Reviews

Hey ! This is a rather decent clone of Manic Miner !!! ... colorful , charming and challenging , a delight to play and watch . Not superb but quite good !! ;)

It happens that I love this sort of video-games -vintage platformers- and also the title "Doctor What?" sounds funny and intriguing to me , like the game itself . so my predisposition for this piece of software was quite positive from the start .

The tune is a beep version of Para Elise ... funny enough . :)

No one doubts that the author of this game must be one of the many Matthew Smith´s fans and followers out there .



ps - in answer to The Dean of Games : level one is easy . I just wait on the ramp until the enemies pass me by and then I go up and take the items . I got stuck in LEVEL TWO . Haven´t tried hard , anyway .

1988
by Mega-Soft and Screen Soft

Every lover of Manic Miner gets delighted when he comes across a similar game.
Doctor What is not the best MM clone around that's for sure, it was distributed freely and it shows on the quality of the programming. For an 1988 game this surely feels outdated, but that's not a problem if you are a retro gamer like me and indeed may be a positive thing. On the other hand the programming skills are beyond outdated and the play ability resulting is sometimes excruciating. The jumping routine is quite awful although it seems to work, the levels design (got to level 3 once) all seem the same, only changing the colours, the enemies look and number. But the main real problem is that the game keeps blocking when you least expect it. I have experimented the game in different PC's and it happens in all of them, so it must be a really bad bug in the game itself. Overall it is a nice MM clone but only for die hard fans of the genre and only if you are lucky to surpass the games frequent blocking.
Can't rate this game higher without feeling dishonest with better games and better programmers that exist out there.
1,5 stars

PS Answer: Thanks dandyboy ;)

I felt duty bound to review the other Doctor What game which is from 1988, four years after CRL's Doctor What! game. This is a more simple looking Manic Miner type game but it's a difficult one at that. The first time I played, screen 1 was completed with no problems whatsoever, then screen 2 was a nightmare, lost all my lives and it was game over. Attempt 2 saw me fail on screen 1 three times and game over, and every other attempt after that saw me fail on screen 1. As a Manic Miner clone, there's a lot lot worse out there, but it's just very tough and it probably won't keep you interested for too long as a result. But as a Doctor Who inspired game and comparing it to the previous Doctor What game, I think this is the better game, just. But let's face it, two Doctor What games, one with a ! and one with a ? and neither of them are great.