THE SPECTRUM GAMES DATABASE CHRONOS - A TAPESTRY OF TIME PUBLISHER Mastertronic AUTHOR Steven Tatlock - Programming John Tatlock - Graphics Tim Follin - Music YEAR 1987 CATEGORY Shoot-em-up DESCRIPTION Fly a ship over a horizontally scrolling landscape and shoot things. CONTROLS Redefinable keys, kempston, sinclair, cursor. INSTRUCTIONS You must rescue Chronos, the lord of time, by flying a little spaceship over five horizontally scrolling levels and blasting the hell out of everything that gets in your way! The nasties start off pretty dumb, but soon get unpredictable! INLAY CARD TEXT I don't have this on me, but I remember liking it 'cos it told a long-winded and torrid tale of space heroes and missions and stuff, then said something along the lines of "all of which has nothing to do with this game which is about shooting blocks of eight pixels at enemy sprites". Hilarious! CHEATS Numerous! Type any of the following into the high score table to get a strange response: nemesis design design jing it baby: activates megalaser cheat, select it from the menu! peter gough mike follin tim follin mark wilson the thug fuck agent x chronos Also, you could use the multiface to enter POKE 56906,167 for infinite lives, and/or POKE 26987,201 for autofire. SEQUELS/PREQUELS None. SCORES RECEIVED Don't have the info on hand, but I recall it didn't do too badly in the mags, but then again it was never a "smash" game. URL A couple of dodgy snaps of this exist, so you may have to try a few to get one that works. This snap may or may not work: ftp://ftp.gui.uva.es:/pub/sinclair/games/c/chronos.zip GENERAL FACTS The team who wrote Chronos also wrote the hugely successful Agent X! Chronos includes some of their famous five channel 48k music, which actually sounds quite good if a little quiet! The programmers obviously admire Design Design, as they have chosen to implement a number of features in their game which are similar to ones in Design Design programs. Most noticeable of these is the high score table which fills up with random text every time you load the game, and which will respond with witty replies should you type the right thing in instead of your name! Beware of snaps which don't include the loading screen as these will not give you random high score tables! Judging by the text on the high score table, the programmers are not particularly proud of Chronos! However, although it's not the world's greatest game and smacks a little of being thrown together in a few days to earn a few bob, it's certainly not as bad as they make out! The little ship that you fly in Chronos looks suspiciously like the little ship used to indicate your shield level in Ultimate's Cyberun! NOTES Not a bad blaster, but nothing amazing. Worth a look if only to try out the various things you can type into that high score table!