"Why do we always go to Egypt to loot? Can't we be fair and rob the Incas now and then?"

In Tutankham, you control an archaeological absent-minded professor type through four sets of horizontal-scrolling mazes in an effort to find King Tut's tomb. Each maze is timed, with monsters chasing you, and you will need to grab keys to open locks that guard treasures at the end of each maze. As you can only grab one key at a time the game becomes a bit of a shuttle race. There are also marked vertical teleporters and monster pits where bad guys(there are three sorts in each level, faster, slower and as fast as you) and gems that you can pick up along the way--each subsequent gem gets you more points. You're allowed to shoot the monsters, but the catch is that you can't shoot vertically; the original arcade machine had a fire-left and fire-right button. There's also a smart bomb button; you get one per life, and it's use it or lose it. It lights up the screen for a few seconds and wipes out all the monsters, although if you use it with a monster next to you, you may die anyway. If you are able to reach Tut, you get to do it all over again, with more time allowed and an extra key to retrieve.

As for controls and gameplay, I told a slight fib above. No, you can't shoot a monster vertically in the distance, but if you time things right you can shoot a monster about to kill you. I'm not sure if this is a bug, but if so it's one of the nicer ones. An added element of strategy is that your professor fellow doesn't stop unless he runs into a wall. So he usually has to stop at an intersection, which means monsters can approach him vertically unless he's in a dead end, in which case time(which you have way more than enough of, but it affects your end-of-level bonus) is ticking down and he's not making progress toward an exit. This clever combination of limitations on your controls is well thought out but it makes walking around in open areas very slippery. It also exacerbates the shot-timing issue that results because the fast monsters don't make a direct beeline for you unless they're in a corridor. They align horizontally and then zigzag in a pattern like ULDLDLUL so that you have to time your shots or waste a smart bomb and are, in fact, a huge reason why the game is tough. There's a huge open area in level two where you can risk picking up two treasures but having to battle some fast monsters, and there's another area in level three that you will have to pass three times to solve the level. Level four restricts itself to lots of nasty vertical corridors. If there is one genuinely unfair thing about the game it is that you are placed annoyingly far back when you lose a life, but on the other hand the neat radar-like display at the top showing where you are in the maze is nice even if it isn't very handy; the mazes are easy enough to remember.

Tutankham's graphics really shine, well, as much as a dark tomb can anyway. The different wall borders for teleporting areas and where monsters appear in clouds of smoke are useful. The background colors are different for each maze, culminating in a creepy black for level four, and there's good between-level variety in the bricks and the moss that grows on them too. The monsters are also well-animated and have good variety. The midget dragons and butterflies and snakes and penguins don't seem vicious, but they work. There are also niches where you pick up keys(you never touch an item--you simply go directly above or below it) that are empty through the first four waves, which is a nice sort of foreshadowing(you need to unlock an extra gate at level five and beyond.) Your pudgy professor may be the least convincing of the graphics, but perhaps more serious is that sometimes your laser-gun vapor trails look like they've hit monsters and haven't, which will cost you. Oh yeah, your professor also causes the screen to flash white on-and-off. But given that not many complex games scrolled until Tutankham(Defender doesn't count. I meant complex graphics, not absurdly indecipherable controls) the game was well-executed.

The background music has only three notes, but it's quite good(CG-CG-CG-CGC(hi-A) repeating.) There are jagged musical scale tunes when you pick up a key or jewel. You also get a neat tune for opening each lock and then Tut's tomb in level four. The sounds also serve as warnings that monsters are about to come from the pits, and it's always good to see a combination of sounds and graphic in such early games. Your shots do sound like high-tech lasers for some reason, which is misguided. But the main music will stay with you, and the ''award tunes'' have that pseudo-Egyptian feel to them.

Tutankham is the sort of game that appeals to me. I don't know if it inspired Lady Tut on the Apple(similar premise and controls,) but it was the first really effective maze game and used the relatively new concept of scrolling quite well. Although it's too bad that much of the difficulty relied on the randomly produced ''fast'' monsters, with some waiting around and luck, the game certainly has other virtues. If action maze games are exciting, this game won't get old for you. I know it has been released as part of a classic games packages for some systems, and these packages are well worth picking up if the other games are up to Tutankham's standards.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 09/19/01, Updated 09/19/01