Rush'n Attack

The Good
It's not too bad for being a BASIC game written by a fifteen-year-old, if he had only spent some thought on the game balance. The BASIC of the Plus 4 is rather good, so it's quite likely that it could have been pulled off without resorting to machine code.

The Bad
The problem is that this is a commercial game with a respected name from the arcades slapped on. Slapped on, because apart from the name and some backdrop graphics, there is not a smithereen of likeness to the arcade game, or even to any other port of the same. The game mechanics, which are what made Green Beret a well-remembered game, are nowhere to be seen. If you step back and look at the game beyond its backgrounds and sprites, you find that it is just a game programming exercise of the kind every teenage programmer made in the eighties. There is no game logic, just a randomised counter throwing enemy objects at you from both directions, some of them shooting at you based on another randomised counter. You can't wield weapons, there is only one enemy type (a copy of your own sprite with a different outline colour) and in the end, it's just a kind of Pong with the ball replaced by multiple enemy sprites.

The Bottom Line
The poor programmer (as in someone who programs poorly) can't have had much more than a week to finish this game for Imagine, who just wanted to milk the Plus/4 market a bit after having paid for an expensive licence which didn't leave enough money to pay for a properly programmed game to be released on the small Plus/4 market. Apart from the non-existing game mechanics mentioned above, and fact that it takes a superhuman being to clear only the first few screens, the game is on a technical level so low that Spectrum users can laugh at ports like this. Running in high resolution mode with some very odd choices of colour, the monochrome soft sprites aren't masked, making the game seem even more like an exercise in BASIC programming.

This is not the first sub-standard Plus/4 port of a famous game, nor is it the last, but it is probably the worst.