, as usual, is disposable. For what it's worth, Dan is a secret agent sent to steal the top secret plans of Dr Blitzen's mega ray from a mountain top hideaway.

The house is infested with lethal mobile thingies, and Dan must avoid those as best he can while all the time collecting sticks of dynamite and consuming the scattered munchies. Points are scored for food eaten and objects amassed; test tubes score highly as well as giving extra lives.

A lift will take you to various levels before depositing you above the waters which run below the house. Those can be navigated with a raft, though once on it you must keep walking to stop falling off, and strategic hops are necessary to avoid flying birds and insects.

Dotted around the building are trampolines, useful for reaching inaccessible ledges but decidedly dodgy to negotiate, and teleporters which transport you to other rooms.

Such a straightforward description does little to convey the horrifically addictive nature of the game, but only a few minutes play will have you beyond redemption. The graphics are all they should be; large, colourful and free of flicker. The obligatory irritating music is present too.

Scoring virtually no brownie points for originality, the game is nevertheless well set to be the platform game of the summer. Forget Jet Set Willy II and fork out the folding stuff instead for Dynamite Dan.


Publisher Mirrorsoft Price £6.95
Memory 48K Joystick Kempston, Sinclair, Cursor
*****

Bill Scolding

DYNAMITE DAN
Mirrorsoft / £6.95

Ross: Hallo ... what have we got here then? Looks like a man of that all too familiar Jet Set Willy ilk! But hang on! This Dynamite Dan chap is decidedly more dynamic than his earlier rivals. Why do I say that when the basic idea is a collecting- objects- from- a- many-roomed- building- clone? Good question, but the mission that Dynamite Dan takes on is pretty high on the excitement stakes! You'll find that this is the very cornflour of a Bond-movie-type plot when you get to grips with the story. The courageous DD is out to rescue the plans for a deadly weapon stolen by the dastardly, devilish Doctor Blitzen. As Mr Dan himself you have to land your Zeppelin on the castle's rooftop, way up on a cliff. You must then gather together as much dynamite as you can to blow that safe where the plans are, sky-high!
So what else is new in Dynamite Dan? This man is a pretty big sprite, and pretty spritely he is too! His movements beat other games literally by leaps and bounds as he boosts his jumping power by springing, Zebedee style on trampolines and bouncy floors!
The screens are bright and colourful and as funny and action-packed as any I've seen. Dynamite Dan is a bit of a tricky one that makes you try and try to beat those screens. Not quite explosive, but plenty of fun. 7/10
Rick: Achtung! Achtung! Dynamite Dan, the man you've never heard of is coming to town! Wait till you hear the music on this good-humoured-family frolic, you'll be hooked immediately! 6/10
Dougie: It seems that Mirrorsoft has taken all the good bits from the classics and bunged them all in together. Great stuff! 8/10

Designing elegant graphics so that loads of screens add up to some sort of building, has been all the rage since JSW, but this new Mirrorsoft platform games takes the idea about as far as possible, and features one of the most classically elegant buildings in any game. Dan’s girlfriend (our pre-production copy lacks a scenario) appears to have been locked in the vast safe tucked in the depths of a massive porticoed, pillared mansion inhabited by a variety of unpleasant denizens. Dan arrives on the roof (trendily in time for the new Bond movie) in an airship, descends from it, and commences a mission of rescue. Should you enter the screen containing the safe, you’ll see the girl pacing up and down in frustration and, presumably, in an advancing state of asphyxiation.

The collectable objects in this game are sticks of dynamite (eight needed to blow the safe), a weapon to defend yourself with against the rioting rotters, and food to keep up the energy level that distressed damsel rescuing demands. Food is a relatively simple find — being a wealthy house, there’s plenty lying around, but dynamite tends to hide in very inaccessible places; worse still, it isn’t in the same place each game.

The house is divided up into 48 slightly overlapping screens, six high, eight wide, but they wrap around horizontally, making the building effectively a cylinder. All along the bottom runs a river. This can be negotiated by waiting for a raft to float by, jumping down onto it and keeping up with it by walking at its speed. Falling into the river is quite fatal, unless you have been lucky enough to discover an oxygen bottle somewhere. Above the river is a warren of foliage-lined caves and grottos, gradually mingling with the bowels of the house, pump rooms, boiler rooms, electricty-generator and store rooms. Above these are the commodious living apartments with libraries, bathrooms, dining rooms, sitting rooms and the like. The building is topped off by the roof with its chimneys and classically domed towers.

Different features include trampolines and entire trampoline rooms, tightropes, several teleports and an all-floors lift. Dan himself is a large animated character with a fair-sized jump, which he needs to negotiate the complexities of the house and avoid the numerous nasties, although if he falls too far he loses a life.

And just to add a little extra excitement to solving the puzzle, a nice lady at Mirrorsoft told us that the first person to phone them with the name of the tune played when the airship takes off at the end of the game will win a flight in the Goodyear blimp.

Producer: Mirrorsoft
Memory required: 48K
Retail Price: £5.95
Author: Rod Bowkett


CRITICISM
‘Mirrorsoft have certainly come up in the world with this game, I can remember Caesar the Cat — that had nice graphics and was a start. Obviously this game is going to be compared with JSW but I don’t think it’s fair to do so because the graphics are so much better, more detailed, more colourful, more lively and there’s much more of them — each screen is action packed. Also, this must be the first game that has had continuous tunes (and many of them) as well as normal sound effects — I don’t think it could be bettered. There seems to be more to the game element in this than in JSW as well.

Exploring the rooms is great fun, solving the different ways of how to get at the dynamite to be able to blow the safe is not an easy task, but the game would have no lasting appeal if it was an easy one. You certainly need the ten lives they have given you and even with infinite lives I still haven’t solved the problem of collecting all the dynamite.

Is it addictive? Well I’ve spent a good six hours so far reviewing this game, that speaks for itself when you get to see hundreds in a year. The newly created super-hero Dan is bound to become very popular. (Part of a trilogy of games?) If you had the tiniest inclination to like JSW then you’ll absolutely adore this game — it is much better and has much more content - highly recommended. Brilliant! I must