Game Review: Gnasher (ZX Spectrum, Mastertronic)

Yes, it’s a Pacman clone!

On the front cover of the cassette inlay, there is a rather angry (and squarish) yellow character with very sharp jagged teeth.  It’s Gnasher in a maze, so you immediately know it is going to be a Pacman style game.

The object is to therefore eat all the dots scattered around the maze and progress onto the next level.  There are, however, four ghosts intent on capturing and killing you.

Eating one of the four energy pills gives Gnasher the ability to be invincible for a short while and munch the ghosts by capturing them.  The ghosts turn dark blue and each successive time after eating a energy pill (before eating another energy pill or if they return to normal), you can score 100, 200, 400 and 800 points.  Sounds very familiar, doesn’t it!

Opening Presentation

The loading screen is the standard Mastertronic logo (as used by many games in the very early Mastertronic releases).  Once the game has loaded you are given the option to choose from either the Keyboard or Joystick, by pressing either K or J.

After that you see the screen being displayed with text appearing gradually and then Gnasher moving across the screen, leaving a graphically Gnasher text behind him, followed by four pursuing ghosts.  Gnasher then eats an energy pill and appears on the other side of the screen and eats them.  It really does look very good indeed.

Graphics

The use of colour is very with each colour used and no colour clash.  The dots and maze are green, with the four energy pills (which flash black and white as dotted blocks) are in each corner of the screen.  The four ghosts are red, magenta, cyan and yellow colours with the top of the ghost house in the middle having a magenta door.  The ghosts will turn dark blue when they are able to be eaten.

Fruit will appear in the bottom centre of the screen (when you begin each level), from time to time.  This is a bonus should you eat it and appears in the colours you’d expect.  For example, the cherry is red, but what seemed unique was the banana.  This is because it’s white on top section and yellow at the bottom seems quite unique for any Pacman style game.  Just making it yellow would have been the easy option but the programmer has gone to the effort of making it two.

Animation is mainly the movement of Gnasher’s mouth chomping away and 90 degree angle turns.

Capturing the Ghosts

Before capturing a ghost, they turn dark blue.  When you do catch one their white eyes move through the maze, eventually returning back to the ghost house in the middle of the screen.  The ghosts then turn back to their original colour and come out to chase and haunt you down again.

Playability

You begin the game with three lives.  The remaining ones shown in the top-right corner of the screen).  Should you reach 10,000 points, you are rewarded with an extra life.  After losing a life or starting a new level, the game pauses until you press a key to resume playing.  It shows some thought clearly went into the design of the game.

If you use the keyboard, the default keys 5 for left, 6 for down, 7 for up, 8 for right (also used by the Sinclair Joystick) as well as a hold key.  The keyboard can be re-defined so you can choose your own keys instead of the default cursor keys.  The hold key is effectively to pause the game.  It is a nice feature to have, and I can’t recall any other Pacman style game having this ability.

The main issue of the playability when you want of need to change direction.  It seems a little clunky and you need to time this exactly right.  Quite a few times, I ended up facing the maze wall instead of heading in the direction that I wanted to go.  The responsiveness isn’t too great and doesn’t allow you to press the direction in advance that you want to travel in (like other games of this genre).

The ghosts are predictable in the directions that they move.  Usually it is towards you, but not always.  Moving through the side escape tunnel to appear on the other side of the screen is therefore useful.

Sound Effects Only

These are the usual style of Pacman noises.  They can be heard on the main presentation page, eating dots and pills when getting captured.  A slightly higher pitched sound is made when eating the fruit.  Having no music isn’t a problem as I wouldn’t have expected any.

An Additional Extra

Gnasher also gives you the ability to save and load your previous high score to and from tape.

Point of Interest

Gnasher was originally by R & R Software and then subsequently re-released by Mastertronic at £1.99.  If you weren’t aware that this, then pressing the BREAK key (after the first loading block on the cassette) followed by List command will show those details.

Gnasher also got released later on with Spectipede (also by R & R Software).

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