Flashback was a pretty big deal in its time. It had the rotoscoped animation that made Prince of Persia stand out so much, but with shooting instead of swordplay, and a story that was like every major sci-fi movie of the 80s thrown in a blender. Total Recall, The Terminator, The Running Man, They Live, Robocop, Alien... That kind of cinematic approach was still novel at the time.
Cinematic platformers aren't a well-appreciated genre now because their emphasis on weighty, fragile characters that require a more measured, patient approach to gameplay is off-putting to players that just want to jump in and go Super Mario everywhere. But if you can get down with the style, it can be rewarding to persevere through the game, although Flashback also has some ridiculously frustrating combat-heavy sections that seem to have been added mostly to stretch out the playing time because it would otherwise be fairly easy. It's certainly a game that's more about atmosphere than anything else.
Krull the movie was a glossy attempt at a space-fantasy to get in on that rich Star Wars action, with a swashbuckling hero having to rescue his bride from The Beast and his army of faceless Slayers. It had a pretty good cast of people who got famous for doing other things later, and some interesting production design with vivid locations, good special effects, and suitably revolting villains. It even had some cool direction, such as how Peter Yates never really gives the audience a full, clear shot of what the Beast actually looks like, but instead you merely glimpse fragments of him through a haze. But one of the biggest talking points about the movie (to whatever extent people actually talked about it) is that the Glaive, a sort of magical boomerang with switchblades protruding from its five extensions, was an awesome weapon for the Ken Marshall to wield and that it was utterly baffling that the movie never really let him use it. He's constantly told he'll know the right time to use it, even as his friends are mowed down in combat, and then when he does finally use it he just sort of cuts through a wall with it and then a couple of minutes later it gets stuck, at which point he gets an especially cheesy variation of "the power was within you all along!" and the Glaive is left behind.
So the arcade game based on the movie is an almost immediate improvement because you use the Glaive in every level beyond the opening. The game takes a lot of liberties. The first level is reasonably faithful to the film in that you have to run around a mountain grabbing the pieces of the Glaive while dodging boulders careening down the slope. In the movie, he runs up the mountain, dodges a few rocks, and then finds the Glaive in a cave pool.
From level 2 onward, the game becomes a twin-stick shooter with varying objectives. In the second level, you run around a swamp and assemble men for your army while using the Glaive to dispatch Slayers. There is a swamp in the movie, and hero does have to build an army for himself, so this does sort of track. Level 3 sees you running around a rocky labyrinth, rescuing your men while continuing to battle the Slayers, but when you pick up a soldier a hexagon will start meandering around the screen, so you have to essentially place the men inside the hexagon and once you've rescued as many as possible, the level ends. This level seems to be referring to the part near the film climax in which the heroes storm the Black Fortress of the Beast. Level 4 wanders completely away from the movie in that your men are now trapped inside a giant hexagon prison and you need to use the Glaive to break its walls down, but the walls flash color and you can only break a layer when it turns black, and you have to break it open while Slayers attack you. Level 5 is the final confrontation with the Beast, in which you fend off his fireball attacks with the Glaive while trying to reach Princess Lyssa at the top of the screen. Rescuing her causes the Beast to flee, your men celebrate with you, and the game restarts at a higher difficulty.
Interestingly, one of the film's sections that would seem most ripe for a video game adaptation, in which Freddie Jones has to climb across the web of a giant spider while evading the spider, isn't touched. Perhaps the designers brainstormed something and had to scrap it.
Krull was designed by Matt Householder for Gottlieb. Gottlieb, probably best known for Q*Bert, made some very attractive games in its time, with clear graphics and particularly rich, crunchy sound and music and Krull holds up quite well.
Designed by Malcolm Evans (3D Monster Maze, Escape), Trashman is one of those odd cases of turning a job into a game and somehow making it fun. You control a garbage collector and have to empty a street's trashcans before a time limit runs out. The truck idles up the street a little bit at a time, so you have to rush to the can, taking care to not step on the grass because doing so will rob you of a "tip" and might even cause a dog to chase you, pick up the can, bring it to the truck to empty it, then place it exactly where you found it. If you do everything right, the homeowner will call you inside for a moment with some amusing dialogue and you'll get a bonus in time.
The biggest threat in the game, though, is simply trying to cross the street without getting run over by speeding traffic. Getting run over is an immediate game over. After a couple of levels, you have to worry about getting run over by cyclists on the sidewalks, too.
It's pretty nice-looking as Spectrum games go. It keeps things simple and clear with minimal color clashing. Sound effects are sparse, but the controls handle well enough, just "sticky" enough that you usually won't accidentally oversteer into the grass.
