Reviews

And from 2015 we have Baldy, a bald man you have to navigate from platform to platform to collect cassettes. It's good fun, it's simple to play yet it's challenging. It kept me interested and coming back for more anyway.

Baldy ZX
2015 Paul Jenkinson

There are times when all you need in life is an uncomplicated avoid & collect platform game, and this is a perfect example of one.

Poor Baldy has been robbed of all his games, but thankfully the miscreants were the undiscerning sort and on realising they were retro, promptly discarded them. Little did they realise you can probably get about 5 spond per cassette these days. You must jump, squat and teleport your way across 20 levels collecting them up again.

Each screen is made up of floating islands and Baldy can leap between them, duck under flying arrows (or hamburgers etc) or use the up/down teleports where available. Baldy can’t walk in the usual fashion but is unusually supple, he can crumple into an amorphous fleshlump that would be the envy of any limbo dancer. It’s a good design choice that he remains ‘ducked’ or ‘unducked’ after teleporting.

There are a few avoidable attribute glitches but the graphics are colourful, cartoony and cute. If you’re playing on a 128K (or one of the few with 48K AY) you get some rather nice AY spot effects, that are so regular they make up for the absence of music. Paul is an AGD master and it shows here, Baldy was probably not straightforward to implement.

Granting 3 lives is a bit mean and will probably lead to most players cheating or giving up, either case meaning the game is not properly experienced. In my opinion 10 lives would be more appropriate.

Baldy reminds me of a few games, shades of Nifty Lifty perhaps, but I can’t think of anything exactly the same. This would have been a big hit BITD and I can picture the conversations now “trying to remember a game – it had colourful islands and a bald bloke”.

4/5.