Operation S.K.U.M.

You are on a very dangerous mission. Good luck, the fate of the planet is 
in your hands...

Way back in the mists of time when Atari launched the ST on an 
unsuspecting world, some of the first companies to release games for the 
new machine were French.  One of the first games I ever loaded on my ST 
was French, "Prohibition" from Infogrames.  The idea was very simple, you 
were a gangster in 1930's Chicago. The game was viewed from the end of a 
Tommy Gun. Various sprites of other gangsters popped up at various places 
on the cityscape to your front.  The idea? Kill them before they killed 
you.  Though very simple, the game was highly playable, with fast 
scrolling of the cityscape and the challenge, which increased just enough 
with each level to keep you coming back fro just one more go.  Well, ten 
years have passed, Atari has come and gone but the French are still 
releasing Atari games such as Operation Skuum , a Falcon game from 
Logitron.

You can tell from the inlay on the video style case that this is a subtle 
little number. "Goes to a secret terrorist base, kill everyone who is on 
your way and stop their atomic bomb" - well at least you aren't left in 
any doubt as to what sort of game this is.  Inside the box is a single 
disk and a single sheet of instructions printed in French, English and 
German. The majority of the content in fact contains warnings against 
piracy and the dangers of epilepsy. The instructions themselves  are only 
eighteen lines long - well subtle games like this don't exactly need much 
in the way of detailed instructions. Translated very roughly from the 
original French, the instructions are faintly amusing but do explain the 
game's title. Apparently you are in fact a "Secret Killing Underground 
Unit Military soldier (S.K.U.U.M2E) - obviously the best guy of your 
unit."  The only other points to note are that you must "kill everyone who 
is on your way" and that you have three weapons "the pistol, machine-gun, 
and the gun".  Surprisingly there is no mention of the fact that the game 
must be installed on your hard drive, this minor detail can be found in 
the readme file on the disk.

Once installed and run, the title screen appears and a voice strongly 
resembling Inspector Clouseau announces "Operation Skuum" (pronounced 
"skooom"). Then it's on to the first level which sees you standing on a 
pier, apparently your first stop on the terrorist island. As in 
"Prohibition", you view the action from behind the barrel of a gun. 
Unfortunately unlike the older game, the scene is completely static, no 
fast moving scrolling cityscapes here. Figures pop up on the scanned 
photograph which forms the backdrop and you take pot  shots at them with 
the weapon of your choice by placing the cursor over the target and 
pressing the mouse button.  If you don't kill them, you get killed. Get 
killed five times in a row and the game is over. There are three different 
types of target, one male, one female and a terrorist in a motor boat. 
They all give the same strangled groan when you shoot them, even the boat 
which then sinks very jerkily beneath the waves.

Once you've killed all the targets, the screen clears and the next level 
loads. This time you are faced with a scanned photo of a beach. The enemy 
appear in three places - either in a guard tower just beyond the beach, in 
a helicopter which moves very jerkily across the screen, or just beneath 
the barrel of your gun. Kill them all and another level appears with more 
of the same.

That's about it, the screen remains disappointingly static apart from the 
bad guys who pop up in a limited number of places in an all too 
predictable fashion and then die very unconvincing deaths.  Although the 
packaging shows more levels I can't tell you how many there are because I 
really could not be bothered trying to reach them.  When I first saw this 
game I thought it would be a 90's version of  "Prohibition" with improved 
graphics and sampled sounds. Unfortunately I was sadly disappointed. This 
is a poor imitation of the earlier game with none of its gameplay, 
challenge or variety. Quite why this game requires a Falcon is beyond me, 
it does nothing that I didn't see 10 years ago on a 520STFM and 512K of 
memory. If you want a good Falcon game then give Operation Skuum a miss, 
otherwise you will be sadly disappointed.

Domnall Dodds