SUPER SEVEN

Main review

Like a fair few games of it’s ilk, Super Seven doesn’t really have a story line as such; in this case the simple premise is to match two dice of the same denomination as one falls from the top of the play area and the other cycles past as part of a group at the bottom. If you mess up and try placing your falling die on one with a different number you will loose one of your tries and, whilst everything starts off at a sedate pace, progressing further into the game increases the speed of the falling die and therefore makes lining up harder.

On the graphics front, Super Seven just about manage to get the job done but there’s very little to them and certainly nothing of note after their functionality. Hi-res graphics, even with colourings, can be incredibly bland unless they’re very well drawn (as witnessed on some Spectrum and Oric titles) and that’s what has happened here, so while the dice obviously dice and the denominations are clear enough to get on with the game they’re also quite frankly rather boring. Similarly, the surround is simple and the status boxes look very primitive. Most of the classic puzzlers tend to make a song and dance of their presentation to make up for the relatively simplistic (although not simple) gameplay but Super Seven misses it’s step here and manages merely to get on with the game in hand.

To it’s credit, the in-game music on Super Seven is reasonable or at the very least unobtrusive even if it’s not in the same league as C64 titles like Tetris or even Vioris but, worryingly, it’s probably the high point of the entire game.

The worst problem has to be the gameplay itself, the initial concept behind Super Seven is flawed so it’s very simple to just push the falling die over to the left and simply sit there waiting for a match before pulling down to make the connection. This “technique” seems to work all the time apart from the occasional slip due to human error which is bound to happen from time to time, so the only real problem most players will have is that it becomes very repetitive very early on.

Puzzle games on the C64 (and indeed most platforms) are ten a penny simply because they’re fairly easy to develop and take far less time in general than any other genre so Super Seven has a lot of stiff competition on the C64 and does close to nothing to raise itself out of the mire of simple and flawed puzzlers that already exist. Which is quite sad in a way, because with a little more thought, a few reasonably simple tweaks to the gameplay and preferably an overhaul on the graphics and presentation fronts to give it a bit more of a “wow” factor, it could have been a much more solid title.

Second opinion

Puzzle games, you either hate them or love them. Personally, I like them when they are good (like Bombuzal or Gem X) but when they suck they suck. But can this really be classed as a puzzle game? I think not, it comes across like a poor man’s hybrid of Klax and Tetris. I played this game for all of five minutes and then went for the “off” button. The so-called “rolling dice” at the bottom of the screen isn’t random so, as Jason did, I just waited for the correct dice and pulled down and hey presto I got points after points after points and I didn’t even lose a life… ho hum.Presentation is nothing but functional (there’s a very bland front end) as are the graphics.There are instructions in the scroller on the titles screen, but telling a games player how you created the logo and how long it took to make the game makes me want to puke. Sonically, the title tune is average but better than some efforts I have heard but there are no in-game sound effects available.