Amiga Computing - Commodore Is Awesome

ACTION PREVIEW
SPACE SIM
planet Denab - looks
rather like Rainow to me
I was tired and hungry, I'd just
been released from jail for the
fourth time and only had enough
money to buy a snack in a dodgy
pub. The letters page in the Big
Issue? An exert from Trainspotting?
No, actually that was the state my
character was in after playing Cygnus 8.
It's a strange game. Although the basic
idea behind if has been done many times
before (trade goods, both dodgy and
straight across the galaxy and
attempt to get rich) the idea has
never been approached like this.
Graphically the game has a very
cartoony feel to it; there are none of
the polygon models and texture
mapped planets of, say, Elite
Frontier. Instead the space travel sections
play like Astro Blaster and the planet based
trading parts include destinations such as
The Pub and |ail and give you the option of
breaking and entering various, premises.
Although quite cute looking, Cygnus 8 is
like a psychotic hamster - deceptively
vicious. You may think there's nothing to the
game, that it's purely about trading the same
boring old commodities. Well you'd be
wrong. If you don't drop into the pub every
day and feed your face and get some sleep
(which costs a lot of money), your health
will decline inexorably. You need to be
earning quite a lot to do this comfortably, so
AMIGA ACTION
Return of the
space tea-leaf
Fight your way through
the thronging crowds in
Denab's best pub
if you're not exactly excelling at
interplanetary Irading, you'll probably fake
the slippery path to theft and drug abuse that
I did.
If was all so easy to begin with - wander
round the deserted planet and break into
factories and stores. This pays off when
you're lucky, but the money required to buy
your way out of jail is so extorlionate you'd
probably prefer to spend a week in the
slammer. However, if you haven't got
enough money to buy food or shelter, your
health will decline to such an extent that
Spaceport officials won't allow you fly your
Hugh Poynton
tries his hand
at Applause's
latest
intergalactic
Your intergalactic runabout -
more Xr2i than XL5.
tinker
simulator
spaceship. To be totally honest, at this stage,
the graphics aren't really very good and the
preview version we received didn't have
any sound. Despite this, Cygnus stands out
on account of its originality and the funny
little touches which set it apart from other
trading games. I mean, getting tired? You
never flaked out from exhaustion if you
hadn't found digs for the night in Elite. If
you want a detailed space trading
simulation game pick up Frontier, but if you
just want a Del Trotter in hyperspace, space
cockney muck about, you could do worse
than investigate Cygnus 8.