Reviews

1987 Software Projects (UK)
by Jonathan Smith, Karen Davies, Tony Pomfret and Stephen Wahid

Most Joffa games are beautiful pieces of software, examples are Green Beret, Hyper Sports or Mikie, and Hysteria is no different. But somehow it got left behind, forgotten with the passing of years.
I think it's probably one the least remembered games written by him.
The game was a collaboration with other names of the game's industry, the FX team, but both sound, graphics, gameplay and even the opening menu, have all Joffa's trade marks.
So It's not clear to me what the other members of the FX team did in this game.

Hysteria plays as any side scrolling game. It resembles Cobra but without the platform action, although you can fly using a special power once collected. Like in this sort of games, you must go thru til the end of each level killing every nasty and collecting objects that enhance your powers, R-Type style. You start out with a sort of telekinetic power which fries your enemies, and move to bigger weapons as you move along picking up lemons or worms (yap!). You also have to pick up pieces of a face puzzle along the way, once the face is formed, a Primeval Entity (a sort of boss) will appear and you will have to destroy him using your fire power. So be sure to have collect enough goodies.

The game is short with only 3 levels, always with the same bosses, and a few changes in the baddies army. It's also a tad easy, the authors even blocked movement when in the air (after jumping) to make it harder to turn around and shoot your enemies, but it's still an easy game to finish. This obviously spoils the longevity of the game and is probably the reason why it isn't better remembered. But it's still a great game.

Hysteria [Software Projects]
by Special FX Software Ltd (Jonathan M. Smith, Karen Davies, Tony Pomfret, Stephen Wahid)

Jonathan Smith returns with a less funny version of Cobra that nonetheless has what Cobra was missing:
a decent end-of-level boss.
3,5/5

Coded by the late, great Jonathan "Joffa" Smith, Hysteria is basically a run-and-jump action game which might be mistaken by a careless eye for a fantasy version of his previous title Cobra - the hilarious tie-in from the movie of the same name starring Sylvester Stallone - but the only thing the two games have in common, besides the author, is the use of an excellent left-right scrolling routine (which causes the same lock-up problem on the +2A in the first release versions of the game in fact).

Hysteria is conceived as a travel through time where the player character must collect puzzle pieces and lemons (yes, you read it well) in order to battle the same end-of-level monster each time, a large two-headed creature. By picking up small worms popping from the groud, you can gain power-ups ranging from a long-range shot to a jet-pack which will be required in the third and final level to collect some of the aforementioned pieces and lemons.

Hysteria has none of the complexity of the Cobra levels: there are no platform to jump over and the enemies follow mostly predictable patterns. This is the main point that keeps the game well under the previous work by Smith. However, Hysteria looks good with large, detailed graphics in the typical style of its author, features some nice plip-plop music and sound effects, and the gameplay feel is noticeably slick. 3.5/5

This is quite a famous game in the Spectrum archive for all the wrong reasons, one look at its loading screen will explain all, that's my one and only comment about it. This is also a bit of a weird one in that it's a Joffa Smifff game and a Special FX game not published by Ocean or Imagine, it was published by Software Projects instead. This has all the Joffa traits, the graphics, the sound, the music, the style, the presentation, the humour and of course the difficulty, it's all present and correct. I was going back and forth on whether to give this a 3 or a 4, it's quite a nice game but it's difficult with so much happening at once, then again I enjoyed this more than Cobra, so based on that, Cobra got a 3, and so this shall get a 4.

Not a Joffa classic but still charmful and enjoyable.