Rainbow Islands Bub and Bob are at it again, they retired
from bubble blowing after the brilliant Bubble Bobble. The barron has
taken everyone on the islands Bub and Bob went to live on and the yare
out to rescue everyone. They must negotiate seven islands, each with
four sections, if they take to long water starts filling up the
screen/island. This time instead of bubbles, rainbows are used to walk
on and to destroy your enemies, who are varied but yet cute.
The Spectrum version is very colorful, for a Spectrum game, the
colorclash is obviously still there but it is handled OK. When the
action gets busy the sound slows down and the scrolling is one shift
instead of smooth scrolling. All the usual Spectrum issues. The
Commodore has a great tune playing while the Spectrum has at least
something playing, unlike Bubble Bobble whic had nothing.
It is difficult to see a clear winner, I
am however going to call the Commodore the winner, better color, tune
and scrolling.
Robocop This
is one of the iconic movies of the eighties, it is still replayed
numerous times on TV. The conversion to the 8-bit machines were well
done, both versions are high quality games. Level 1 and 3 and 5 are
side scrollers where you walk from left to right on the screen and
shoot the baddies. Level 2 sees you looking from Robocop's perspective,
you have to shoot a criminal while avoiding the hostage he is holding.
In Level 4 you have to solve a puzzle and match the face of a criminal.
You can pick up extra ammo, better ammo and food to fill your power
again.
The Commodore character graphics are
very good, also not only on the main character but on all the sprites.
Not blocky at all and also in color, very good indeed! The Spectrum
suffers from a lack of color, everything is black and white. The
Commodore has some speech and tunes playing, nothing special, obviously
still fastly better than the Spectrum.
The major difference between the games are the number of lives you get,
on the Commodore one and on the Spectrum three. To be honest you uare
going to need more than one life. The Commodore version is therefore
much more difficult in my opinion, it therefore loses on playability to
the Spectrum version, although not by much.
The Commodore version however gets
the vote, the graphics on the Commodore is much better than the
Spectrum. I
