Mindscape
£9.99/£14.99

Your circus is in big financial trouble: ten thousand dollars is needed to pay off the mean banker who is putting the squeeze on you. Only completing six death defying acts will save your beloved Big Top. But to put a spanner in the works the banker's hired Fiendish Freddy to pull every dirty trick to make you fail.

Visit the option screen first and choose players (1-5) or enter the practice mode (recommended for novices). Event one is 'Phenomenal Feats Of Daring Diving', or high dive. Clamber up the pole to the first springboard (there are three in all): the idea is to perform the diving pose displayed in the top left hand corner of the screen. Freddy will turn up if you take too long to pose - he uses different sabotage tactics, none of them very nice, for every act. As you complete each dive you climb higher and have further to fall. At the end of an act the judges give you their score (in the guise of money). The better the performance, the nearer you get to the ten grand you need.

Act two is 'Genuine Juggling Genius', with Jeffy-Joe bravely balancing on his unicycle to catch (and juggle) objects thrown to him by his faithful sea lion. 'Breathtaking Bravado From Hazardous Heights' (trapeze) sees Finola up in the air trying to swing across the Big Top whilst avoiding the obstacles in her path, and Fiendish Freddy of course. Pin point aim is needed in 'Deadly And Dangerous Daggers Of Death' with lovely Knancy Knife strapped to a revolving wheel with a set of balloons: pop the balloons without popping Knancy. End the show with 'Tense Travel Techniques On Tightrope', tottering along a high wire avoiding a literally nasty fall. Finally Fernando, the human cannonball, takes the stage: shoot him into the safety net on the opposite side of the ring. Failure sends Fernando to an early grave.

Fiendish Freddy is graphically and sonically one of the best seen for a while. Large cartoony sprites abound whilst a variety of spot effects and jingles assail your ears. The hilarious antics of Freddy lend lasting appeal - you never know quite when he is going to leap out and ruin your act. One slight niggle is the lack of colour, with the main part of the action in monochrome. Despite that Fiendish Freddy's Big Top O' Fun is exactly that - fun!

MARK [93%]

This is amazing. I could not believe my eyes when I first played Fiendish Freddy's Big Top O' Fun! You could just as easily be watching a cartoon on the telly instead of playing on your Spectrum! The graphics are simply amazing. Big, detailed sprites have been packed into various animated sequences. Backgrounds on all the events are equally astounding and the scrolling is superbly smooth. What more could you ask for? Hundreds of little jingles, tunes and effects are here too, despite the Speccy's weak point. Each circus event is excellent, packed full of addictiveness and will definitely bring a titter or two when Fiendish Freddy makes things go terribly wrong. Fiendish Freddy's Big Top O' Fun is the best game I've seen in yonks. Run away with the circus today.
NICK [94%]

Mindscape International Inc
£9.95 cass/£14.95 disk
Reviewer: David Wilson

Circuses may well be dubbed 'the greatest show on Earth' but they've hardly inspired many corkeroony Speccy games, have they? (Tynesoft's Circus Games? Nuff said.) But (but! but!) things might be about to change, 'cos here, flush from its success on the 16-bit posh-jobs, is Fiendish Freddy's Big Top O' Fun. Published by Mindscape, it won awards for best graphics and ad (!) at the 1989 annual industry dinner, and, what's more, the Speccy version's been converted by Imagitec, the programmers responsible for coding that YS Megagame Times Of Lore by MicroProse. Sounds promising? Well, here we go...

Fiendish Freddy is a circus game with a difference. You play the circus owner, trying to put on the show of your life to raise enough case to prevent your big top (o' fun) turning into a big concrete office block, courtesy of Fiendish Freddy, a wicked property developer. To stop him you need to raise $10,000! This is obviously no mean feat, especially since Freddy (they don't call him 'Fiendish' for nothing!) keeps trying to sabotage your daring exploits!

The game begins with a really nice front end sequence, incorporating both a practice option and the choice of playing either on your own or with up to five mates. Hurrah! Then you're straight into the six sub-games. First off, there's High Diving. Here, you get to spring from progressively higher platforms into progressively smaller water receptacles, performing various poses along the way! But watch out! You'd better keep an eye on the overhead view to make sure you land in the water or you'll end up feeling like a right old squashed tomato!

From here you go into the Juggling. This lets you control the unicycling clown, pedalling left and right whilst trying to catch and juggle various objects tossed to you by a seal(!). Occasionally, Fiendish Freddy lobs bombs and babies at you - drop these and you lose the sub-game.

