THE SPECTRUM GAMES DATABASE RAINBOW ISLANDS PUBLISHER Ocean AUTHOR Graftgold YEAR 1989 CATEGORY Arcade Conversion, Platform DESCRIPTION Cute and colourful platform romp through 28 levels. CONTROLS Keyboard, Kempston, Sinclair. INSTRUCTIONS Upon returning home at the end of Bubble Bobble, Bub finds that his home has been taken over by an evil dragon and his minions! Bub must use the power of the rainbow to collect the diamonds from each of the Rainbow Islands and destroy the evil for good! You control Bub and must make your way from the bottom of each level to the top, utilising the platforms. You can collect fruit for extra points, and there are various items which you can pick up to help you out. Nasties are everywhere, but luckily you are armed with an infinite supply of rainbows! Pressing fire makes a rainbow grow in the direction you are facing. If a rainbow hits a bad-guy, he dies! Alternatively, you can build rainbows over the baddies and then jump onto the rainbow to smash it, and the bad guy will be killed by falling pieces of colour! Killing bad guys by smashing rainbows on top of them makes them release a diamond, and collecting a diamond in each colour of the rainbow is the task for every island. Your rainbow power can be increased by picking up pots. Red pots make you fire multiple rainbows (up to 3) and yellow pots make your rainbows grow faster! Running shoes make you move more quickly, and there are many other assorted power-ups which you will learn to use. Each island is comprised of four levels. At the end of these, you will meet the island boss who must be dispatched before you can continue to the next island! Be sure not to hang around too long on any of the levels, though, as if you take too much time the island will begin to sink into the sea and Bub CAN'T SWIM! INLAY CARD TEXT CHEATS None known.... SEQUELS/PREQUELS Bubble Bobble, released on the Speccy by Firebird, was the prequel to Rainbow Islands. A great conversion of the coin-op! Parasol Stars is the sequel to Rainbow Islands, but was never released on the Spectrum. You can get it for the 16-bit computers and a few consoles. SCORES RECEIVED Excellent scores, as far as I remember.... URL ftp://ftp.nvg.unit.no/pub/sinclair/snaps/games/by-letter/r/rai nbow.zip 128k only though, I'm afraid! GENERAL FACTS This game is PACKED with secrets. Try collecting the diamonds in order - Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet and you get a secret door when you face the end of Island baddie! To really enjoy this, play the 128k version. Great music and no annoying multiload! NOTES A BRILLIANT conversion of an arcade classic. Only the blocky end-of-level bad guys let this game down, but you can put up with that.... Speccy arcade conversions don't get any better than this. What more could we expect from Graftgold.