Reviews

I am so much in love with this game, that I find it very difficult to find the proper words to review it!

This game is just perfect! Even though I can only get to a certain point (usually day 5 or 6), I always enjoy every moment with this game. The colors are used to the best effect and in the most clever way (sprites are well spaced so no color clash is seen at any time). And the music...oh boy! The in game tune is just right, taking the player into the slowly-building frantic athmosphere...and keeping him/her there for hours!

The presentation and high-score screens are just ...PERFECT (I know I am repeating myself but what else can I say?)

Addictivity is (of course) top-level...and I am just so glad I never saw a game like this at the arcades, in my days!!

And to top it all, even my 11 years old son loves this game (his super-mario- galaxy-pokemon-rumble-jumble-whatever notwithstanding)!

I consider this to be the best zx arcade game ever and surely one of the best single-screen arcade games of all times!

Well i know it might seem strange that I am reviewing this game, since I am the one who wrote it.

But let me just say than more a game "per se", this effort should be regarded as an experiment in learning and testing some of the potentialities of Arcade Game Designer (v3.0 is the one I used).

As a game, this has several flaws: the on screen messages are kind of silly, the game is very short and shallow, the action is sometimes marred by a poor arrangement of the screens and the "victory screen" routine just doesn't work. Mostly, i would say that this is just another "jump and run" (and not the best one for sure) in which i shamelessly exploited the good name of one of the best games ever.

As an AGD experiment however, I think it is kind of interesting: by playing a bit with the codes provided by J. Cauldwell I tried (with some success) to go beyond the regular AGD game, having enemies (some of them at least) NOT moving on fixed paths. Plus I obtained some interesting effects: the player can not only run and jump, he can also swing on a vine, swim and even fly (!). Also because AGD is so well written, the action is quite fast-paced.
Finally I am very pleased with the sprite graphics and I particularly like the crocs, the jungle men, the little monkey blowing bubbles as well as the main character :D!

To be fair, I would rate this 5/10 or 2.5/5

The only thing that this is missing is... THE GAME!! :D

I mean: after such a wonderful display of technical skill...

Still an excellent feat!

1984 Thomas Busse (Germany)
by Thomas Busse and R. Busse

I feel very sympathetic with this interpretation of DK Jr (and with its author of course). I mean: the still pictures from the WOS page are really enticing, you can see that some love and some work has been put in the effort of recreating the coin-op athmosphere.

Of course when things are moving, everything changes, with all the color-crash/crap that we all know very well and love very much ;).

This being said, the game mechanics have been reproduced quite faithfully, and if you pretend that 30 years have not passed by, you can actually enjoy this little game...and after all this is dated 1984!

Soundwise...well I am pretty sure they could have done a better job even back then.

I was however let down a bit by the main character and the sitting Mario sprite graphics, which are a bit fuzzy and not so well defined. Also some nice animated sea waves would have been nice.

Overall I think this is an average game, considering the time in which it was written. And to be honest I kind of enjoyed playing it. So i guess it deserves a few goes.

So I will give it a 3 or even 3.5/5

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.

Well here is a very good, fun, crazy and addictive game.

I love every single bit about this game: the action, the idea, the colors and gfx.

The outakes are funny and the whole game is just a little gem.

Plus Dave Hughes has created a nice, very distinguished little character and I will always envy him for that!

I keep playing the game and I can never have enough of it even if I am not so good at it. Just for the fun of seen some of those huge colorful monsters coming out and chasing you.

I LOVE I LOVE I LOVE THIS GAME!
I would gladly give it a 4.5 (just because i gave factory daze 5 and this one does not have a in-game tune) but since we do not have this mark in our system, well I will "have" to give it 5! :D

This is an obscure (to me at least) game which received a mixed reception (see the scores on SI): it is (I guess) programmed in BASIC, it is in italian (maybe an English translation would help), it is very primitive and it is damn slow...

NONETHELESS, the puzzle in itself is a good one. For non italians the object of the game is to arrange 4 colors in a 4X4 grid, according to the scheme suggested in each level. To do that you use 1 and 3 to rotate a cursor and 0 to activate the corresponding row or column, which will move according to the direction of teh cursor(it is easier than it looks from my explanation)

I wonder if a modern implementation of this game's idea wouldn't be nice, with animated graphics, a tune, a main character (maybe being chased by an enemy) instead of these dull arrows, a timer.... In other words maybe a good arcade could be made out of this?

As it is now I would rate it 2 but with great possibilities for improvement..

Well, Bob Smith did it again!
This game is an absolute gem and there is not much more to say about it.

Just go ahead and play it!

Zippy is a colorful, fun puzzle game.
It is a great example of what can be written in BASIC if you are skilled and imaginative
In one word I love it
I hope Luca will make a AGD version of it, with some arcade element in it (enemies wandering about the screen would be nice)