Next you're onto the Trapeze, playing the lovely Finola. You've got to swing to and fro and time your jump between the two swings. Miss and you bite the sawdust. Pause too long and Freddy snips your trapeze ropes! It's murder!

The fourth sub-game is Knife Throwing. Pop the balloons fastened to the spinning wheel whilst avoiding your charming chum (who's also fastened to the wheel). Hit her and you hear her scream. Ouch! And as if that weren't bad enough, Freddy's out to cause mischief again by employing smoke bombs to put you off your aim.

Then there's the Tightrope. Push the joystick forward to walk whilst moving your balancing pole to the left and right as appropriate. And last, but most definitely not least, you play a Human Cannonball. Note the cannon icon in the bottom left of the screen which shows you how much powder's been used up. Then move the trampoline target to where you think you're going to land, press Fire and the barrel starts descending (very quickly!). Press Fire again when you think the elevation is right and you shoot out. If (or should I say 'when') you miss, you're given two more attempts.

At the end of each sub-game, some animated clown judges appear on-screen. They decide on the sum of dosh your performance warrants - get $10,000 of course and you've completed the game (either way you'll cue another nice graphics routine).

And, er... that's it. "Blimey, I never knew there was so much in it!" I hear you cry, and of course there's a catch. Yep, its a multiloader nightmare! The cassette version comes on what looks like a C120, whilst the +3 version comes on two double-sided disks! Mindscape tells me that it deliberately chose this option rather than lose whole chunks of the game and I can see the point, but it's a tad tiresome all the same.

On the whole though I really liked Fiendish Freddy - the graphics are brilliant and amusing, there's nice sound, lots of variety and a copious dollop of gameplay. The better you get at the game, or indeed each separate sub-game. the more you'll cut the multiloading to a minimum. Basically, I'm going to mark this one highly, but take that mark as being for the disk(s) version. I tear that on cassette you'll end up spending more time loading Fiendish Freddy than playing it (especially if you're crap!).

Label: Mindscape
Price: £14.99 Disk
Reviewer: Garth Sumpter

Roll up, roll up, roll up! See the magnificent acts pleeese! 'Cos if you don't get a lot of money soon the bank is going to forclose on the £10,000 loan that's keeping the circus afloat and what will everyone do then?

The bearded lady's not going to get a job in a beauty parlour, the clowns won't get a job in the police force (hopefully), the plate spinning juggler's neither going to get a job in a restaurant nor most certainly, a pet shop.

So, once again it's down to you to save the day by performing impeccably and perfectly to pre-empt the re-appropriation of the patron's pleasure palace - namely, one big top. Should be easy but the bank have put in a ringer - one Fiendish Freddy and he's going to do his upmost to spoil your acts so that the bank can steal the show.

Each of the six acts throws the various members of your troop into the ring to perform their act. Your guiding hand la needed to help them accomplish each of their daring doos to delight the crowd and hopefully earn some hard cash from each of the four completely insane judges. Each, when they've finished fighting amongst themselves, will award a cash prize - the better the performance, the more dosh they'll dole out. "What do points make..?" Oh do shut up Bruce, you silly old fart.

Up to five players can take part with a practice mode where rad ringmasters can try their hand and perfect each of the various acts that they will have to undertake.

There are six acts altogether the first being High Diving and the rest being Juggling, the Tightrope, Fernadez the Human Cannonball, the Trapeze and a Knife Throwing act. With each act you must guide each of the artists so that their performances will be dazzling and convert into wads of cash with the judges - even with the interference from Fiendish Freddy.

The whole game is graphically vary good and is full of humour, making it definitely the most graphically funny game ever on the Spectrum. It's also great in terms of gameplay and everyone will have a particular favourite event; mine's the high diving because it's REALLY silly with Horace the High Diver pulling some hilarious stunts and poses as he hurtles down to land in anything from a large water barrel to a small glass. Even the judges themselves do some peculiar and hilarious stuff before giving out their cash marks. Overall, the circus is about entertainment and Fiendish Freddy's Big Top O' Fun spells it out to a letter.

N.B. The disk version of the game was reviewed and NOT the casette version which is a single load game.

Mindscape; £9.99cs, £14.99dk;
Amiga version reviewed Issue 24; ACE RATING: 775

The 16-bit versions of this circus game worked well because the programmers were able to make maximum use of the advanced graphics and sound on those machines to get the funniest effects. This is a brave attempt to do the same on the Spectrum, but unfortunately the game doesn't quite come off with just two colours and feeble sound.