Maths Master
Post date: 19-Feb-2016 15:06:37
Game by: PROSM
Reviewed by: Simon Ferré
Picture the scene. Settling down in front of the TV with the family surrounding the little black box of fun, you grab the latest educational title you’ve got your grubby hands on.
You know the children will be expecting the latest shoot-‘em-up they’ve been badgering you for, but you know no child of yours will be bashing the poor rubber keyed door stop.Waiting for the game to load, you expect to at least see a loading screen. Nope. Starting to fear the worst, you realise you didn’t buy the game from W H Smiths, but from some dodgy bloke down the boot sale for 75p. No pack of polos even changed hands.You think there might be a custom designed font. Nope. You think there could be slick graphics. Nope. Amazing beeper tune. Nope. Colour and slick presentation. Nope.So what do you get? A background that fills up with green digits with a rising tone. This screen-filling effect takes an absolute age to complete. Thankfully most modern emulators have a speed-up facility (Eighty One does at least) so crank that up for a few seconds.You then get the instructions screen (see first picture).Press a key and the screen-filling routine starts going again. Yawn.Once the screen fills you get the first question (see second picture).
At least the two numbers are in a different colour. I think PROSM could have lost a few extra points by leaving the colour the same (and almost created an impossible game in the process).Anyway, there are plenty of times during running the game where the screen filling routine proceeds, and the fact it takes so long to complete makes the whole thing slower than a slug crawling through a splash of treacle while waiting for Terry Griffiths to pot a snooker ball.The general idea is clever, although nothing new, so no points for imagination. One neat (but very easy) trick is to continuously poke the scroll counter so the program never asks the user to scroll the screen. It’s almost impossible to think the high score starts off at 10. The author probably has far too much free time on their hands if they waited that long to get a score that high. After about 2 questions I had to stop as I’d almost drifted off by then.Score: 704 very slow characters.
