Thunder Jaws is an action adventure game, originally released for the arcades by Atari Games in 1990, and later ported to all major home computers like the 16bit Commodore Amiga, Atari ST and the 8bit Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY An evil woman named Madam Q has kidnapped a female group of swimmers (!) to conduct a series of hideous human experiments. You, as a secret service agen must stop her evil plans and rescue them as soon as possible. The game has two different gameplay zones (the underwater zone and the base zone) throughout each stage. Diving into the underwater zone you swim through the level looking for an exit to proceed to the base zone. You're armed with a standard spear gun to kill enemies like other armed divers, sharks or even destroy torpedo launchers. You may also find other weapons (of limited ammo that is) either on the ground or when specific enemies are eliminated. Inside the base zone, you walk and jump across platforms, shooting everything that moves until you reach the end of the stage. The enemies vary from divers, robots and more. Note that at the end of some levels you'll have to confront a big boss. Overall, Thunder Jaws is a neat game of great action.
GRAPHICS / SOUND The CPC version has nice and very colorful graphics although the background scrolling is quite slow during gameplay. The small sprites are nicely designed and animated but the gameplay window is quite small as it is surrounded by some artistic stuff and vital info like the number of your lives, your energy bar status and your score. The game's sound on the Amstrad has a nice intro tune, a bunch of typical shooting sound effects and explosions but unfortunately no in-game music.
CPU: ZiLOG Z80 4MHZ MEMORY: 64 KB or 128 KB of RAM depending on the model (capable of being expanded to 512k using memory extension boards) GRAPHICS: Motorola 6845 address generator, Mode 0: 160x200 / 16 colors, Mode 1: 320x200 / 4 colors, Mode 2: 640x200 / 2 colors, A colour palette of 27 colors was supported SOUND: The CPC used the General Instrument AY-3-8912 sound chip, providing 3 channels Mono Sound (via internal speaker) but capable to offer Stereo Sound provided through a 3.5 mm headphones jack (with pretty impressive outcome!). Also, it is possible to play back digital sound samples at a resolution of approximately 5bit. This technique is very processor-intensive though.