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!















































