ESCAPE FROM BEDLAM ASYLUM

(SICK SOFTWARE/WHITE TRASH SYSTEMS)

"Commodore Monthly" - November 1982:

This is possibly one of the nastiest and most disturbing games it has ever been our misfortune to review. Sick Software, the coders responsible for this piece of trash, apparently paid a great deal of money to Bedlam Asylum in return for being allowed to set their arcade-style adventure in the infamous mental institution. In the game you play Dick Limp, a young man who has been  committed to the asylum after a romantic interlude with a flock of sheep. Your goal is to escape, using every means at your disposal. To be fair, there are the bones of a decent plot within the numerous possible solutions to the game - believe it or not, I actually built a glider out of used toilet roll tubes and took off from one of Bedlam's towers. Quentin favoured the more time-consuming method of acquiring a large dildo and pleasuring guards and nurses to death. However, the depraved humour and revoltingly filthy perversions which this game rams down the players' throats (quite literally) are beyond forgiveness.     

GUNSHIP LUNACY

(Haunted Hill/Rip-Off Budget Label)

"C64 Gamer" - April 1983

Microprose's helicopter sim 'Gunship' set new standards and inspired many imitations. But this has to be the most unusual (and the most downright evil) chopper sim yet. The in-game missions are based upon the activities of Hellcat Island's Helicopter Task Force; an organisarion which patrols the airspace around an ultra-secure institution for the criminally insane. The designers claim that every aspect of the simulation was validated and approved by both the real Task Force and their employers Bedlam Asylum.

After a couple of training flights which help you get to grips with navigation and weapons systems, you're thrown into a series of missions aimed at tracking down and eliminating ever-larger numbers of escaping inmates...culminating in a final chapter with the unsettling title 'Bedlam Bloodbath'. Crazed lunatics have captured the Asylum's staff and you are ordered to kill every patient who refuses to surrender. For this mission you have temporary command of some heavily-armed marines (useful for flushing out maniacs who are hiding in buildings or behind pieces of shrubbery). Once driven out into the open, any inmates who survive the soldiers are easy meat for your 30mm gatling cannon, anti-personnel rockets and armour-piercing missiles.

Despite our moral objections to this game, most of us played it quite obsessively. We were sickened by it...but not sickened enough to switch off.   

BEDLAM CAPERS

(Bedlam Patient Co-operative Projects)

"CBM User" - October 1984

Loosely based upon the popular board game 'Judas Neighbour', this game has been coded by inmates serving life sentences at the World's most famous prison for the criminally insane. You have been sent to Hellcat Island's forbidding mental hospital and 'Bedlam Capers' is all about scoring 'Brownie Points' for betraying your fellow inmates...gain enough points by being an informant and you may be given privileges which will help to save your life - a private cell means peaceful nights without the risk of a piece of cold steel stuck between your ribs...or the prospect of homosexual rape; being allowed to start your own birdwatching club gives you access to binoculars which makes it easier to spy upon other patients and rat on them.

Every so often the game will offer little sermons which encourage the player to see his career as a stool pigeon as a form of social justice - for example, we are told that people who pee against walls are destroying the environment and contributing to global warming!

This is a big game, every cellblock and most of the rooms at Bedlam Asylum have been included, so disk access is frequent and time-consuming; we didn't test the cassette tape version, but it would undoubtedly have horrendously protracted loading times. The packaging comes with a huge parental warning - there are themes and images in the storyline which are definitely unsuitable for children. Also included in the box are a Bedlam inmates' T-shirt and a steel-rimmed drinks coaster which doubles as a lethal throwing weapon.