PHANTOM CLUB
(Ocean, 1988)
I scoured through quite a few isometric games before I could find two which stand up reasonably well in this day and age that weren't Head Over Heels. It was a big mad craze at the time of course, but once the amazement at this novel style of game wore off, how many would still get played? Most seem so slow and quite painful on the whole, and not too many are remembered with much affection, besides the one that started it all of course. Yes, I speak of Scuba Dive. But here's one I'd not encountered before. Imagine's M.O.V.I.E. was a big hit in '86, then two years later Serbian maestros Dusko Dimitrejevic and Dragoljub Andjelkovic followed it up with Phantom Club. Oh and they also had help from the probably non-Serbian Simon Butler, who spends his time as a Crash DJ these days rather oddly. "Let's rock!"
It's surprising that the Phantom Club hasn't been made into a movie itself yet like all those other ones, since they're a kind of Avengers or X-Men type affair. A group of superheroes with superpowers, their leader Zarg (classic bad guy name) has turned them all onto the path of evil. It's your job as Plutus the Zelator, the lowest rank in the team, possibly a janitor, to fight your way through the 500 (*faint*) rooms at Phantom Club HQ, neutralising enemies and completing missions to increase your own rank, then overthrow the Z Man.
This is relatively good fun for an isometric game. It moves pretty well, not too much of that horrific slowdown just about every game like this is prone to. And your hero chap is indeed quite super, as he can fire mind bullets (like Tenacious D) and even do a forward somersault. It's a little difficult to line up the baddies though, the 3D not really helping with this. Some of them annoyingly turn into spiders from Nosferatu The Vampyre when you shoot them rather than just sodding off. And I in my rubbishness never found any missions as such, only a TV with a running horse on it. How odd.
But despite its inherent difficulties, Phantom Club is quite a decent 3D trawl. The graphics are very impressive, with some truly abstract wall designs and nice sprites aplenty. Colour is used very psychedelically, with just about every colour on the Speccy used as foreground and background (white on magenta anybody?) This is the kind of novel approach which raises the game above the majority of Sabre Man's relatives.
H.A.T.E.
(Gremlin Graphics, 1989)
If we talk about a pantheon of Spectrum programmers, who would we see there, dressed in togas and holding scrolls (of hex code)? Maybe the likes of Turner, Cecco, Singleton, Crow, Priestley, the mysterious Stampers in hoods, possibly that Soft And Cuddly guy... But here's one that might not immediately spring to mind - Costa Panayi. He was both prolific and impressive throughout the '80s, starting on ZX81 games, then moving to the Speccy with Androids 1 and 2, T.L.L. and Cyclone, then he went 3D mad with the classic Highway Encounter and many more, including the not-3D Deflektor. H.A.T.E. was his swansong in '89, so did he go out on a high note or a dud?
Hostile Alien Terrain Encounter is the slightly boring expansion of the acronym, Costa clearly liking his Encounters. So what year is it this time around? It's 2320 actually and guess what - the aliens are still attacking us, the fiends! You need to meet them head-on and on your tod as usual, so you must leave right this minute... for Stripworld! Hang on, what kind of game is this...
Calm down, there's no nudity unless you count the blobular aliens (urgh). You jump in your star fighter and fly along a bumpy course, avoiding zig-zagging aliens and picking up plasma cells, which line up neatly behind you in a nice nod to Highway Encounters of the past. Finish the level and the next one sees you swap for a Ground Assault Vehicle named Gav. A tank to you and me. The tank can't fly as such but it sure can shoot at stuff. The more plasma cells you collect, the more lives you get on the next level, which is novel. And there's a smart bomb which destroys every MF in the room. No wait, that's the C64 version only, what a crock! Come on Costa, you're better than this. There are 30 levels, of which I made it to about 5 or 6. I don't claim to be any good at these games, y'know.
Mr. Panayi sure was a wiz at the old diagonal 3D graphics and scrolling - U.S. Gold really should have got him to do the Zaxxon convo if they had any sense. This game is monochrome but still looks an absolute treat. Your ship moves and shoots so smoothly, it's like playing an isometric shmup, which ain't easy to make on the Spec. There's a great Ben Dalglish tune, on the title screen only but never mind, but the in-game sound is rather limited. H.A.T.E. is fun to play for a while, but maybe a tad one-dimensional (ironically) in the long term. Still , a decent send-off for one of the ZX Greats. Sounds like a book Graeme Mason's now thinking of making - you can have that one Graeme if you're reading ;)
THE ISO-METRICS
PHANTOM CLUB 82%
H.A.T.E. 84%
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