Drop Out

Your Sinclair review (Recovered) courtesy of the YS Rock 'n' Roll Years YS83

Drop Out (SAM) Supplement Software     £4.50     Nov 1992

Bend over backwards and touch your toes! The Supple Boys strike again with (surprise) a game naughtily similar to an incredibly old Speccy game. This 'un's Gatecrash from Quicksilva - a game so ancient that nine out of ten people just haven't heard of it. (If you have, award yourself a couple of brownie points.)

It's a thirty-level plan-ahead puzzle game where you move a switch-peppered maze up and down the screen until you think you can see a safe route through to the bottom for your metal marbles, then let one of 'em go. Once a marble passes through a switch, the switch will send the next marble in the opposite direction.

Various obstacles lie smugly in your path, and if you get really stuck you can sacrifice a marble for the greater good and cause an earthquake, which randomly resets the switches. And that, as Edmund Spenser (sixteenth century poet and secretary to the Lord Deputy in Ireland whose epic poem The Faerie Queene was left unfinished due to his tragic death in 1599) says, is that.
   
That's as maybe young Master Simpkins, but is it any good?

To put it in three words with a mouse impression at the end, no it isn't squeak. As you plan your route ahead of time, and there's no time limit, you just sit there squinting at the TV and sliding the maze up and down, tracing the path of the marble on the dusty screen. Admittedly there's some mild excitement when your marble goes wildly astray in the middle of the maze, but apart from that it's quite staggeringly boring. Pretty obvious why nobody remembers Gatecrash, eh?

Overall: 25%