💾 Archived View for spam.works › mirrors › textfiles › apple › REVIEWS › wasteland.txt captured on 2023-06-16 at 21:32:35.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Summary: The old Space Invaders craze meets typing lessons. Very early eighties game. Gameplay: A good way to learn how to type--action plus learning! The controls are simply all the keys on the keyboard. You have to hit the right keys as quickly as possible. It even comes with a nice instruction manual which has some general tips. Story: The earth is being attacked by aliens! Strangely enough, these aliens look a lot like the letters you might find on your keyboard. They are in eight rows of ten columns at the start of a wave and go in a left-down-right-down pattern like you see in Space Invaders. You have no shields and no actual ship. Your "guns" are small dots located on the bottom of the screen. To "fire" you press a key on the keyboard. If that is the lowest letter in any column, you see one of your "guns" shoot and you hear a "bink" noise and the leftmost lower letter(it really should be the lowest of the low letters, then the leftmost of that....but I digress) disappears. If not, you lose an energy point. You start with 100 and lose points for letting the invaders land(35), typing a wrong key(1) or letting a word slip by in the "word wave."(1 for each character in the word) What's the word wave? When you have completed 3 waves of space invaders(invaders start lower on the screen for each wave), words start running across the screen in the "word wave." You must type in the highlighted word before it gets all the way across. If you do, you gain energy(1 per letter in the word), and if you don't, you lose it. A bonus round is after that if you don't let words slip by. So, four or five rounds per level, and forty levels total. Graphics and sound: If you lose all your points, a blue curtain comes down on you, and a death march plays. But if not, and you survive, letters appear on the screen and do a dance for you every four levels you complete. Y's rock their branches back and forth to a little ditty, A's kick their legs up one at a time, and T's tilt their tops. Sound is entertaining without being annoying. And no matter how much technology progresses, it'll never capture the outright coolness of the dancing letters by itself. The levels get progressively harder, starting with ASDF for level 1, JKL; for level 2, and moving on to more complex patterns. Eventually you use multiple rows, even using numbers and, at the very last levels, shift keys! And you can even set the speed(higher speed means more points for you!) You can even create your own levels, although you can't get on the High Score List then. Replayability: unfortunately, you could find a pattern of letters to "shoot down" and for the first two sub-scenes it is really quite easy, before the third screen mixes the letters up more or less randomly. The "word wave" always has the same words in the same order, which removes some potentially interesting challenges. But on the bright side, you can focus on typing faster by adjusting the speed, and you can always work at a certain level if you want to improve specific typing skills or get the hang of certain keys on the QWERTY keyboard. You can also pause the game while setting up a combination of letters to type, which ruins the spirit of the game, but people who cheat that deliberately probably don't deserve to have fun. Overall this game does a great job of combining education and gaming. Reviewer's Score: 7 / 10