Reviews

Well I could not resist reviewing my own Cattivik.. so here it is!

First of all let me just say I really like the main character, which however might seem a bit silly to non Italians. But Cattivik is ...well just Cattivik: "a clumsy evildoer who lives in the sewer, comes to the surface at night to commit crimes, and always ends in trouble!" (just to quote what I wrote in the youtube video description).

So the game is a bit silly and a bit surreal: you have to get out from your hideout, by defeating a giant mouse armed with a cannon (you will have to throw bucketfulls of poisonous crap at him); get enough money to buy a nice dress, by stealing coins from innocent orphans (they sleep at the nun's hostel) or from little old ladies at the retirement home (they are guarded by a crazy old guy on a wheel-chair, armed with a big gun); get enough bones (from the natural history museum) to break the glass cases where the treasure items of the opera singer/countess are, and find your way back home (watch out for the dogs and the crazy ex-marines).

As a game in itself, it is actually a good one. A bit short maybe but fun. There is a relatively good number of tasks that you need to accomplish. There is some puzzle element (very little really) and some humor even. Your enemies will get tougher as you proceed so watch out!

There are a few bugs; however they do not spoil the action and infact facilitate the player, so I decided to let them there.

Sound is ok...well sfx are be a bit below average, but the title screen tune is nice and the intermediate and final tunes are ok (although the way they are called into play is a bit weird at times)... but i kind of miss not having an in-game tune...

The graphics are just right: I am very pleased with the way I reproduced the jumpy way of walking of the main character and honestly I like every other character in the game, from the mice, to the nuns, to the crazy marines, to the mario-like workers, to the big skeletons etc etc (actually occasionally those big skeletons get split in two but what can you do?).

Now obviously I am very biased toward this game. But in fairness, given that it is a short game and maybe it is not so easy (maybe a bit frustrating even), I would give it a score of 3.5/5 (just a tad above average, really)

However since we do not have 3.5 in our scoring system and since I am biased, I will "have to" give it a 4! ;D

The game is a platformer made with AGD 3.0; it is freely available at Sinclair Infoseek and will be well worth the few secs it will takes you to download it.

To my knowledge, this is the final game World of Spectrum recognises before it went to shit. Cattivik was written by Italian duo Gabriele Amore and Alessandro Grussu and is inspired by an Italian comic of the same name. It was written with Jonathan Cauldwell's Arcade Game Designer and is one of a number of games to use this engine. Among those written with AGD include Antiquity Jones, Chopper Drop, Lost in My Spectrum, the latter of which was also written by Grussu and the unofficial Donkey Kong Reloaded and Donkey Kong Reloaded Again, which were written by Amore. First off we have the game's loading screen, and it's really nice. I like the character at the front which will be Cattivik himself. So to the title screen and with some nice title music which for some reason sounds a bit familiar unless it's my memory playing tricks with me. It could even be an original tune or for all I know it's from Cattivik itself. Nonetheless it's a nice jolly sounding tune. First thing I notice about this game is the colourful graphics of this game. One of the benefits of AGD was it gave you really nice graphic and colour options, and this game takes advantage of it, some games did so more but this game still took advantage of that. But the gameplay feels very similar to Donkey Kong Reloaded which doesn't sit well with me at all because I couldn't get on with that particular game. Even the death sound effect is identical and the way the sound only appears when the character moves is also identical to DKR. There is also a bug on the second screen where you go to jump over the sewer type thing on the top right and instead you are teleported to the ladder on the bottom again. And the third screen is under water, much like DKR. So this seems to borrow elements of DKR, perhaps it was the other way round but to my knowledge that was released before this one. Mind you, this type of gameplay and design is a better fit for Cattivik compared to Donkey Kong, but it just doesn't sit well with me I'm afraid. Nice graphics but the gameplay is a miss.