Game Review: Bosconian ’87 (ZX Spectrum, Mastertronic)

Bosconian ’87, by Binary Design is a Spectrum conversion of the Classic Namco arcade machine. It’s a free-form four-way scrolling shooter, with you roaming around each looping map hunting down the enemy space stations poised to wipe out humanity.

Destroy all the stations, and it’s on to the next level. There are 14 of these, which is far less than the arcade’s 200 or so, but as the difficulty ramps up towards the end you do get your money’s worth.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

The enemy base ships are well designed, with six modules placed around a central reactor core. The easier, but slower way to deal with them is to pick off the modules one by one, destroying the whole thing when you’ve got them all.

The quick, but potentially deadly way is to go straight for an instakill by taking out the core in a single shot. However, that means facing down the missiles that fire out every second or two.

There’s a nice balance of risk and reward to it and after years of playing Bosconian, it’s still fun to do. It’s like blowing up a little death star each time, provided you don’t get killed.

With practice you can finesse the stations a bit, ducking in behind the missiles and getting a quick shot off. However, they still retain an element of threat, which is my way of saying I get killed flying into them quite often.

Under Pressure

Two more things keep you on your toes. Firstly, the formation attacks. These are groups of fighters that regularly launch from bases. They bear down on you quickly, and you don’t get much time to react once they appear on-screen.

They’re tough to avoid, though you can increase the odds of survival by lingering behind a base or a crowded bit of the level, hoping they’ll crash into something. Once one member of the group dies, though, the rest disappear from your radar, making stragglers even deadlier.

Secondly, there’s your slowly diminishing fuel gauge, which adds a sense of urgency and forces you to keep up the pace, though extra fuel is scattered around the level and you’re usually blasted into space dust long before your run out.

A Few Useful Pieces of Kit

Fortunately, you’ve got a few tricks up your sleeve, too. As well as your front-firing gun, you can add a rear shot via a power up. There are also bombs to pick up, which can take out enemy ships, though not bases. You need to time these well, as fighters can kill you before you know it, but the bombs give you more of a fighting chance.

There are also extra lives to collect, and with a bit of practice and some luck you can probably acquire these just about as fast as you lose them.

There’s also a handy scanner, which is essential for spotting incoming enemies, and you also get a heads-up on the formation of incoming fighter attacks.

If it all gets too intense, there are friendly space stations you can dock at for a brief moment of safety. You can sit and wait here while fighters fly to your location and explode on the surface. There’s also a teleport feature, that you need to collect a small power up to activate, but I never really found this particularly useful. I’d rather know where I am, thanks!

Technical Chops

Bosconian is graphically functional, with simple, but pacey graphics doing a good job of conveying the action. It’s not going to win any prizes for looks, but the space stations look cool, and it’s good how you can nobble them bit by bit. There’s also a parallax starfield in the background.

As for sound, the standard 48k Speccy version of Bosconian has a few basic effects, including a dramatic screech that introduces each level. Music plays over the game in 128k mode and the sound effects are considerably spruced up, making the game feel livelier.

Bosconian was also a rare game that supported the Fuller Box, a sound expansion system that included the AY-3-8912 chip used in 128k Spectrums. That meant that 48K owners lucky enough to have the expansion could enjoy the 128k sound. At £29.95 and with only a few supported games, it was an expensive listen, but did include a joystick port. You can enable the box in emulators too, if you’re curious.

A Solid, Original, Shooter

Overall then, Bosconian is a decent game. It’s fun, playable and reasonably addictive, but it is fairly samey. It’s the kind of thing that you have the odd go on, rather than keep playing. Chasing your high score is fun though, and it’s always satisfying to take out those bases.

The levels are basically the same thing but with increasing numbers of space stations in different positions. Bosconian does mix things up in the last few levels, with bases launching sorties at you left, right and centre, but with extra lives dotted liberally about to partially compensate.

Enjoyable, but limited, Bosconian is still a fantastic recreation of the arcade original and it’s certainly a steal at £1.99. If you’d spent your pocket money on it, you’d be quite happy, but you’d be back to the shop in a week or two.

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