Egghead in Space
First appeared in Micro Mart issue 744 (April 2003)
Author: Jonathan Cauldwell
Publisher: Cronosoft (www.cronosoft.co.uk)
Egghead in Space is the third in the Egghead series of games by Jonathan Cauldwell, a saga that began some 13 years ago on a CRASH magazine covertape. CRASH - God bless it - is dead now, but Egghead lives on, and in an ironic twist of fate this installment is the only Egghead title to be commercially released, coming in a time when just about anything Spectrum related has a price of precisely zero pence.
But this is more than just a game. New Spectrum software has been woefully thin on the ground over the last ten years. If you don't count the demo scene, then this cuddly little platform frolic might just be the turning point in this sad and sorry state of affairs. Seismic though a new Spectrum title is in its own right, Egghead in Space is actually the first release from nothing less than a brand new software label - Cronosoft - and, as I write, a second title, Dead or Alive, has already been released, with a third and a fourth lined up to be deployed very soon to the virtual shop front that is www.cronosoft.co.uk. All of a sudden, our dusty old cups are overflowing, and the man we have to thank for all of this is Simon Ullyatt, the single person the Spectrum community so badly needed to take a chance and invest in some blank cassettes, a ready supply of ink cartridges and a quantity of padded envelopes.
As Spectrum games go, Egghead in Space is as solid as John Prescott's tightly balled fist following his very own egg and head encounter. And every bit as exciting. This is a highly competent piece of 48K coding, smoothly animated with nary a hint of intrusive colour clash to be found. Quite how our oval hero has happened upon eyes, feet and sentience in the first place is a subject unexplored in the accompanying instructions, but what we do know is that mischievous aliens have taken all his Spectrum games and hidden them in an underground labyrinth. Egghead wants them back and it's your job to guide him to them.
It's cheap, it's cheerful and it's fun. And if Cronosoft succeeds in its aim, it's the first of many more titles to come. I urge all Spectrum fans to open their underused wallets and buy this game right now. You won't regret it, and you'll be contributing to something very exciting indeed.
